9. Donna Rosenthal, The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land (New York: Free Press, 2005), p. 111.
10. Standard of living comparative data from www.gapminder.com.
11. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1870), p. 488.
12. Interviews with Gidi Grinstein, founder and president, Reut Institute, May and August 2008.
13. Interview with Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO, Google, June 2009; Maayan Cohen and Reuters, “Microsoft CEO, in Herzliya: Our Company Almost as Israeli as American,” Haaretz, May 21, 2008.
14. “The Global 2000,” Forbes.com, March 29, 2007; http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/18/biz_07forbes2000_The-Global-2000_Ind Name.html; and “Recent International Mergers and Acquisitions,” http://www.investinisrael.gov.il/NR/exeres/F0FA7315-4D4A-4FD CA2FA-AE5BF294B3C2.htm; and Augusto Lopez-Claros and Irene Mia, “Israel: Factors in the Emergence of an ICT Powerhouse,” http://www.investinisrael.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/61BD95A0-898B-4F48-A795-5886 B1C4F08C/0/israelcompleteweb.pdf, p. 8. Among the top fifty software and technology companies of the two thousand largest public companies listed on Forbes, almost half have acquired Israeli companies or have opened an R&D center in Israel.
15. Paul Smith, senior vice president of Philips Medical, quoted in Invest in Israel, “Life Sciences in Israel: Inspiration, Invention, Innovation” (Israel Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, Investment Promotion Center, 2006).
16. Interviews with Gary Shainberg, vice president for technology and innovation, British Telecom, May and August 2008.
17. Interview with Jessica Schell, vice president, NBC Universal, Inc., April and June 2008.
18. David McWilliams, “We’re All Israelis Now,” April 25, 2004, http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2004/04/25/were-all-israelis-now.
19. Background interview with senior eBay executive.
20. Curtis R. Carlson, CEO of Stanford Research Institute International, in “We Are All Innovators Now,” Economist Intelligence Unit, October 17, 2007.
21. John Kao, Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters and What We Can Do to Get It Back (New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 3.
22. Robert M. Solow, “Growth Theory and After,” Nobel Prize lecture, December 8, 1987, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1987/solow-lecture.html.
23. Interview with Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, March 2009.
24. Paths to Prosperity: Promoting Entrepreneurship in the Twenty-first Century, Monitor Company, January 2009.
25. Michael Mandel, “Can America Invent Its Way Back?” BusinessWeek, September 11, 2008.
CHAPTER 1
. Persistence
1. Information in the following section is taken from interviews with Scott Thompson, president, PayPal, October 2008 and January 2009; Meg Whitman, former president and CEO of eBay, September 2008; and Eli Barkat, chairman and cofounder, BRM Group, and seed investor in Fraud Sciences, January 2009.
2. Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 5.
3. Loren Gary, “The Right Kind of Failure,” Harvard Management Update, January 1, 2002.
4. Background interview with Israeli Air Force trainer, May 2008.
5. Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner, and David S. Scharfstein, “Skill vs. Luck in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital: Evidence from Serial Entrepreneurs,” working paper 12592, National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2006, http://imio.haas.berkley.edu/williamsonseminar/scharfstein041207.pdf.
6. Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World (New York: Twelve, 2008), p. 163.
7. Ian King, “How Israel Saved Intel,” Seattle Times, April 9, 2007.
8. Shahar Zadok, “Intel Dedicates Fab 28 in Kiryat Gat,” Globes Online, July 1, 2008.
9. Michael S. Malone, Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane (New York: Doubleday Business, 1999); quoted in “Inside Intel: The Art of Andy Grove,” Harvard Business School Bulletin, December 2006.
10. David Perlmutter in “Intel Beyond 2003: Looking for Its Third Act,” by Robert A. Burgelman and Philip Meza, Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2003.
11. Interview with Shmuel Eden, vice president and general manager, Mobile Platforms Group, Intel, November 2008.
12. Ian King, “Intel’s Israelis Make Chip to Rescue Company from Profit Plunge,” Bloomberg.com, March 28, 2007.
13. Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002), p. 144.
14. Dov Frohman and Robert Howard, Leadership the Hard Way: Why Leadership Can’t Be Taught and How You Can Learn It Anyway (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), p. 7.
15. This passage is based on Ian King, “Intel’s Israelis Make Chip to Rescue Company from Profit Plunge,” Bloomberg.com, March 28, 2007.
16. “Energy Savings: The Right Hand Turn,” video presentation by John Skinner, Intel Web site, http://video.intel.com/?fr_story=542de663c9824ce580001de5fba31591cd5b5cf3&rf=sitemap.
17. Interview with Shmuel Eden.
CHAPTER
2. Battlefield Entrepreneurs
Epigraph: Interview with Eric Schmidt.
1. Interview with Abraham Rabinovich, historian, December 2008.
2. Azriel Lorber, Misguided Weapons: Technological Failure and Surprise on the Battlefield (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2002), pp. 76–80.
3. Interview with Michael Oren, senior fellow, Shalem Center, May 2008.
4. Interview with Edward Luttwak, senior associate, Center for Strategic and International Studies, December 2008.
5. This section is based on an interview with Major Gilad Farhi, commander, Kfir infantry unit, IDF, November 2008.
6. Interview with Brigadier General Rami Ben-Ephraim, head of Personnel Division, Israeli Air Force, November 2008. The name of the pilot is fictitious since the IDF does not allow publication of names of most pilots.
7. Interview with Major General (res.) Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, former head of 8200, IDF, May 2008.
8. Interview with Frederick W. Kagan, military historian and resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), December 2009.
9. Interview with Nathan Ron, attorney and IDF Lieutenant Colonel (res.), Ron-Festinger Law Offices, December 2008.
10. Interview with Amos Goren, venture partner, Apax, January 2009.
11. Amos Oz, speech at the Israeli Presidential Conference, Jerusalem, May 14, 2008.
12. Interview with Michael Oren.
13. Interview with Lieutenant General (res.) Moshe Yaalon, Likud member of Knesset and former chief of staff, IDF, May 2008.
CHAPTER 3.
The People of the Book
1. Information in this section is from Patrick Symmes, “The Book,” Outside, August 2005; and an interview with Darya Maoz, anthropologist, June 2009; and an interview with Dorit Moralli, owner, El Lobo restaurant and guesthouse in La Paz, Bolivia, March 2009.
2. Aaron J. Sarna, Boycott and Blacklist: A History of Arab Economic Warfare Against Israel (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), appendix.
3. Chaim Fershtman and Neil Gandal, “The Effect of the Arab Boycott on Israel: The Automobile Market,” Rand Journal of Economics, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1998), p. 5.
4. Christopher Joyner, quoted in Aaron J. Sarna, Boycott and Blacklist: A History of Arab Economic Warfare Against Israel, p. xiv.
5. Sarna, Boycott and Blacklist, pp. 56–57.
6. Interview with Orna Berry, venture partner, Gemini Israel Funds, January 2009.
7. Interview with Gil Kerbs, venture capitalist and contributor to Forbes, January 2009.
8. Interview with Edward Luttwak.
9. Interview with Alex Vieux, CEO of Red Herring, May 2009.
CHAPTER 4.
Harvard, Princeton, and Yale
1. Interview with David Amir
(fictitious name), August 2008.
2. Interview with Gil Kerbs, venture capitalist, January 2009.
3. Interview with Gary Shainberg, vice president for technology and innovation, British Telecom, August 2008.
4. IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook (Lausanne, Switzerland: IMD, 2005).
5. Interview with Mark Gerson, executive chairman, Gerson Lehrman Group, January 2009.
6. Interview with Tal Keinan, cofounder KCPS, May 2008.
7. Interview with Yossi Vardi, angel investor, May 2008.
8. Background interview with U.S. Army recruiter, January 2009.
9. David Lipsky, Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point; and interview with Lipsky in March 2009.
10. Information from this passage is largely based on an interview with Colonel (res.) John Lowry, general manager at Harley-Davidson Motor Company, November 2008.
11. Interview with Jon Medved, CEO and board member, Vringo, May 2008.
12. This experience prompted the army leadership to pursue a proactive public relations campaign to bridge the civilian-military divide, which included reaching out to Rolling Stone and offering access to a West Point class. This effort culminated in David Lipsky’s book Absolutely American. This passage is also based on author interview with General John Abizaid, May 2009.
13. Interview with Tom Brokaw, author, The Greatest Generation, April 2009.
14. Interview with Al Chase, corporate executive recruiter and founder, White Rhino Partners, February 2009.
15. Interview with Nathaniel Fick, author of One Bullet Away, March 2008.
16. Interview with Brian Tice, captain (res.), U.S. Marine Corps, February 2009.
CHAPTER 5.
Where Order Meets Chaos
1. CIA, “Field Listing—Military Service Age and Obligation,”The 2008 World Factbook.
2. Mindef Singapore, “Ministerial Statement on National Service Defaulters by Minister for Defence Teo Chee Hean,” January 16, 2006.
3. Amnon Barzilai, “A Deep, Dark, Secret Love Affair,” http://www.israelforum.com/board/archive/index.php/t-6321.html.
4. Mindef Singapore, “Speech by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong at the 35 Years of National Service Commemoration Dinner,” September 7, 2007.
5. BBC News, “Singapore Elder Statesman,” July 5, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/820234 .stm; retrieved November 2008.
6. Quoted in James Flanigan, “Israeli Companies Seek Global Profile,” New York Times, May 20, 2009.
7. Interview with Laurent Haug, founder and CEO, Lift Conference, May 2009.
8. Interview with Tal Riesenfeld, founder and vice president of marketing, EyeView, December 2008.
9. The information from this passage is largely taken from Michael A. Roberto, Amy C. Edmondson, and Richard M. J. Bohmer, “Columbia’s Final Mission,” Harvard Business School Case Study, 2006; Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, Apollo (Birkittsville, Md.: South Mountain Books, 2004); Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger, Apollo 13 (New York: Mariner Books, 2006); and Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (New York: Berkley, 2009).
10. Michael Useem, The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All (New York: Three Rivers, 1998), p. 81.
11. Roberta Wohlstetter quoted in Michael A. Roberto, Richard M. J. Bohmer, and Amy C. Edmondson, “Facing Ambiguous Threats,” Harvard Business Review, November 2006.
12. Interview with Yuval Dotan (fictitious name), IAF fighter pilot, May 2008.
13. Interview with Edward Luttwak.
14. Interview with Eliot A. Cohen, director of the Strategic Studies Program, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, January 2009.
15. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling quoted in Thomas E. Ricks, “A Brave Lieutenant Colonel Speaks Out: Why Most of Our Generals Are Dinosaurs,” Foreign Policy, January 1, 2009, http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/01/22/a_brave_colonel_speaks_out_why_most_of_our_ generals_are_dinosaurs.
16. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling (United States Army), “A Failure in Generalship,” Armed Forces Journal, 2007, http://www.armed forcesjournal.com/2007/05/2635198.
17. Interview with Eliot Cohen.
18. Giora Eiland, “The IDF: Addressing the Failures of the Second Lebanon War,” in The Middle East Strategic Balance 2007–2008, edited by Mark A. Heller (Tel Aviv: Institute for National Security Studies, 2008).
19. Quote identified from interview with Carl Schramm, March 2009.
20. William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); and Carl Schramm, “Economic Fluidity: A Crucial Dimension of Economic Freedom,” in 2008 Index of Economic Freedom, edited by Kim R. Holmes, Edwin J. Feulner, and Mary Anastasia O’Grady (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 2008), p. 17.
CHAPTER 6.
An Industrial Policy That Worked
1. Central Bureau of Statistics (Israel), “Gross Domestic Product and Uses of Resources, in the Years 1950–1995,” in Statistical Abstract of Israel 2008, no. 59, table 14.1, http://www.cbs.gov.il/reader/shnaton/templ_shnaton_e .html?num_tab=st14_01x&CYear=2008.
2. Howard M. Sacher, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 30.
3. “Yishuv,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 10, p. 489.
4. Quoted in Time/CBS News, People of the Century: One Hundred Men and Women Who Shaped the Last Hundred Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 128.
5. Leon Wieseltier, “Brothers and Keepers: Black Jews and the Meaning of Zionism,” New Republic, February 11, 1985.
6. Quoted in Meirav Arlosoroff, “Once Politicians Died Poor,” Haaretz, June 8, 2008.
7. Daniel Gavron, The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p 1.
8. Bruno Bettelheim, The Children of the Dream: Communal Child-Rearing and American Education (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 15–17.
9. Alon Tal, Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 219.
10. Alon Tal, “National Report of Israel, Years 2003–2005, to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD),” July 2006, http://www.unccd.int/cop/reports/otheraffected/national/2006/israel-eng.pdf.
11. Dina Kraft, “From Far Beneath the Israeli Desert, Water Sustains a Fertile Enterprise,” New York Times, January 2, 2007.
12. Information for this passage comes from Web sites of the Weizmann Institute, Yatir Forest Research Group, http://www.weizman.ac.il/ESER/People/Yakir/YATIR/Yatir.htm, and the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael/Jewish National Fund, http://www.kkl.org.il/kkl/english/main_subject/globalwarming/israeli%20research%20has%20worldwide%20implications.x.
13. Reut Institute, “Generating a Socio-economic Leapfrog,” February 14, 2008, http://reut-institute.org/data/uploads/PDFVer/20080218%20-%20%20Hausman%27s%20main%20issues-%20 English.pdf.
14. Reut Institute, “Israel 15 Vision,” http://www.reut-institute.org/event.aspx?EventId=6.
15. Information in this passage is from Yakir Plessner, The Political Economy of Israel: From Ideology to Stagnation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 11–31.
16. Ibid., p. 288.
17. David Rosenberg, “Inflation—the Rise and Fall,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site, January 2001, http://www.mfa.gov.il.
18. CNNMoney.com, “Best Places to Do Business in the Wired World,” http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0708/gallery.roadwarriorsspecial.biz2/11.html.
19. Orna Yefet, “McDonalds,” Yediot Ahronot, October 29, 2006.
CHAPTER 7.
Immigration: The Google Guys Challenge
1. Interview with Shlomo Molla, member of Knesset, Kadima Party, March 2009.
2. This covert rescue effort w
as aided by the Central Intelligence Agency, local mercenaries, and even Sudanese security officials. It was kept a secret largely for political reasons—in order to shield Sudan from any blowback from the Arab countries that would criticize the government for ostensibly aiding Israel. When the story of the airlift broke prematurely, the Arab countries pressured Sudan to stop the airlift, which it did. This left one thousand Ethiopian Jews stranded until U.S.-led Operation Joshua evacuated them to Israel a few months later.
3. Leon Wieseltier, “Brothers and Keepers: Black Jews and the Meaning of Zionism.”
4. Joel Brinkley, “Ethiopian Jews and Israelis Exult as Airlift Is Completed,” New York Times, May 26, 1991.
5. David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, The Google Story (New York: Delacorte, 2005), p. 15.
6. Interview with Natan Sharansky, chairman and distinguished fellow, Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, Shalem Center, and founder of Yisrael B’Aliya, May 2008.
7. Interview with David McWilliams, Irish economist and author of The Pope’s Children, March 2009.
8. Interview with Erel Margalit, founder of Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), May 2008.
9. Interview with Reuven Agassi, December 2008.
10. While the new law was already rigid, the U.S. State Department directed consular officers overseas to become even stricter in their application of the “public charge” provision of immigration law. A public charge is someone unable to support himself or his family. At the beginning of the Great Depression, in response to a public outcry for tougher immigration laws, overseas consuls were told to expand the interpretation of the “public charge clause” to prohibit admission to immigrants who just might become public charges. The designation became a completely speculative process.
11. David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. x.
12. Some scholars now believe that the lack of a safe haven for Jews seeking to leave Germany and other soon-to-be-occupied Nazi territories became an important factor in Nazi plans to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. “The overall picture clearly shows that the original [Nazi] policy was to force the Jews to leave,” says David Wyman. “The shift to extermination came only after the emigration method had failed, a failure in large part due to lack of countries open to refugees.” From Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 35.
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