Israel is high-tech country. In 1974 it exported one percent ($800 million) of its high-tech products. Within a decade it was exporting 30 percent ($2 billion) annually. By 1990 that proportion is expected to leap by two-thirds.
In 1970 there were 3,000 engineers and applied scientists. By last year there were 12,000. Israel is producing the most advanced concepts in technology and software. Sophisticated science-based industries like Elscint, Tadiran, Scitex, Iscar and Elbit have become household words. These "Silicon Valley" companies are generating and regenerating communities around them and putting Israel on the world map of technology and science.
At Israel’s present rate of technological and scientific development, there is a shortage of technological people to maintain the momentum. In the next 10 years, Israel will need 1,800 engineers but there will be a shortfall of 400 to 500 annually. But Israel is not standing still in the meantime.
New words and concepts are emerging more rapidly than they can become part of the Hebrew lexicon. There is a constant introduction of high-tech and scientific terminology such as microchips, fiberoptic high speed data transmission and distribution, computer-based diagnostic medical imaging, computerized electro-optical systems, genetic engineering, nuclear cardiology, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) scanning.
INTER-LINKED USES OF HIGH-TECH PRODUCTS
A great deal of high-tech products in industry, science and medicine are manufactured with defense technology know-how. Civilian and military technical developments are by-products of each other’s needs. These are interlinked and applied in both sectors.
For example, industrial, medical and print lasers, thermal imaging and image-intensification technologies are targeted at both the medical and military sectors. An interlinked refinement of some of these processes is the NMR which gives remarkable three-dimensional images of what is happening inside the human body, far beyond what the X-ray and CAT scanner can accomplish. Although NMR has been around since the 1940’s, it was first applied to medical imaging only five years ago.
A WORLD LEADER IN VARIOUS FIELDS
Israel is also a world leader in factory automation and computerization. Sophisticated missile technology is successfully being converted into labor-saving robots that are finding application in American garment plants. The robot feeds pre-cut fabric bundles to semi-automatic sewing and fusing machines and assists in making garment production completely automatic.
Computer-based imaging systems were put to use in the textile industry. By automating the conversion of color designs to magnetic tapes for electronically controlled knitting machines, the elapsed time required for patterned knitted goods was slashed from several weeks to minutes.
In the field of thermal imaging, cameras are being developed that can display a TV picture of inanimate and animate objects in the darkness of the night, thick haze, dust or fog. The cameras, tested in the field and battle, are beginning to be used for civilian application in surveillance, and ultimately may be used in cancer detection.
Along with these developments, Israel has also become a world leader in agricultural break-throughs such as drip irrigation, breeding of new crop strains which thrive on brackish or saline water, crop cultivation under plastic sheets, and growing fruits and vegetables with longer shelf life.
HELPING DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
These innovations, and solar ponds and solar-driven turbines and generators, water conservation, and desert research and development, have been introduced by Israel into more than 100 countries, including the United States.
Israeli methods of agriculture and farming organized along kibbutz lines were introduced by Israelis in such diverse countries as Japan, and in Cuba in the early 1960’s. Special turbines combined with solar ponds to generate power in some of the world’s most desolate regions was pioneered in Israel.
The process of "humanizing" the desert by tapping its mineral resources and underground springs, and the exploitation of Dead Sea minerals to manufacture fertilizers and pesticides has also brought Israel to the attention of many developing countries with large desert areas.
Among other countries, Egypt and the People’s Republic of China have expressed great interest in studying the methods of desert research developed by Israeli scientists. In the near future, efforts to make deserts habitable will become more pressing as populations grow and have nowhere else to reside except for the deserts.
All these developments have enriched Israel’s economy by introducing revolutionary techniques to increase productivity and to provide for expanding domestic needs. It is changing the nature of the labor force in both industry and agriculture by requiring more and more technicians and science-oriented workers. It is providing a military edge to the country’s security force. It is helping millions of people in developing nations. And it is creating a world market for Israeli products and techniques.
REVOLT AGAINST ‘LO CHASHUV’ SYNDROME
Other changes are taking place in social relations that are equally profound and far-reaching. The most radical change taking place is the revolt against the long ingrained "lo chashuv" (so be it, it doesn’t matter) syndrome which has been the earmark of Israeli bureaucrats (p’kidim) and the myriad bureaucratic fiefdoms that infest all levels of life.
The anti-bureaucratic attitude is expressed in a demand for "accountability," a concept introduced into the country by Project Renewal, the vast undertaking by the government and diaspora Jewry to eliminate poverty neighborhoods and to restore "hatikvah" (hope) in the lives of its residents.
The assault on Israel’s systemized bureaucracy is being led primarily by new immigrants from the United States and the Soviet Union. American immigrants, used to corporate efficiency, are askance at the wastefulness of a bureaucratic system which demeans and stultifies life. Soviet Jews, who were entrapped by their own bureaucracies, rebel against the Israeli version.
Israelis, who for all these decades had accepted the existence of p’kidim as a necessary and unalterable way of life, are also demanding an end to an uncaring and insensitive system with its maze of paperwork and red tape which requires that almost all daily transactions be carried out in quadruplicate, quintuplicate and sextuplicate, and waiting in endless, sometimes never moving lines, to distribute the paperwork to another pakid who rules his or her own roost.
The anti-pakid attitude is beginning to change the social process in the country. No institution is immune to criticism. The demand for accountability is aimed at the government, the army, postal system, hospitals, industry, unions, political parties and Zionist organizations. The "lo chashuv" syndrome is slowly beginning to wither away or is being swept aside. The dam broke with the Bank Leumi scandal earlier this year. It lifted a veil on an entrenched bureaucracy which answered to no one but itself.
Israelis who decry advice from afar and what they sometimes refer to as "meddling" in their country’s affairs by Jewish representatives from the United States, actually welcomed their decision to move against a moribund bureaucracy in the Jewish Agency.
The move, which focused on Agency chairman Leon Dulzin who was caught up in the Bank Leumi scandal, caught the imagination of many Israelis who have had to deal with the Agency’s p’kidim. They watched the shakeup, smiled mischievously, shrugged their shoulders and said, "Lo chashuv," meaning, in this case, it couldn’t have happened soon enough.
SEEKING ENCOUNTERS OF THE ‘CHALUTZIC’ KIND
There are many Israelis, young and old, who want the country to return to its "chalutzic" (pioneering) spirit, who want Israel to end its decades-long policies of drifting and haphazard planning, that it should implement the Zionist principles that guided the country’s founders, to return to its Jewish roots, values and ethos. There is a search for answers –not gimmicks–about the kind of society Israel should be. They are seeking the raison d’etre of Israel’s existence, as a Jewish State, not just a state.
"Israel has been created mainly for a Jew like me," said Menachem Perlmutter, head of the Jewish Agency’s rural settlement department, engineering division, in the Negev, and a member of the Board of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. "I am a survivor of the Holocaust. I have a number on my left arm. I can’t look back. If I look back, what do I see? I see the shadow of the gas chamber. I see crematoriums. For me there is only one answer: Israel."
Perlmutter said he was 16 years old when he was taken to Auschwitz. "Of a family of 53 persons, two remained –my brother and myself," he said. "My dream was to be a free and independent Jew who would be able to build a family. My generation had a beautiful challenge, a chance to create a home, a State. But we made a mistake. We were trying so hard to be Israelis that we forget that we were Jews. The new generation has little Jewish feeling."
This problem is haunting many Israelis: while they welcome the rapid pace of super-industrialization, they are concerned that it may produce a generation of technocrats who will be Israelis but not Jews. Israelis are searching for new vistas, for new encounters of the chalutzic kind, for a way to realize old hopes and old dreams and to combine them with new needs and new realities. They are seeking a new national agenda and many point to the Negev and the Galilee as the places in which to renew the pioneering spirit.
(Tomorrow: Part Three)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
