Send Flowers to Damascus…

Image via Wikipedia

I had a geo-political revelation while reading Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle(which I reviewed from a business/innovation perspective on my other blog).

Were it not for the pressure cooker situation that Israel finds itself in because of the Arab world’s intransigence and desire to destroy the country, that Israel would not have the highest rate of innovation per capita in the world.

If “necessity is the mother of invention,” then “innovate or be exterminated,” certainly raises the stakes.

So, in a great ironic twist, the constant effort to destroy and isolate Israel has actually led to Israel’s increasing wealth and sought-after knowledge/innovation.

At the end of “The Believer,” a move in which an Orthodox kid becomes a neo-Nazi, the main character says that the way to get rid of the Jews is to “love them.”

Then, they will assimilate and be no more.

So, too, the Middle East, in some way.

Israelis will tell you this, “if the Arabs made peace with us and left us alone, we’d probably kill each other in a civil war.”

So, the 50-fold increase in living standards and having more companies on the Nasdaq than all of western Europe combined…well, that’s something the Israelis owe to the Syrians, Palestinians, and the rest of the Arab world that want them gone.