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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (358735)	4/9/2010 11:09:01 PM
From: skinowski	Respond to of 793958

Yes, an influx of great numbers of educated Russian Jews played a great part. However, pro-business and pro-capitalism reforms by the previous Netanyahu government were a crucial factor. George Gilder described this recently in this rather fascinating article. Message 25912539 The influx of Soviet Jews into Israel represented a 25 percent population increase in ten years, a tsunami of new arrivals that would be equivalent to the entire population of France being accepted into the United States. Largely barred in the USSR from owning land or businesses, many of these Jews had honed their minds into keen instruments of algorithmic science, engineering, and mathematics. Most had wanted to come to America but were diverted to Israel by an agreement between Israel and the United States. Few knew Hebrew or saw a need for it. At best, they were ambivalent Zionists. But many were ferociously smart, fervently anti-Communist, and disdainful of their new country’s bizarre commitment to a socialist ethos that punished achievement. At the same time as the flood of Soviet immigrants, a smaller but seminal wave of Americans arrived in Israel from such companies as IBM and Bell Laboratories, with a knowledge of Silicon Valley and an interest in opportunities in Israel. Capping off and funding these catalytic outsiders was a generation of eminent American retirees who arrived in Israel with billions of dollars of available capital, petawatts of imperious brainpower, a practiced disdain for bureaucratic pettifogs, and Olympian confidence in their own judgment and capabilities. Mix the leadership of these dynamic capitalists with a million restive and insurgent Soviets, and the reaction was economically incandescent. Throw in natural leadership from the irrepressible Natan Sharansky, who had faced down confinement in the Gulag and formed a new conservative political party in Israel to mobilize his Russian compatriots, and the impact reverberated through the social and political order as well. Such an influx could not be clamped or channeled, tapered or intimidated into the existing economic framework, and, as Israeli financier Tal Keinan remarks of the Russian newcomers, “they could not all work for Intel.” Today, immigrants from the former Soviet Union constitute fully half of Israel’s high-tech workers.