Quoting from one of the sources most heavily referenced in DK diaries on I/P issues:
Far from the rockets, fiery kites and snipers, cooperation between Palestinian techies and Israeli entrepreneurs – as seen in the Rawabi Tech Hub in the West Bank – is booming. Will ventures with the Arab world be next?
The young Palestinian city of Rawabi, which is not far from the Israeli city of Modi’in and is surrounded by settlements, is not a vibrant city like Ramallah, its neighbor. Not yet, anyway. The tidy streets of the first planned city for Palestinians in the West Bank, some of which are still under construction, are empty. Only in one part of the business district is the sense of solitude interrupted by the relative bustle of cafes during the afternoon.
That’s not accidental: Every day, over 100 software developers converge on the area’s principal office building, which also houses on its upper floors the city’s entrepreneurial center, featuring a large shared working space that resembles that at similar facilities in Israel. After Arabic, English is the main language spoken in the new facility, the Rawabi Tech Hub, which opened last year.
Many people are unaware of the fertile cooperation taking place between Palestinian software engineers from Gaza City, Ramallah and Rawabi, in the West Bank, and Israeli high-tech companies, which are beginning to benefit from the experienced and inexpensive workforce of their neighbors. Such Israeli companies employ 20,000 people from India and Ukraine at present, while just over the border, an hour by car from Tel Aviv, is a substantial pool of skilled workers who can help ease the labor shortage in Israel’s high-tech industry ...
[more at the top link]
|
Exploitation of Palestinians by Israelis? Actually, no more than how business operates worldwide, and potentially less, because a lot of critics are watching.
The people who start a company or industry usually come out richest (cf Saint Bill Gates), and virtually everyone reading this accessed this diary via a variety of several of the world’s most exploitive industries —and corporations— in using their favorite means of communication.
Being realistic: how many of us have NOT accepted working in and buying from business and industry as it existed and exists,rather than go unemployed, impoverished, cut off from making change for the better in our lives, and in no position at all to effect change anywhere except by violence?
Look around, Americans. We have entire huge communities throughout this nation forced into more generations of poverty and conflict than I and P have existed, because of lack of any skilled foothold or way in. Participation in productive economy is the only route up, the route to empowerment to make the changes humanity better embrace before climate kills us all.
Mellanox employs 130 Palestinians, which not only provides badly needed jobs but fosters a dialogue of equals between the two sides
Mellanox Technologies became the second-largest high-tech exit ever in Israel when Nvidia agreed to buy it for $6.9 billion thanks to its place at the forefront of emerging technologies of artificial intelligence and parallel computing conducted at giant server farms.
Mellanox’s success is due to its employees’ dedication and enthusiasm no less than it is the result of the imagination and vision of its longtime CEO and co-founder Eyal Waldman.
Over the years Mellanox invested in areas that outsiders regarded as too ambitious or in segments regarded as unattractive. The company’s technology is an inseparable part of nearly every supercomputer or giant computing center [with sales reportedly exceeding $1bn].
It’s that same tendency to think outside of the box that led Mellanox to cross the Green Line. A decade ago we realized that every year more than 3,000 young Palestinians complete their studies in engineering and technology at institutes of higher education in the West Bank and Gaza.
Some of them are hired by Palestinian, Israeli or multinational companies, a few try their luck in the Gulf and others go further afield. But three quarters of them remain unemployed. In the best case, they remain idle; in the worst, they become part of the conflict with Israel.
In cooperation with the Palestinian outsourcing company ASAL, Mellanox began hiring [in 2015]...
|
How many of us knew in 2015 there was a Palestinian outsourcing company?
Tech offers a way out of the West Bank and Gaza’s economic misery, if their leaders get their mind off other things and the BDS movement stops meddling.
The interview with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar that appeared in the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth week was devoted mainly to explaining why Hamas didn’t want war with Israel and how Hamas is doing a great job running Gaza, under the circumstances.
Amid all the doubletalk, Sinwar also made several emotional asides about Palestinian children, saying at one point: “I want my kids to dream of becoming doctors not to treat only the wounded, but cancer patients.”
|
This article intermixes viewpoint on Hamas —without much mention of the PA/PNA/Fatah/Plo/etc— that doesn’t take fully three-dimensional account of numberless world cases throughout history of the way quasi-governments enrich the top echelons and operatives, while even with the best of intentions easily bogging down in serving the self-limiting popular rhetoric of conflict before and above all other priorities, through having made conflict the raison d'être. And not least in trying to sustain any stability in the presence of more violent and less constructive internal parties/militancies (e.g., Islamic Jihad), intergovernmental schism (Fatah/PA/PNA/PLO), and so-called friends bending Palestine to their own aims.
So, editing moderately for the voice of another perspective:
...beyond the goal of liberating Palestine... building a future for the next generation of Palestinians [needs its leadership to invest] in education and the economy now, because if a state ... ever does arise, Palestinian society won’t suddenly morph [into a productive economy] from a warrior society [prioritized] to fight...
For that to happen, the groundwork of post-independence society has to be laid down … much like the pre-state Zionists did...
...much of [that task] can be done, through high-tech.
Given that the West Bank is subject to border closings and barriers, and that Gaza is subject to complete blockade, the prospect of Rafah and Ramallah turning into the next Silicon Valley might seem preposterous. It’s not.
One of the beauties of high-tech is that all you need besides a [trained and] fertile mind is a good internet connection, and you’re in business. Closed borders and barriers to physical movement are minor issues...
There already is a Palestinian startup scene of sorts, but a recent World Bank report shows it hasn’t [yet] been a roaring success. Palestinian universities turn out about 3,000 engineering and computer science graduates every year, but their unemployment rate is close to 20%.
...[that] sector has been showered with international aid. Between the West Bank and Gaza, there are more than 20 incubators and accelerators funded by various donors [and some of the biggest names in the field, a huge number relative to the size of the economy, where newly hatched companies can get professional help starting up, mentoring and inexpensive facilities. But their success rate is pretty poor — ] Palestinian startups that were launched without the aid of an incubator or an accelerator had slightly better rate of success.
As the World Bank ... put it, the whole Palestinian entrepreneurship system is “supply-driven rather than market driven,” [i.e,] a lot of organizations and governments with good intentions have swamped a tiny tech industry with money and help [it’s not yet built to make productive use of, so what opportunity it creates is for people who aren’t entrepreneur-builders].
[One alternative is for the West Bank and Gaza to piggyback on Israel’s progress by signing on with tech entrepreneurship there]. On a small scale, it is already happening. Companies like Mellanox, Frieghtos and [Nokia’s Israeli unit] have hired hundreds of Palestinians.
And as we know of economics, every one job fuels multiple others through family income being spent in the local community.
...Israel’s tech sector is badly short of engineers and has tapped into talent pools as far away as India and Ukraine to fill the gap… [But] Mellanox ... has 20 engineers working in Gaza - whom company executives have never met face to face because they can’t go into Gaza and their Gaza staff can’t leave.
For Palestinians, working for Israeli companies doesn’t have to consign them to a life beholden to Israeli bosses. As Israelis themselves do, when they decamp to Silicon Valley early in their careers, working for a big, successful company is an education and a way to [learn the business and its] networks. When the time comes, the most ambitious and successful of them start their own companies.
[Or joining growing ones.]
What’s stopping Palestine from becoming another major outsourcing center is Israeli suspicions about working with Palestinians – but mainly, the resistance of the BDS movement, whose activists pressure Palestinians not to work for Israeli companies.
The irony is that while BDS hasn’t been able to put a dent into the Israeli high-tech phenomenon, it’s doing its best to destroy an emerging a Palestinian tech sector.
Like [a warrior society], BDS is singularly focused on the one goal of confrontation with Israel, and ordinary Palestinians be damned.
|
BDS activists get to go home to their comfortable nonPalestine lives after a hot day slaving over rhetoric online, on-campus, and in demonstrations, leaving Palestinians exactly where they’ve been: 40 years in the desert and counting.
Mellanox has demonstrated the power of defying the consensus. The Palestinian economy is desperately in need of investment and technology. Hundreds of Palestinian engineers and technicians are waiting for the phone to ring. Israel’s high-tech sector shouldn’t hesitate to make that call.
|
Tech isn’t the only avenue of bootstrapping for an underdeveloped nation, it’s just the most ‘small’ in material equipment and the most visibly high-return ... therefore the most glamorous. At the links of the quoted articles are others that take a much darker view of tech and its promise [or risks] for under-developed nations and for economic uplift as a resolver of conflict. See also an opinion on Hamas and another on Arab rulers’ history of exploiting P/I conflict, by Muhammad Shehada, that contain information about leadership that Palestinians are stuck with because coreligionist regimes want it that way.
That being said, the key point is that at daily-life bottom line, almost everything really is all about the benjamins: most everyone anywhere wants a decently-paid job in some productive field, by which to sustain family and community longterm, nourish meaningfulness about life that doesn’t need to focus on hate at all, and look forward to the future with hope and confidence.
http://nocamels.com/: Hire the Neighbors: Could Israeli-Palestinian Tech Initiatives Prove to be a Win-Win Arrangement?
|
In recent months, I’ve come across some lessons taught by Qur’an replying to terrible events with compassionate, courageous, common-sense philosophy. Two quotations in particular that it’s up to us to foster among ourselves in order to support more widely:
"Humanity is but a single Brotherhood: so,
make peace with your brethren."
Surah al-Hujurat 49:10
“Repel evil by that which is better.”
Surah Fussilat 41:34
If progressives can’t do that among ourselves and with our own other ‘brethren’, there may not be much else we have a good handle on either.
Just something to think about.