Israel is like the U.S. of old.
There are a lot of things in common between the US and Israel, even as many on the Left turn against the Jewish state and falsely accuse it of genocide and starving Palestinians. There is, of course, a shared religious core and similar values. It’s a funny thing to see “Trans for Palestine” and “Gays for Hamas” when the only country that would not turn them into alternative sewer covers is Israel. While Israel has a strong Jewish ethos, it is a secular state and promotes “liberal” ideas like having “Gay Pride” parades in Tel Aviv, though homosexuality is explicitly forbidden by Torah law.
One shared area is the “can-do” mentality. Europe once had it, but through socialism and a loss of religiosity, it has lost it. Only one European company is in the top 30 by market value, while the US holds 23 spots. The US dominates this list, but even then, most of the companies are 30+ years old. Local, state and federal governments find every way to stymie creative growth and make technical revolutions harder and harder. Elon Musk has told the story of how he had to provide impact studies of his rockets on sharks should one land in the ocean. And after they provided the same, they had to make a similar study for whales. The sun-based electricity generation plant that is going out of business in the Mojave Desert (Ivanpah) once had to drop $55 million to buy an adjacent parcel of land. They needed to move an endangered turtle to the new site, as the state of California threatened that if one more turtle was killed during site construction, they would revoke their license and end the project.
Israel is not yet there for sclerosis, though it is doing its best to turn “Start-Up Nation” into another over-regulated, over-taxed Western country. A few months back, the Harvard Club of Israel had Bill Ackman address local associates of the university. Just before he spoke, a cherub-like fellow came bounding out and welcomed the crowd, which also included University of Pennsylvania alumni. My son gave me a sharp elbow and told me that the smiling fellow was the founder of NSO, the Israeli company banned by the US. NSO apparently could put its Pegasus code into a single pixel of a picture and, most importantly, integrate it into a target device without a user clicking on or otherwise opening some link or attachment. NSO gained the wrath of US officials when it became clear that various governments and individuals were using their software to spy on people of interest. The last thing I heard about NSO was that the CIA used its software to confuse the Iranians while American and Israeli forces were working to get the second downed F-15 pilot back. Israel’s base in eastern Iraq was built specifically for that purpose.
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A friend told me of his grandfather’s efforts during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Egyptians were having success with their surface-to-air missiles against Israeli fighters. So he and his colleagues developed a device that sent out a signal that would mimic the target signal that Egypt’s Russian systems identified. They put their invention on a helicopter and approached an Egyptian SAM site. The latter unloaded all of its missiles, and then an Israeli plane bombed and destroyed the SAM. Rinse and repeat.
Stories abound about American ingenuity from the earliest years of the Republic. Things that seemed impossible — making an atomic bomb or going to the moon and returning safely, for example—became the American signature. Israel also has its fair share of stories of the impossible becoming reality. The beepers manufactured and sold to Hezbollah are one such example. The now-dead leader of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah, worried that Israel could penetrate cellphones and thus had his fighters go back to pagers. Israel took advantage of the decision to sell the terror group several thousand units, and when the time came, activate the explosives that were placed at the cost of a smaller battery. The charge was selected to injure rather than kill and thus tie up Hezbollah men and resources for years to come.
On a more personal side, I can tell about an invention of this author. My company made a sensor that could, within five seconds, determine if drinking water was contaminated. It could detect contaminants in parts-per-billion concentrations and was able to detect organic, biological and heavy metal materials that should not be in water. We won an Israeli start-up competition. We did the same at the massive Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. We received glowing press from the BBC and ABC. We got a contract to put our devices into thousands of CVS stores. With all that, the company went nowhere. We did not have a marketing budget, and we learned two very important lessons. Most people don’t care about their water quality beyond no smell/no color. Additionally, we learned that regulatory authorities like the EPA have tunnel vision.
Our device can instantly detect contamination of bacteria or heavy metals. But the regulators want a separate test for each type of contaminant and told us that they could not work with a general screen like ours. Even companies that wanted to provide water quality data were at a loss. Filter companies realized that we would show that their products are good for years and not just six months and thus they would lose revenue. A major faucet manufacturer chided us for being too sensitive after we detected lower-than-threshold values of bad things that nobody would want to drink. In short, we had great tech but a market that did not want it. When we took it to the Israeli water provider, the lab folks told us that they have run the same tests for 40 years and had no interest in changing the way they worked.
As my business partner was mostly busy with IDF matters, he tasked me with finding a better market for our technology. We bandied about a couple of ideas and then I set out to test. I wanted it to detect sugar in blood. Glucose is uncharged and our device detects electric fields. As such, the hundreds of pin-pricks I made on my fingers were enlightening as to how my body works, but there was zero correlation between our sensor signal and traditional glucose readings. So what about blood flow? We could put a blood pressure app on a watch. But that too did not work. While we seemed to get readings that corresponded to blood flow, cutting off the flow did not cut off the signal. So what did we have?
Finally, we discovered that our technology can detect the action of muscles. Every muscular contraction requires an electric signal, and we can detect the fields from that signal. We are looking to use the sensor to monitor muscle action, improve muscle use, and identify potential injuries before they happen. Stay tuned.
The IDF has often faced challenges and then worked to address them. Roadside bombs led to metal plates under Merkava tanks. RPGs and anti-tank missiles brought about the Trophy system for their neutralization. The US has purchased Trophy units for some of its armored vehicles. Arrow and other interceptors have been developed and refined for Iranian ballistic missiles. The current optical drone problem in Lebanon is getting a lot of attention as to possible solutions. Can-do, it can get done. That is the view here. The missile Israel developed to mimic a ballistic target for Arrow was repurposed and used in the opening salvo of the present Iran war. It took out the Ayatollah and his top people in under a minute.
Israel and the U.S: it can be done.
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