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Why Israel Could Be the Next Cybersecurity World Power
jfruh writes: Beersheba is a small town in southern Israel, more than an hour's drive away from Tel Aviv and the bulk of the country's population. But the city is a hotbed of cybersecurity startups driven in part by a graduate program at the local university and the country's military and intelligence apparatus's keen interest in the subject. "To become such a cyber nexus, any place has to have several ingredients: A great university with a solid computer science department with a penchant for security research. Check. Several industry partners who have set up their own research and innovation laboratories nearby, to take advance of the cheap labor pool of graduate students. Check. An active venture capitalist operation that can fund startups is also essential, along with mentors who can help entrepreneurs along. Double check. And finally some solid support for local and national government to grease the wheels of progress. Check."
It's called "Google". It points here.
Short answer: they are either misquotes or ourright fakes.
Shachar
I'm not the GP, but I think I can help. Israel is a secular liberal democracy, in the literal sense (I think most American Israel supporters would be surprised at how much Israel does not match their own political and social views). Palestinians have more say in the Israeli government than most of your average Arabs do in their own. Israel is one of the only nations in the middle east where things like blasphemy, homosexuality, and being a woman in public aren't a mortal danger. Now, it was not always thus; the Arab world has significantly regressed since the 1960's, and largely due to American and British corporate interventionism, but Israel really has no part in that.
Actual Israeli here, with family in Beersheva, happy to answer questions. ;tldr, the article is bs, no one wants to live and work in Beersheva and don't confuse a few offices with a new silicon valley - here's why below.
Not sure where the author is getting his information from, but this article is dubious, albeit in an innocent way. First of all, let me explain that Beersheva is hardly a cosmopolitan city. It is a place most famous in Israel for cheap living until the last couple of decades, our version of guidos/greasers (arsim), and for housing one of the largest influxes of former Soviet immigrants after the flood of them we had pre/post fall of the Soviet Union. It is a place that no one really chooses to go, only to leave. Many of the people there were put there when they immigrated because it was cheap to build and the going theory besides developing the desert in the South was to also have a line of defense against Egyptian advances that traditionally marched up towards the heart of Israel via Beersheva.
So if Beersheva sucks, why are these businesses opening and why do people live there? Well generally, people just are stuck there or can't afford anywhere else. One of the largest problems and why this article may have even a hint of truth is that living in Israel is expensive relative to our per-capita incomes. Really expensive. Most of the country lives in the center, and not so shockingly, the center is really really expensive. As you can imagine, a lot of people would love to move somewhere cheaper, less crowded, more natural, etc. One option, highly encouraged at times by the government is to move to the periphery which to many Israelis essentially starts in the area of Beersheva in the South, and North of Haifa and the Kneret (Sea of Galillee I believe in English) in the North. In Hebrew we'd refer to this area as the end of the world, or how do you get to Beersheva - turn left at the end of the world. Before you start in with your naive and ridiculous comments, no, this does not include the West Bank or Gaza (glad we got that out of the way, but I expect the usual lunatics).
So enough background, why else is this article bs:
1. Ben Gurion University is hardly well-respected in Israel. It is known to be incredibly left-leaning in a way that even liberal people often detest and has been the subject of a lot of controversy. More importantly, no one in Israel really cares where you went to school. If they do care and you went to an Israeli university for tech, God help you if it was not the Technion. At best you can get someone to admit that Hebrew University's computer science department is not so bad.
2. Beersheva was/is under constant rocket threat. The property values in these areas is considered dubious in the future, especially given the obvious range of Hamas rockets in relation to Beersheva. Hint: people in Beersheva heard a lot of sirens last war. A lot.
3. There are much nicer, cheaper places in Israel for smaller tech firms who don't care about recruiting from the pool of people in Tel Aviv/center.
4. The traffic crush to Beersheva is unreal by Israeli standards. The infrastructure in and around Beersheva is not good enough to support a large amount of people coming and going every day, so no one is going to want to commute there to avoid living there. Commuting in Israel is just not something people generally do, especially not multiple hour commutes if they can avoid it. My wife does commute between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem a few times a week, but only out of necessity and the fact we can't afford to give up our apartment we own here and buy a new one in Jerusalem. Moreover, given the prices of gas and the fact that cars are egregiously expensive in this country, most people aren't even able to commute on a daily basis.
5. Apparently the author has never met actual Israelis in tech. They are all "security" experts. This is exacerbated since many of them spent years writing crappy VB forms for security companies here like Checkpoint
You're putting "maintaining its Jewish character" in quotes like it comes from somewhere other than your own bias. It's a straw man. The original mandate called for a two-state solution with lines drawn exactly where the Jews and Arabs at the time lived. That mandate was unilaterally abrogated by the Arabs of the entire region who thought dirty Jews shouldn't have a country at all. Tit for tat for tit for tat. But don't pretend that the Palestinians are blameless. They had a state, it wasn't good enough, so they gambled everything on a holy war and lost.
What genocide? Less Palestinian were killed by Israel (including combatants) since the conflict started 100 years ago than Syrians over the past two years.
The Palestinians in both Gaza and the west back, individually, experience a positive natural growth.
If Israel is trying to commit genocide, it is criminally ineffective.
Shachar