Innovation Nation

TEL AVIV – Driving back to this city last Saturday from the lowest place on the planet, the Dead Sea, I spotted heavy machinery transplanting young date palms in the desert sand, close to the water that is so salty only single-cell organisms can survive.

The desert terrain along the Dead Sea is so forbidding it’s a miracle that anything can grow there. Yet in that wasteland of sand and, along the mountain slopes, limestone millions of years old, the Israelis have managed to grow not only date palms but also banana, avocado and mango trees.

The young mango trees are tented with nets made of fine silver thread developed by the Israelis to trap the heat and humidity required for the tropical fruits to thrive, but keep out harmful UV rays. Fresh water is collected from the mountain and distributed to the date palms and trees through drip irrigation, in which water is injected in controlled amounts through the roots to avoid waste. With the first seed varieties brought from India, the Israelis now export mangoes.

At Herods Dead Sea Hotel, where I had the unique experience of being unable to sink in the salty water, there was a profusion of lavender and brightly colored flowers in the desert soil.

In a kibbutz pit stop along the highway, I got to taste the Dead Sea dates – large, fat, juicy and luscious. The Israelis are also proud of the Judean “Methuselah” date palm, so named because it was sprouted a decade ago from a 2,000-year-old seed. In 2015 Israel exported $60 million worth of dates, and aims to double the amount this year.

Israel’s agricultural miracle was born of necessity. With nothing but desert sand, ancient rocks, swamps and seawater, those who built the Jewish state had no choice but to innovate for survival. Failures did not deter them; when thousands of eucalyptus trees bought from Australia did not live up to the promise of draining the swamps, the Israelis used machinery, covered the drained land with fertile soil and started planting.

They picked plants indigenous to the area: olives, pomegranates, dates and sycamore-fig – the tree which Zacchaeus the chief tax collector climbed, according to the Bible, to watch Jesus Christ enter Jericho. All in all, some 400 million trees were planted throughout Israel in those early days. They adopted pines to the desert and revived a “mother wheat” that could survive in the arid land. And they perfected desalination to use seawater (except from the Dead Sea).

Adversity and existential threats compelled the Israelis to innovate. The spirit of innovation remains strong to this day in all aspects from agriculture to cyber technology and the defense industry, making Israel a leader in research and development. With a population of just over eight million, Israel has 12 Nobel laureates, mostly in science and R&D. Maybe Jews have an innovation gene, which gave the world the likes of Albert Einstein and Google’s Sergey Brin.

The country has produced an environment that encourages startups, which have given the world Waze, the USB flash drive, the Intel chip and SMS, among others.

Earlier this year, Israeli scientists successfully tested an injectible drug developed from a naturally occurring form of chlorophyll in aquatic bacteria. In 20-30 minutes, the drug killed prostate cancer cells without harming surrounding healthy cells, and without side effects. Within a day or two, the tumor had undergone necrosis. Tests are underway to use the drug on other types of cancers.

The innovative, entrepreneurial spirit has made Israel an advanced economy in just 68 years of existence, with GDP per capita at $36,000. Compare this with the Philippines’ $2,635 last year, and you can see that there’s a lesson to be learned here.

* * *

Our circumstances are, of course, different. We face no existential threat from hostile neighbors, and we need little effort to make anything grow in our fertile land. And when we need technological knowhow, we turn to experts from – among others – Israel.

So the startup of Oren Silbershatz is providing off-grid solutions to fresh water and energy needs in areas in the Philippines where such basic services remain unavailable. The Tahal Group is partnering with Maynilad and Manila Water to purify wastewater before this is dumped in the Pasig River or Manila Bay. Adi Ben Dayan’s startup Rewire has launched a remittance service for migrant workers that allows the recipient to get the money within just 30 minutes instead of two days, for a fee of just two percent. Samuel Wazana is CEO of PoliPhone, which has developed a smartphone-based system that will do away with large offices for call centers, allowing people to work from home.

With Israelis required to serve in the military before entering university, usually at age 18, many learn to innovate in battlefields, and become entrepreneurs at a young age. Ran Krauss, for example, turned his passion for toy planes into Airobotics in 2013 when he was just 30 years old. The company creates drones with their own “air base” or docking station and software for industrial use.

The other day I listened to a briefing at the headquarters of Fifth Dimension – not the US pop singers of “Up, Up and Away” but a provider of cutting-edge deep learning artificial intelligence, which is now being used in several countries to fight terrorism. The latest recruit of the company that was founded by an ex-chief of the Israeli intelligence arm Mossad is retired US Marine Gen. John Allen, who was appointed by Barack Obama as special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State.

A brief Fifth Dimension promo video was like a James Bond movie, except the video featured technology that is now in use and has empowered human agents to foil recent terrorist attacks.

Fifth Dimension marketing director Liad Churchill, himself a former military intelligence agent, explained that government agencies usually have the data but cannot connect the dots that will help identify potential threats.

The company’s service allows such agencies to put together “unstructured” data – text, e-mail, video, audio, photos, bitcoins – and detect patterns, apply sophisticated face recognition and make sense of the information.

“We literally create an artificial brain,” Churchill told journalists, adding that their product allows humans to turn data into “real-time, actionable, predictive intelligence.”

Fifth Dimension’s clients are all governments that are protected by confidentiality. About 350 Israeli companies are engaged in cyber security. The interest was born of necessity, like the agricultural miracle during the founding of the Jewish state. And as in their agricultural expertise, the Israelis are sharing their knowledge with the world.