The Start-Up Nation

"Seventy-Five years ago, on the fifth day of Iyar on the Hebrew lunar calendar, which falls on April 26 this year, on the eve of Great Britain pulling out of Palestine, the region's Jewish community declared 'the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel'."

"The Zionist movement was formed to re-establish the ancient Jewish homeland in Judaea, as a refuge for a people who faced centuries of persecution. At the end of the 19th century, the World Zionist Organization began building the institutions that would form the basis of an eventual state."

"Following the Holocaust, Zionism came to be seen not just as a dream, but as an existential imperative for a people who had barely escaped total annihilation."

From ubiquitous carbonated water to drip irrigation for growing crops in the desert, the USB key and anti-missile systems, Israel has a talent for creating things the world wants.

 

Modern-day Israel has distinguished itself as a innovative hub of human creativity, a vast beehive of technological advances as well as an agricultural focus on the art of the possible. In an arid landscape where water is always in short supply, its lack through normal means and natural resources has been rectified by coercing nature to cooperate with enterprising methods in resupply to huge advantage not only to Israel but in sharing its remedies to the rest of the water-scarce world.

 

Ranking highest in the world for per-capita startups, Israel's rate of tech investment has registered as much as 28 times greater than the United States. In the 1980s, the USB stick was invented in Israel. Israeli agricultural scientists popularized the cherry tomato. Smartphones with Waze operate with Israeli code. The brilliant inventive power of Israeli scientists has led to all manner of inventions uniquely Israeli which become technologies with global spread.

 

Translation machines represent a particular Israeli tech inspiration possibly reflective of the many langues aside from the country's national Hebrew, being spoken. Babylon, one of the first software programs offering instantaneous translation of documents and web pages was the work of an Israeli company in 1997. In the 1990s Wizcom Technologies debuted pens able to scan words and translate them to an LCD screen. OrCam Read, a hand-held device, can scan printed pages and read them aloud. 

One of the country's first major technical challenges to face Israeli scientists was how to maximize scarce water resources. Israeli geography is largely desert; almost all sources of surface water arrive through neighbouring territories hostile to Israel. Israel now produces 20 percent more water than required internally, with three major initiatives.

 

Huge desalination plants to repurpose sea water into potable water; a centralized water management system repurposing wastewater, replenishes aquifers and moves awater through a complex system of canals, pipes and reservoirs. Irrigation, the third, a method of agriculture developed in the 1950s where water crops use targeted drips instead of sprinklers. 

 

The Pillcam ESO is used to photograph a patient’s esophagus.

 

Rewalk, a robotic exoskeleton enabling paraplegics to walk, grabbed world attention to gawk at Israeli medical technology. Israeli researchers invented tiny cameras and sensors to be introduced into the human body; disposable 'cameras'-in-a-pill, the PillCam that can be swallowed to allow doctors to view the state of a body's internal organs. An off shoot of Israel's security tech sector. Surveillance cameras, drones and spy cameras, part of Israeli defence technology.

ENvizion Medical based in Tel Aviv created a "smart" feeding tube to help chart its path down the esophagus, meant to prevent health-care providers from accidentally sending the tube into the lungs. Another, a flexible and high-resolution Aer-O-Scope colonoscope sends a tube to scope around the human colon. 

Israel's never-ending concern over hostile neighbours scheming to destroy it by incremental attacks and lethal violence required technology capable of destroying incoming missiles. The country's military poses an advanced catalogue of technologies designed to shoot down missiles; Iron Dome the most famous among them. About 90 percent of incoming rockets and artillery shells are blocked from landing through the latticework of sensors and interceptor missiles along Israel's border.

 

Israel has an advanced catalogue of technologies designed to shoot down missiles from hostile neighbours.

 

A qick reaction missile -- Arrow 3 -- "designed to intercept and destroy the newest, longer-range threats, especially those carrying weapons of mass destruction" has been developed. A tiny anti-missile system to be attached to tanks and armoured vehicles is the Trophy countermeasure system, designed to detect an incoming anti-tank missile and disarm it at the last second with a burst of small projectiles.