Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Latest From Middle East & North Africa [12.02.14]

Israel

"A bill approved by the cabinet on November 23rd, and sent to the Knesset, seeks to define Israel as the “national state of the Jewish people”, enhance the role of traditional Jewish law (which gives Jews preferential rights) in Israeli legislation and limit rights for non-Jewish citizens to “individual rights according to the law” (thus denying Arabs “national” rights as a minority).
Israel’s independence declaration pledged to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants”. In the various drafts approved by the cabinet, with a 14-6 majority, the word “equality” was omitted and democracy placed second to Jewishness. Arabic was demoted from its status as an official language, alongside Hebrew.
The move is increasing political tensions. Two of the five coalition parties in Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet have opposed the bill and threaten to bring down the government. Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, has warned against making Palestinians feel as Jews did in exile. A spokesman for America’s State Department says: “All citizens should enjoy equal rights.”
Human-rights groups warn that, without an express right to equality and the inclusion of international law as a source of inspiration for legislation alongside Jewish law, they will be powerless to challenge traditional interpretations that discriminate against non-Jews."


Israel - Palestine Relations
"A 2009 bestseller dubbed Israel Start-Up Nation [1], and the name has stuck. Israel boasts the second-largest collection of fledgling tech companies in the world, after Silicon Valley. Israeli programmers and engineers—and the security software, biomedical devices, and agricultural technologies they create—enjoy a reputation for ambition and technological ingenuity.


The number of Arab engineers at the large Israeli branches of multinational tech companies such as Cisco (CSCO), Google, Intel, and Microsoft (MSFT) is climbing. In cities such as Nazareth in the largely Arab Galilee, a small startup ecosystem has started to flower, nurtured by a couple of Arab-focused venture capital funds and incubators—one of the latter, the Nazareth Business Incubator Center, houses Optima. The potential for a boom is there, in a highly educated generation of Arab scientists and engineers.


A young Israeli Arab who shows promise in school is expected to become a doctor or, perhaps, a lawyer. “Arabs can’t join high-tech companies because of their parents,” says Ahmad Soboh.
This narrow vision of professional success isn’t uniquely Arab—it’s the same path minority and immigrant parents push their children onto in the U.S. and other wealthy nations. Medicine is safe. High tech is unpredictable. And starting your own company, whoever you are, is a little crazy.  

The single biggest disadvantage is that Israeli Arabs, Muslim and Christian, do not serve in Israel’s compulsory military service, which has proved a powerful machine for matching up young, entrepreneurial Israelis.  

Everyone’s still waiting for Israel or Palestine’s first big “Arab exit”—a major IPO or a billion-dollar acquisition. (So far, the biggest Arab exit in the region was Yahoo!’s (YHOO) 2009 purchase of Maktoob, a Web portal founded in Jordan, for $164 million.)

The door, in Nazareth, is now wider, thanks in part to the Younises. Today the company takes up one floor of a hulking new office building on an otherwise bare hilltop outside Nazareth. It employs 60 people, and as in the city itself, most are Arab. The company’s “GPS systems for neurosurgeons” are in 500 research labs and hospitals around the world."

A startup ecosystem among Israel's Arabs flowering in Nazareth : A Silicon Valley for Israeli Arabs? Sounds enticing!


References
  1. Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer (Amazon) 



Syria

"A Syrian Muslim Sought Help From Israel and American Jews"

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