The Land of Hope and Fear Quotes

“While the Arab community suffered from police neglect, the Ethiopian youths consistently complained of overpolicing and harassment.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“In the wake of the 2015 protest, the government formed a commission to stamp out racism; it was led by Emi Palmor, the director general of the Justice Ministry. Its conclusions, submitted in the summer of 2016, were quite damning, finding discriminatory policies and practices that distinguished Ethiopian Israelis from other citizens in fields including education, medical treatment, employment, and army enlistment, as well as policing. In 2015, it said, the percentage of indictments against Ethiopian Israelis was twice as high as that for the general population and four times as high among minors, while the percentage of Ethiopian Israeli minors in detention was almost ten times that of the rest of the population.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The overwhelmingly secular, Jewish, ex-military delegation that landed in Dubai represented both the vanguard of Israeli high-tech and its problem.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Then there were the two Israels: one Israel still basking in its successful brand as one of the world’s leading go-to places for venture capitalists, an outlier in the Middle East with the third most companies listed on the NASDAQ after the United States and China, and another Israel whose schoolchildren scored toward the bottom of a long list of developed countries in math, science, and reading. Pupils in the Arabic education system did worse than those in many predominantly Muslim and developing countries. The ultra-Orthodox schools, where boys barely studied such core subjects, were not even included in the testing process.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Despite Israel’s prowess, some worried about an industry bubble. By 2019, a decade after the publication of Start-Up Nation, there were signs of a slowdown. Israeli high-tech export had reached an all-time annual record of $45.8 billion, representing about 46 percent of the country’s exports, consisting mainly of R&D and software, according to the annual report of the governmental Israel Innovation Authority.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The youthful savvy of the recruits, the typically Israeli yihye be’seder (it’ll be okay) attitude toward calculated risk, the knack for improvisation, and the lack of fear of failure all helped turn the IDF into a national high-tech incubator with premier offensive and defensive cyber capabilities and digital connectivity among its fighting forces, a powerful force multiplier in a world where war was increasingly fought on screens.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“In some ways the beginnings of Israeli high-tech could be traced to one particular failure. In the 1980s, as young people around the world were logging on to their first desktop computers, Israel brought together some of its best engineers to work on an ambitious project: the Lavi fighter jet, a made-in-Israel aircraft and part of the doctrine of self-reliance. A catalyst for groundbreaking technology in avionics and electronics, it proved to be a spectacularly expensive escapade and was shut down in 1987 under intense pressure from the Americans, who preferred Israel to spend their military aid on American aircraft. Hundreds of highly specialized scientists and engineers were released into the Israeli civilian market. The injection of the aforementioned Soviet immigrant engineers in the 1990s boosted the genesis of the start-up phenomenon, encouraged by prescient government support and incentives. The country’s new moniker and brand was minted with the publication in 2009 of a proud, blue-and-white-covered volume titled Start-Up Nation that chronicled what its authors, Dan Senor and Saul Singer, called the story of Israel’s economic miracle. It fast became a bestseller.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“All had become established breeding grounds, or boot camps, for the country’s start-up ecosystem.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“tech units became instrumental in developing the industry. Like the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, a seemingly endless fount of new ideas for high-tech companies sprang from the minds of the graduates of the IDF’s once-shadowy, now-famed technological intelligence unit known as 8200, as well as from lesser-known army frameworks such as the Talpiot program, which turned out an elite squad of technological problem solvers for the fighting units, or Unit 81, the technological arm of military intelligence, or Mamram, an acronym for the army’s center for data and computer systems.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Another ingredient was undoubtedly Israel’s ability to locate and nurture young tech talent and genius, first through programs for gifted pupils at school, then through the IDF’s annual intake system of screening and testing of so many of the country’s seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. And all this was built on the trauma of the Holocaust and the national security doctrine of self-reliance.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The bonanza had begun nearly two decades earlier. In 1998, America Online bought Mirabilis, an Israeli pioneer in instant Internet messaging. The people who spoke the revived tongue of the Bible had invented ICQ, the first online chat program, then sold it for more than $400 million. It was an almost inconceivable fortune at the time for an invisible product with no business plan to drive it; as Israel’s first big exit, it was hailed as a high-tech milestone.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“In 2017, Intel spent $15.3 billion on Mobileye, a Jerusalem-based autonomous vehicle tech company led by Amnon Shashua, a Hebrew University professor, in what then constituted the biggest acquisition in Israel’s high-tech industry.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“By the early 2020s Israel was becoming a top producer of unicorns and, despite the pandemic, foreign investment was pouring in, keeping the economy afloat and filling the national tax coffers. In the first nine months of 2021, Israeli high-tech firms raised a historic peak of nearly $18 billion in capital from funding rounds and made nearly $19 billion in merger and acquisition deals or initial public offerings of shares, both popularly known as exits in Israel, and up by 92 percent from the annual 2020 figure.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The marriage of Israeli technology and Emirati entrepreneurship would be a boon for Israeli start-ups looking to scale up. Even more ambitiously, he argued, by maximizing the potential of Israeli ag-tech, food-tech, and water solutions, a combined force of Israeli ingenuity and Emirati initiative could help feed the world.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“For more than two decades Israel and the Emiratis had conducted unofficial, under-the-table intelligence, diplomatic, and business dealings, usually carried out by Israeli spies, discreet diplomats, and businesspeople with a second, foreign passport or via third parties. But Margalit and his entourage were making a decidedly conspicuous entrance. After landing, and before checking in at a luxury hotel in the financial district, the local guide took the busful of Israelis to the beach for selfies at sunset against the backdrop of the iconic Burj Al Arab hotel.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“There were no direct flights yet, and the coronavirus had curtailed international travel, so Margalit had chartered a private plane with about fifty seats and was bringing along the top executives of more than a dozen of the most promising Israeli companies in JVP’s portfolio. Some journalists had been invited along to get an immersive, up-close, and behind-the-scenes glimpse into this historic and very public foray into the Arabian Gulf, which was once enemy territory and off-limits to Israelis.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The first tech delegation was the brainchild of Erel Margalit, a leading Israeli venture capitalist considered one of the architects of the start-up nation and the founder and chairman of JVP, a major Jerusalem-based venture capital fund.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Politicians were questioning the army’s open-fire regulations, frequently citing the Talmudic injunction for self-defense: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“For the longer term, however, the projections were more worrying. With almost half the country’s first-graders now registered in the Arabic or ultra-Orthodox school systems, and with the Haredi sector multiplying faster than any other, the ratio of the population constituting the future recruitment pool was liable to shrink.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“developed in partnership with the United States, which provided Israel with more than $3 billion in annual military assistance, mostly to be spent in the United States. Iron Dome had about a 90 percent success rate in identifying and intercepting short-to-medium-range rockets and even mortars headed for populated areas.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Abbas accepted the reality of Israel as a Jewish state and rejected the assertions of apartheid, saying he would not describe it that way.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The problem was that Zionism had come to redefine the Jewish people in a way that no longer required allegiance to God and the Torah. Even the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” posed problems, she said, noting that the Jewish people came into being when they received the Torah from God at Mount Sinai, in the desert peninsula that was now part of Egypt, and that “a Jew is a person who goes in the path of the Torah and its commandments.” Most crucially, she added, “We cannot possibly identify with a Jewish state whose laws are contrary to the Torah of Israel.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The Heilbronns, a twelfth-generation Jerusalem family, were proud descendants of the disciples of HaGra, a Hebrew acronym for the Vilna Gaon, or Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna, and anti-Hasidic adherents of the “Polish” school of misnagdim, or opponents.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“After the Oslo peace process dissolved into violence and hopelessness, the Israeli left and center-left had increasingly moved their focus from the quest for a land-for-peace settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a more social, civic agenda, promoting issues such as gender equality, civil marriage, LGBTQ rights, public transport on the Sabbath, and accommodation toward the more liberal, progressive streams of Judaism with which the vast majority of affiliated Jews in North America were identified, and which were repudiated by Israel’s Orthodox religious authorities.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The Haredi media mostly avoided publishing photographs of women so as to “guard the eyes” of male readers from immodesty and temptation. When unavoidable, in group photographs, for example, some Haredi media resorted to blacking out female images, turning them into silhouettes”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Among the Haredi public, voter turnout was significantly higher than among the general population and loyalty was key.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The name of the village, Al Lajoun, appeared there along with the first words of an iconic poem by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet of exile: “On this land, this is what makes life worth living.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Jewish National Fund, the Zionist quasi-governmental organization founded in 1901 to purchase and reclaim land for Jewish settlement, partly through a vast afforestation project that marked out the borders, blocked the spread of Arab towns, and redeemed and greened what was seen as a desolate land.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Other laws were explicitly created to ensure that Israel remained a sovereign Jewish refuge, chief among them the Law of Return, guaranteeing Jews the automatic right to immigrate and become Israeli citizens, as well as anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent, and their spouses. There was no such law for Palestinians. Yet the more divisive Israeli politics became, and the more Arab politicians became targets of toxic, right-wing discourse, the more Arab voters were shaken out of their apathy.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Its supporters argued that they were anchored in other basic laws, although equality was not explicitly mentioned anywhere and was only extrapolated by the interpretation of Israel’s Supreme Court. This strengthened the conviction of many Arab citizens that Israel could not be both Jewish and democratic. The law also effectively downgraded Arabic from a second state language to one with a “special status.” It described promoting Jewish settlement as a “national value,” without specifying where. Its clauses affirmed the openness of the state for Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles and the status of the flag; the national anthem, “Hatikvah”; and the Hebrew calendar, alongside the Gregorian one, as official calendars of Israel. Netanyahu hailed the passage of the law as “a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel.” Arab representatives ripped up copies of the bill and denounced it as the anchoring of racism, fascism, discrimination, and Jewish privilege. Ahmad Tibi and Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, an alliance of predominantly Arab parties, called it apartheid. Jewish critics, Jabotinskyites among them, said the Knesset would have done better to stick to Israel’s Declaration of Independence of 1948, which did ensure complete equality of social and political rights for “all its inhabitants.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul