Forget slogans like "The Alberta Advantage" and "Tell a Friend About Belleville" (Ontario). There's a little patch of land on this planet that has managed to push its economic, scientific and cultural development through the roof, in perhaps one of the harshest environments and with virtually no natural resources other than its people.

This place, of course, is Israel. And now a fascinating book is documenting just how they did it.

Israel in the World starts with a quote from Albert Einstein, who in 1932 declared that "Israel can win the difficult battle of survival only by developing, painstakingly, the intelligence and expert knowledge of her young people in the field of technology."

Husband-and-wife writing team Helen and Douglas Davis were commissioned to find out just how well this had been accomplished. What they discovered holds lessons for communities everywhere that want to pull ahead of the pack in science and technology.



In a telephone interview, Helen Douglas said she was surprised by the number of Israeli "firsts" in science, technology, education and agriculture. She credits Israel's excellent education system, which was actually in place before it attained statehood in 1948, as a major factor. That talent pool was combined with a "can do" culture and a constant need for innovation just to survive.

The book relates a flood of Israeli success stories from the fields of medicine, agriculture and, of course, science and technology. That section contains a cogent analysis of why Israel is such a powerhouse of tech innovation and commercialization.

It credits a slew of free-trade agreements - with the United States, the European Union, the European Free Trade Area - as well as bilateral trade agreements with Turkey and Canada and a host of other countries, as well as "Israel's dynamic entrepreneurial culture."

This is a place, the book says, where "three unemployed, mostly uneducated twenty-somethings" could make Internet history with a company called Mirabilis back in 1996. Their innovative product, called ICQ ("I seek you") was way ahead of the pack in instant messenger services when it was launched. Within five years, it had signed up more than 200 million registered users.

Yes, they moved Mirabilis to California to expand, but the company's three founders, Arik Vardi, Sefi Visiger and Yair Goldfinger, credit their success to an idea-rich climate in Tel Aviv, coupled with the blind faith of Vardi's father who invested in their company even without a business plan. "They wouldn't even tell me what their idea was," he is quoted as saying in the Douglas book.

Predictably, many of the areas where Israelis excel are security-related. Most computer experts have heard of Checkpoint Software Technologies, founded in 1993 by Gil Shwed. It's a global force in the firewall and virtual private network markets.

You may also have used a DiskOnKey, one of those key-ring flash storage devices created by Kfar Saba-based M-Systems.

However, as the authors say, chances are you've never heard of Amdocs. This is a born-in-Israel company that builds software that combines billing and customer relations management, mainly for phone companies. Like Mirabilis, the firm moved to the U.S., to St. Louis, Mo. Customers include British Telecom and Telkom South Africa, so physical location is becoming less relevant as markets go global.

Another fascinating case is the story of Nemesysco, which claims to have developed voice-sensitive technology that can help to reveal whether someone is telling the truth. It analyses the incoming voice waveform, and can even work over the telephone.

According to the company, it can measure how much thought somebody puts into their answer to a question. Presumably, it takes longer to cook up a lie than to just tell the truth. Satisfied users include a police department in Wisconsin and insurance companies in the U.K. The company doesn't claim it's foolproof, but it does give investigators a clue as to where to probe deeper.

This raises a potential downside to the Israeli high-tech culture. In a society that is perennially under attack, security measures are simply taken for granted and widely accepted as "the lesser evil" when compared to being blown up in a café.

In my own dealings with computer security experts from Israel, there was often a lack of understanding of concerns about personal freedom and privacy. Many Israeli tech gurus simply can't imagine why anyone would object to surveillance cameras, mandatory radio frequency identification tags or biometric identifiers.

Israeli innovations are not confined to the software domain. Just as Canada is doing work on unmanned aerial vehicles at Suffield, Alta., Israeli scientists have perfected the Steadicopter, which the book says "is just five feet long, weighs thirty pounds, and is poised to become the essential eye in the sky for law-enforcement agencies and homeland security officials.”

There are non-security uses too, such as monitoring crops and livestock on farms and ranches.

Perhaps the most interesting material in the Douglas book concerns areas that are a bit futuristic. A section on Israel's budding nanotechnology industry recaps research done at the Weizmann Institute of Science to create a "biological nano-computer," recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the smallest such device ever created.

Professor Ehud Shapiro is working on DNA-based computers that might solve currently intractable problems by doing billions of operations in parallel.

Outside experts have also cited some of the Israeli nanotech research as having the potential to yield insights into Alzheimer's disease and provide a meeting place for physics, chemistry, biology, pharmacology and medicine.

Israelis face stiff competition in this field from Asia, Europe and North America, but they do seem to exude a confidence that can only be called chutzpah. And they're not shy in letting us know about their achievements. Besides this unabashedly self-congratulatory book, the Weizmann Institute folks are among the most regular sources of peppy media releases in my e-mailbox.

Scanning the headlines from the Middle East definitely gives us the impression that Israel needs the rest of the world, particular the U.S., to continue its life as a nation. Reading this book provides ample proof that the world needs Israel, perhaps even more, to continue and improve our lives.

Web Watch: www.orionbooks.co.uk

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications.)