The other side of Israel

Dan Senor (Council on Foreign Relations) and Saul Singer (Jerusalem Post) write:

For all the press coverage of the Middle East, there is one side of Israel that gets scant attention: the country’s economy has the highest concentration of innovation and entrepreneurialism in the world today. For years, multinational technology companies and global investors have been beating a path to Israel. Even in 2008—a year of global economic turmoil—per capita venture investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China, and 350 times greater than in India. And Israel still boasts the highest density of start-ups in the world (a total of 3,850 start-ups, one for every 1,844 Israelis). More Israeli companies are on NASDAQ than companies from all of Europe, China, India, Korea, and Japan combined.

…In fact, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 45 percent of Israelis are university-educated, which is among the highest percentages in the world. And according to a recent IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, Israel was ranked second among sixty developed nations on the criterion of whether “university education meets the needs of a competitive economy.”

Click here to read the full article.

The three languages of Israel

An American Persian advertising campaign?

I have noticed this advertisement pop up recently. It is simply a link to the official website of the United States, but in Persian.  I assume it targets me because I frequently visit websites related to and in the Muslim world. But the link is always to the Persian site, never to an Arabic, Kurdish, Urdu or Hebrew site.

This leads me to two questions:

1. What part of the US budget is allotted to this–meaning is this considered defense, diplomacy etc.?
2. Did this begin before or after Iran’s presidential elections?

A problem in the Arab world

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