Israel’s Tech Firms Do Business in Saudi Arabia Quietly
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This requires hiring Arabic speakers, who are available in Israel. Greed apparently overrides Arab-Israeli differences in this area.
(Big 15-part expose in the Times of Israel: "The Wolves of Tel Aviv".[1] Summary: binary options are bets against the house, not against other speculators. Binary options "brokers" are not really brokers, they're shills for the house. Worse, the house cheats, tweaking the prices to make customers lose. Even if customers win, the house won't pay up. 80% of investors lose all their money. This brings in over 0.7% of Israel's GDP, and that's just the part that pays taxes.)
[1] http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-...
"An industry turning over hundreds of millions of dollars, employing thousands of people, is cynically cheating naive would-be investors worldwide via a range of corrupt practices. It is doing terrible harm to its victims, and it risks doing the same to Israel’s reputation"
I don't think they're particularly ambivalent about this industry being a bad thing.
[1] http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_option
> In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission approved exchange-traded binary options in 2008. Trading commenced on the American Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) in May and June, 2008.
Also it seems that in Israel they are working on banning marketing it overseas
> In Israel, where a high concentration of such firms can be found, binary options trading was prohibited for Israeli customers in March 2016, on the grounds that it is a form of gambling and not a legitimate investment technique. A ban on marketing of binary options to overseas customers is under consideration.
There is a market that is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that only has binary options, but they don't take positions in their own market and meet other regulatory requirements. They even offer binary options on events (Fed funds rate movement, for example) so it acts as a prediction market of sorts. Whether it actually provides a net benefit to the world aside from gambling is very much in question though. I find it hard to believe that people are using their binary options for hedging.
There are more than 2 million people who speak Arabic in Israel.
But I definitely respect Israel as a state, and especially the Israeli tech sector. Israel has consistently produced world-class companies in almost every field you can think of. It's quite impressive once you consider all of the factors.
The author of "Startup Nation" argued that one key reason behind this success is how the military ties back into civilian companies, especially with the mandatory service. I'm not sure how important that is, given how many other countries have a similar model yet they've achieved nothing close to what Israel has. There are a few that have, such as Singapore and South Korea.
I'm hoping that my home country Tunisia can replicate (at least somewhat) the Israeli success story. We have a lot of talented people both inside the country and overseas. The biggest thing we're lacking right now is a functioning economy (yep, tough times)... but I hope we can get there in the near future!
As I said in the beginning, I am completely against the illegal settlements, the blockade of Gaza, and other similar issues. I regard my fellow Palestinians as brothers and sisters. That doesn't mean that I cannot respect what Israel has been able to build.
For those who haven't read Startup Nation, the authors don't argue that the bonds formed in the military are sufficient for Israel startup culture. Rather, the military's unique culture and relatively flat hierarchy in which subordinates can and do challenge superiors (at a frequency unique among militaries) are other important factors in creating the startup nation. But of course, there's yet more discussed, which do indeed fill up the book's pages.
I don't believe I'm the only one in Europe that has a special sympathy for your country. But trying to replicate Israel spirit? I don't think so. It's like when people over here talk about making an "european SV", not very realistic. I neither see my country doing anything similar if you find consollation in that :-)
There are two reasons. One that someone pointed in a downvoted comment nearby: funds from governments (Israel and USA). The other one is a ruthless killer instinct. Both are shared by SV. If you've been around here for long enough, you might remember a couple of references that show clearly both factors. For government backing there was an article about SV origins in WW2. The other one is a YC standard interview question about how founders "hacked the system" for their own profit.
Yesterday I got in a somewhat esoteric argument about how righteous people get very strict about abstract ideas like environment protection. This is the default actitude for many smart people. So the questions that matter are: are your government willing to put a lot of money to grow a sharp industry, and is "selfishness" taboo in your society? Otherwise, we're doomed :)
I guess what I was trying to say is that I'm hoping Tunisia learns what it can from Israel and other successes. I think we have the environment and the human capital to at the very least attract foreign companies to setup offices in Tunisia. Ideally, we would start our own local companies to compete on the global stage. And as you've kindly mentioned, this requires serious interest by the government, and from what I've seen, this is starting to become the case.
Edit: well, after writing this, I hope you don't mind if I point that Tunisia is not middle east and that you probably wanted to write "haven't" ;)
Except Tunisia isn't in the Middle East, it's in North Africa; which is as eastern geographically as Western Europe and as similar to the Middle East in terms of culture and way of life because of shared religion as the U.S. is similar to Peru.
Really different cultures and world views.
There can be no question that Israel is firehosed with money, both from states and private sources and everything in between. I personally know of at least a few of the biggest corporations in this medium-size European country that has a stated policy of buying practically any Israeli technology that is punted. Lots of other large multinationals pour money into Israel as a point of policy, see Coca-Cola, Google, Procter&Gamble and many others.
They have very little to show for it in my opinion, in fact the only successful IT companies I know of out of Israel are ICQ (!) and Fiverr. They have a bunch of B2B businesses, but a lot of their revenue can be chalked up to official or unofficial support programs as mentioned, which is probably why they, and their products, are mostly completely unknown outside their small niches.
I also heard accounts from from several IT workers in Israel that the work culture is quite inefficient if not downright lazy.
The article correctly points out that the Arab states involved (this doesn't seem to apply to the non-arab muslim states) will not normalize formal relationships, without movement on the Palestinian front. However, despite this, these dynamics have made Arab countries much more susceptible to pressuring the Palestinians, and not putting diplomatic pressure on Israel on the things they care about (ie Operation Protective Edge).
An important point to note is that as all of the Arab countries becoming friendly to Israel are non-democratic, and their citizens don't view Israel along the same lines as their governments.
I was once flown to Ryad to deliver our best system to our client, a wealthy hotel resort with a cost-no-object kind of attitude in terms of what perks they supplied to their clients. Our marketing strategy was basically not putting too much emphasis on the hardware and we'd typically be very open in terms of what we had assembled and how much the components retailed for. We'd typically give them a 'dossier' (trendy these days uh?) with hardware details and the manuals of all the components we had assembled.
Things went well, the engineers I was working with were super cool, first demos went without a hiss, we were just rolling the whole week! The night before I was flying back home, my boss called me from Europe in panic mode: someone had read those damn manuals and found out that our mpeg2 decoding hardware was made by an Israeli company and wanted us to cancel everything.
What was interesting was how all engineers I talked to the next day went out of their way to apologize and tell me how completely stupid this whole matter was. Few months later, when the client found out there was basically all alternatives to this card basically sucked, the finally changed their mind :)
I dare say you should not be so presumptuous to assume that local customs and values are 'stupid'.
There can be lot of resentment between two groups of people, and not all of it is unwarranted.
Would you buy software from a company that by de-facto policy did not hire Black people? Maybe not. Someone from another part of the world might consider that to be 'stupid' or 'irrelevant to the situation', because of a lack of understanding of the context (i.e. maybe it's a very segregated part of the world and such weird policies are reciprocated)
I have no love for anti-Israeli antagonists, at the same time, issues such as very illegal Jewish settlements on land upon which Arabs are basically kicked off of at the point of a gun - are real. Anyhow - I take no sides on the issue, other than to point out how these things are very real problems, locally.
It's good to see that 'sound states' such as Israel and Saudi can get along, despite historical antagonisms and despite some pretty big differences in ethos even outside of historical issues ... but I think it's important not to project our own cultural context (or rather dismiss theirs), and try to understand them in their respective situations.
Apologies for the misunderstanding, a long day for me, and perhaps too long a sentence. I edited it back the way it was supposed to be.
What I meant, of course, is that all the tech guys I had been working with did apologize, and I'd say were event shameful about the whole matter.
It wasn't at all a question of being right or wrong, I was just happy to see that despite whatever their opinions could be, this didn't prevent them from finding that making the link between a company and a country was intellectually dishonest.
> Would you have bought technology from apartheid South Africa? It's not a matter of what the people at the company that developed the product actually think or are, it's a matter of boycotting business with a country that it's doing deeply wrong things.
To answer your question, I don't know. For the record, while I am personally hostile to a lot of things Israel is doing in the region, I don't think it's very intelligent or realistic to assume that all Israeli companies de-facto support all its most controversial policies. At the very least, a little bit of common sense could be used I think. If the technology you are talking about is sold by a company that obviously encourages and participates in something I disagree with (e.g: an arms manufacturer inherently part of the military industrial complex of Apartheid South Africa, or an Israel company located on illegal settlements in the West bank manufacturing products with prison labor). But in absence of such evidence, isn't it a sort of collective punishment? In our case btw, the whole project was in jeopardy because someone found that our infrastructure had one PCI card made by an Israeli/American company.
When I think about it actually, I'm afraid that the concept of boycott is completely idiotic to begin with. Let me just give you a funny example: you see, I happen to be French, and I don't know if you remember but circa 2002-2003, there was a little bit of a disagreement between the government of my country and the government of the US with regards to a UN resolution for a regime change in Irak. Rapidly, a classic campaign of demonization and boycott of anything French was activated by some politicians and propagated by the media. I'm not going to remind you the grotesque Freedom Fries or the bottles of wine being poured on the sideways. I have been on the receiving end of this idiocy personally. During this period, I was on vacation on the east coast, and one evening in Boston, as I was having dinner with some buddies, the waiter who had just taken our order came back to the table, asked me where I was from, and informed us that he had just talked to the manager and had his agreement to not serve us because I happened to be French and that was his way to protest against the government of France. The waiter left the table, my friend and I stared at each other in disbelief and left shortly afterwards.
Not doing the crybaby here and needless to say how little i cared about this pathetic incident. In the end, I remember how laughable I found that however noble the patriotic intentions of this waiter were, the only thing this poor soul really achieved was to piss me off, and embarrass my American friends. Politically speaking however, nada. In a way, I almost wish I had been equally as brainwashed, naive, and ignorant of the world at this guy, buying all sorts of nonsense such as links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda (lol) - In fact, since he didn't even bother asking me what I thought, he would have made even more of a fool of himself punishing a guy sharing his own opinion.
As for your personal experience re. french fries and idiot waiters and restaurant owners in the US, that has very little to do with boycott and much with pure ignorance. But brought up in this context it's a pure straw man argument.
Hehe, thanks for having taken the time to provide your definition of boycotting, now in all fairness, at this point I was hoping you had realized we basically agreed on what boycotting is but were arguing about its merits. So hey, your definition is spot on, and my personal opinion is that the very idea that punishing individuals or companies will create political pressure and generate change is not only unfair and stupid, but it's also a fallacy.
> I repeat my question, would you have happily bought products from apartheid South Africa?
I thought my answer was clear since I made sure to add some examples but apparently not, so let me try again: I would try to use common sense, if the product comes from a company that supports or encourages the apartheid I probably would pass, in case I didn't have such evidence, or evidence that the company encouraged the end of the apartheid, it would be different.
> As for your personal experience re. french fries and idiot waiters and restaurant owners in the US, that has very little to do with boycott and much with pure ignorance. But brought up in this context it's a pure straw man argument.
It actually does, so in case you honestly didn't get the commonality between this anecdote and boycotting, here we go. In both cases, an individual or a company gets penalized, irregardless of its own opinion, because it belongs to a particular group disagreed upon. But hey let me know if it's still unclear, I'll provide your some images. Now in case you are just interested in rhetoric here, I hate to say it but you need a few more miles to become a master of sophism.
As for your answer to my question, you said: "To answer your question, I don't know".
See, you might have inadvertently illustrated exactly what was ridiculous about this, and with my anecdote, I was just trying to show how reassuring it was to see that despite what views the technical people I had been working with had on the middle-east, they didn't do the shortcut between the nationality of the company, and the foreign policy of the country.
While in the country I was going to visit their office, but I couldn't find the address anywhere on the website, only their NY satellite office. I was later told this was because they have manufacturing customers in Pakistan and Bangladesh, from which they hide their true identity.
On that note, I have a feeling Mobily's stock is about to dip a bit after this article...
To say Saudi Arabia isn't hostile towards Israel takes one heck of a lot of mental gymnastics, or a burying of your head in the sand. Wahhabism isn't exactly known to be pro-Judaism.
"I'm not going to kill you until I kill that other guy who you also happen to not like" doesn't make you my friend.
Of course, this doesn't mean they're BFFs either, but (despite the best efforts of IS...) 200m Shias aren't about to disappear anytime soon.
Complicated? Welcome to the Middle East.
Also, obligatory: http://www.slate.com/features/2014/07/middle_east/graphics/g...
As for that chart, it appears to literally have been made up by the author. Without a citation I'd call BS after the most basic of spot checks.
Perhaps stick to articles that actually cite their sources: https://flaglerlive.com/89023/saudi-arabia-wahhabism-ps/
This is one of those things that sounds smart until you actually understand it, because it's completely ignorant of actual facts regarding SA internal political dynamics. The Saudi government is perpetually held hostage by religious hardliners who have previously tried to overthrow the government, claiming its too tainted by western influence. The current monarchy has made their Faustian bargain, allowing these hardliners control over religious education in exchange for not advocating a coup. There are uneducated critics who are completely ignorant of the regimes attempts to break the power of the religious fundamentalists, and somehow believe weakening the monarchy will somehow pacificy the country, instead of handing over more power to extremists. Those people should be ignored because their ideas are terrible.
You do realize that just because you remain ignorant of facts, that not everyone else shares in that with you? Nothing I said is actually controversial or even new, and funnily enough, policymakers and intelligence services understand this dynamic as well - I'm not sure why you're attempting to generalize your ignorance to a larger audience.
But since you've asked for sources, here are some quick ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world/middleeast/26saudi.h...
In the future, it'll probably be more helpful for you to think of Saudi Arabia as not another sunni gulf state, but as the caretaker of the most sacred site in Islam, Mecca. Once you understand the centrality of Mecca's importance, you can see why the Ulema have such power in the country and why Western attempts to break their power directly will most likely be framed as an existential threat to Islam and beg severe blowback. Again, there are uneducated critics who are completely ignorant of the regimes attempts to break the power of the religious fundamentalists, and somehow believe weakening the monarchy will somehow pacificy the country, instead of handing over more power to extremists. Those people should be ignored because their ideas are terrible.
Its an age old adage really
If you want proof that this romance has been ongoing for years, you need only look at the public statements of the Saudi dictatorship during the Zionist attack on Lebanon in 2006. The Saudi regime supported Israel, while of course the Saudi people supported Hezbollah.
Great username by the way ;)
"Hezbollah is a Shia group"
Hezbollah basically did their best to provoke a war by kidnapping soldiers.
Yeap - confirmed. Even if you have a passport that shows you've traveled there will get your admission refused to Saudi Arabia:
Arab League boycott of Israel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_League_boycott_of_Israel
The relationship Wahhabism has with the rulers on Saudi Arabia is pretty complex. Their interests aren't always aligned to say the least. It's pretty easy to make the case that Wahhabism is the biggest threat to the Saudi regime.
Put it like this: Wahhabism isn't exactly pro-US, and yet Saudi Arabia remains a strong ally of the US - one might almost say a client state. It's in the interest of the Saudi regime to keep that relationship, and good relationships with Israel are also in their interest.
Both nations share a common enemy: Islamists who deny the right of Israel and Saudi Arabia to exist. Note: a necessary step in the establishment of a Caliphate is the destruction of the modern Arab states, all of which Islamists generally regard as illegitimate.
The Saudi people are obviously very anti-Israel, which ties the hands of the rulers to some degree. Or at least prevents the rulers from openly being friendly toward Israel.
There are many, many other US firms represented in Israel -- often for buying up Israeli startups.
I thought software sales were exempt from trade certificates ?
I mean what if the company didn't try to hide its affiliations (for instance, on the website or when customers visited).
They assume that the customer would react negatively, but do we know this or is it just an untested assumption?
There are unofficial trade relations between Israel and (almost?) any country in the world.