West Bank Buzz: The Quiet Rise of a Palestinian Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

West Bank Buzz: The Quiet Rise of a Palestinian Silicon Valley

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46 pointsfabuzaid19 comments

I had the privilege of being part of a delegation of American businessmen sent to the West Bank earlier this month. It was planned by the US State Department in conjunction with the Aspen Institute and we had the opportunity to visit with business leaders, politicians, and startup founders all over the West Bank and Israel.

Very eye-opening. A lot of great innovation in that region (on both sides). Met a team that's independently constructing wind mills in the West Bank to power up to 20% of their energy team. Another that is making custom furniture for small spaces in Gaza.

There were Israeli companies outsourcing to Ramallah instead of Bangalore, and ideas and ingenuity was very impressive. All in all, I was extremely impressed.

The path forward, I've always believed, was rooted in economic prosperity. Nothing creates chaos like poverty with no chances of escape.

I used to work for an American company with a large Israeli workforce.

When I left the company they were actively trying to hire engineers from the West Bank. Apparently this used to be hard to do, but has gotten easier thanks to a government-sponsored (from both sides) program.

I believe it's a win-win -- Palestinians of the West Bank are cheaper than Israeli engineers and in need of better paying jobs. And hopefully working together will lead to more cross-cultural understanding.

I found myself quite depressed by the politics of the region and didn't like flying there -- but this provided a much needed glimmer of hope.

More info for the curious: http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israeli-high-tech-compa...

Not quite the middle east depicted by the media:

At Asal, 120 software developers work in a large, air-conditioned open plan office fronted by a semi-circular glass wall. Twenty percent of them are women.

Quite true! I am surprised to read this, and thrilled that the technology industry is having an impact for Palestinians as well.

The anti-NGO sentiment resonates with me. I spent the last year living and working in Bangladesh and it's the same story. People get educated to get jobs for foreign aid agencies, not to innovate. This creates a very clear, wide-spread systematic culture of dependency.

Clearly aid agencies are doing good things sometimes. And there are NGOs moving toward fostering business and accountability rather than traditional giving. Still, a lot of work needs to be done. Basically aid should be reserved for post-emergency situations, I believe. Multi-decade aid programs are not going to lead to self-sustaining economies. At least not if some major changes happen.

Great work. Hope us Israelis can start working more closely with our neighbors. Definitely considering making a version of http://mappedinisrael.com/ for the West Bank.

Simplest question: has anyone made an Arabic translation for Waze?

Also, they take salaries of 70% less than us? Ya Allah, we're fucked. Better get all the West Bank tech workers employed to bring the wages up to our levels.

This is great. The path to peace is education, high skill jobs and prosperous businesses.

All hanging by a thread, since random buildings can be bombed or demolished as 'retaliation'.

You're thinking of the Gaza Strip, which is under Hamas rule. Israel doesn't bomb buildings in the West Bank.

Israel doesn't bomb buildings in the West Bank right now. They do demolish them randomly in retaliation, or because they need the space to build more Jewish-only roads and settlements, or... (Note that I do genuinely mean Jewish-only rather than Israeli-only here; non-Israeli Jews are allowed but Israeli Arabs aren't.) That's not to mention the odd state-sanctioned and IDF-protected terrorist attack by settlers on Arabs in the West Bank.

> Israeli Arabs

Nitpick: 'Israeli Arabs' aren't necessary non-Jewish; there are a number of Arab Jews throughout the middle east, and some of them are in Israel.

(Your point still stands, but people are unaware of the above often enough that I feel it's worth pointing out, because it emphasizes that the region is not as black-and-white as poltiics sometimes seem.)

The term "Israeli Arabs" in particular is something of a term of art, meaning roughly: people with Israeli citizenship who primarily identify themselves as Arabs. Jews originating in the Arab countries (the Mizrahi Jews) tend not to consider themselves Israeli Arabs, or be counted as such in censuses. Since Israel identifies itself as "the Jewish state", they identify with the majority Jewish population instead.

Whether Mizrahi Jews are Arabs in a more general sense ("Arab Jews") is a more complex question with more disagreement. My sense is that most don't identify as Arabs, at least not anymore, though a minority do. But they definitely don't, in general, identify with the term "Israeli Arab", which denotes a distinct socio-cultural group.

(It's probably worth noting, though, that many people who are counted as Israeli Arabs in that sense don't identify with the term either: a substantial number prefer other terms that incorporate a specifically Palestinian identity, such as "Palestinian citizen of Israel".)

There's lots of illegal settlements and wells being concreted, though.

True, but hardly relevant to the discussion.

It's in the same damn place, I think it prudent to bring it up.

The West Bank has been sort-of quiet for about 10 years (since the end of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Defensive_Shield), though I suppose that doesn't give any guarantees.

Seems like Mediterranean climes are good for startups.

Low-cost outsourcing compared to Silicon Valley?

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