THE TEL AVIV CLUSTER

The relationship between capital expansion and conflict is not just parasitic it is symbiotic.  As Naomi Klein explains clearly in The Shock Doctrine, the phenomena of what she terms ‘disaster capitalism’ does more than respond to trauma or crisis – it actively seeks to create the conditions for it. In doing so it establishes a fertile environment for a massive transfers of wealth and privatisation under the auspices of reform. This link is entirely lost in this piece from the New York Times by David Brooks. Read it for yourself and you might imagine that the Israeli high tech economy is thriving despite the conflict not because of it. In other words Gaza forms a crucial component of the cluster in that it has become the ‘live’ laboratory in which these security technologies are tested.

“Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas… Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita.”