By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Israel came into being at about the same time as the transistor. So, while it was common in the early years to highlight the country’s agricultural successes in “making the desert bloom,” it is not all that surprising to see it growing now as a center of high tech development.
Helping to make that transition in imagination, Itamar Rabinovitch, one of Israel’s leading scholars and statesmen, came to Seattle earlier this month. Dr. Rabinovitch, who spent time in Seattle several years ago as the B’nai B’rith visiting scholar, came this time as the president of Tel Aviv University.
Chuck Broches, who helped organize the session on behalf of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle has been working on a plan to create a Washington-Israel Chamber of Commerce, modeled in part after a Silicon Valley-based chamber, to stimulate contact between American and Israeli companies, especially in the high tech sector.
The breakfast meeting was one of a series of gatherings being coordinated by Broches and Israeli Consul General Yossi Amrani to explore the opportunities for starting a Washington-Israel Chamber of Commerce, as well as to facilitate networking between Israeli and Washington-based business people.
Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Rabinovitch told a small group of business people at a breakfast meeting in downtown Seattle on March 1, “Israel enjoyed a few years’ period of unprecedented growth and prosperity.
“For the first time in 100 years of the Zionist enterprise, the Palestinian national movement as a body, in the PLO, recognized Israel as not just as a fact, but as the legitimate national home of the Jewish people,” Rabinovitch said. “This laid the basis for a great degree of normalization in Israel’s relationship with several Arab countries. International banks and the large investment banks and multinational corporations, for the first time in the history of the state, came to Israel, established relations, brought money, and investment from the outside grew dramatically.”
At the same time, he said, Israel’s “share in [the high tech] revolution was totally disproportionate to the size of the country.” He said the number of Israeli companies traded on NASDAQ was second only to Canada. But, while the nation had literally hundreds of high tech startups, they were not well prepared to grow them into mature companies, and most of their new firms were bought out by larger European and American multinationals, frequently in stock trade deals whose value evaporated when the dot-com boom went bust.
Since the turn of the century, the collapse of both the peace initiatives and the dot-com revolution have taken a major toll on Israel’s economy and the country is now facing what he referred to as “an economic crisis.” Rabinovitch said he takes a longer view and is sure “that in a few years time, that will change back.”
“Certainly at Tel Aviv University and possibly for Israel in general, for the next wave, our future is in biotechnology more than in computer-related or electronic high tech. Tel Aviv University has a medical school, a faculty of applied sciences and affiliations with seven hospitals where a lot of research and applied research happen,” he said. By emphasizing the medical and biotech fields over electronics and the Internet, Rabinovitch said he feels he is laying the groundwork for a more sustainable future growth for his institution.
Unlike the faster but more volatile world of computers and communications, he said, in the biological sciences “miracles don’t happen. You need FDA approval or the equivalent European approvals. The result from the investment point of view,” he added, “is not immediate huge deals.
“Even when high tech revives, the company will not be bought overnight for a million dollars by some international giant. But biotechnology and biomedical technologies provide a steady stream of revenues over time and, from the university’s point of view, that may be a better strategy when we think of financing a public university five, 10, 20 years down the road. We believe that our ability in that regard is greater,” said Rabinovitch. Broches said the idea of forming a Washington-Israel Chamber of Commerce has been around for a decade, since Irwin Treiger served as president of both the Jewish Federation and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
More recently, he said, the idea has been touted in a number of circles and is one of the projects that the Israeli consul came in looking to pursue. Although there has been a great deal of enthusiasm in some circles, Broches said he believes that a slower, more deliberate approach will ultimately be more successful.
“A number of people were pushing us, ‘Launch this, we’ve got to have it up and running’,” he said. At the same time he got advice from people like Zvi Alon from Net Manage and Sam Kaplan at the Seattle Chamber of Commerce’s Trade Development
Alliance, saying, ‘Don’t make the mistake of running too soon. At some moment the time will be right and the organization will be launched.’”
At this point, he added, they have identified four main sectors of the local economy that have a strong interest in forging ties with Israeli industry — aerospace, biotech, computer software and telecom. (Israel is a center for telephonic research and wireless technologies and has the highest number of cell phones per capita in the world.)
The key question, he said, is whether there is a “critical mass’ of interest to support an ongoing organization. If there is only enough to support a few events a year, then having the Seattle Chamber and the federation
cosponsoring them would be more efficient, he suggested.
“Every time I turn around I find somebody new who’s doing business with Israel in a new way. One of the questions is can we harness that energy? We’re now in the process of asking them by seeing how many people and what kinds of people show up at events like this.
“I would be very surprised if an organization were not launched,” said Broches, “but what that organization will look like, what it’s organizational will look like, what its focal points would be, what its marketing strategy and strategic plan would be are things that will be developed over the coming year.”