RSS
Israeli Kibbutzism Contain Startling Businesses – and Drive the ‘Start-Up Nation’
The Israeli economy was booming in 2023. According to International Monetary Fund figures, total GDP had reached $664 billion, and per capita GDP hit $58,270 — the 13th highest in the world.
Hamas’ vicious attack on Israel changed that, as Reuters reported that after months of war, the Israeli economy contracted significantly during the fourth quarter of 2023. However, even with fighting continuing, we can hope for a strong economic rebound, as thousands of reservists return to their normal lives.
The Israeli technology sector accounts for the majority of Israel’s exports, so it was reassuring to see that Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest generic drug company in the world, reported that the war has not affected manufacturing.
The approximately 270 kibbutzim in Israel comprise only a tiny fraction of the population, but account for 10 percent of industrial production. Kibbutzim in the south bore the brunt of the genocidal Hamas attack, and those in the north are coping with rocket attacks from Hezbollah. So I wondered how another Israeli technology company, this one based on a kibbutz, was making out.
Kibbutz Shamir, founded by Romanian Holocaust survivors in 1944, is located in Upper Galilee at the western edge of the Golan Heights. Shamir Optical began to manufacture eyeglass lenses in 1972, as part of the effort by kibbutzim to diversify from agriculture
Shamir began to manufacture progressive lenses in addition to its existing line of lenses in 1984, and this led to the company’s remarkable innovative success. (Full disclosure, I am a retired professor of Optometry and Vision Science.)
Progressive lenses have been around since the late 1950s and early 1960s. They are used to correct presbyopia, a universal human condition associated with aging, in which the lens inside the eye becomes less flexible and is unable to change shape to enable light rays from near objects, such as reading material, to focus on the retina.
The first bifocals, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, consisted of a split lens, with an upper half for distance vision and the lower half for near. However, in 1959, a French engineer, Bernard Maitenaz, working with a French company, Essilor, produced the first progressive lens, in which the prescription varies continuously and there is no bifocal line.
Progressive lenses have to undergo a process of continual redesign and improvement as the visual demands of modern society change. The ability of Shamir Optical to produce valuable algorithms to optimize the manufacture of progressive lenses led, in 2005, to the company being the first kibbutz enterprise listed on the NASDAQ exchange.
In 2011, when Essilor, the world’s largest producer of ophthalmic lenses, bought a 50 percent share of Shamir for $130 million, the company was delisted. Essilor purchased the remaining 50 percent in 2022 for an amount said to be hundreds of millions of dollars. Shamir Optical remains a separate brand, and research and development continues at Kibbutz Shamir. Today, the company, with 2,500 employees in Israel and abroad, operates 18 laboratories worldwide.
In a 2022 interview in The Jerusalem Post, Shamir’s CEO, Yagen Moshe, described how the COVID pandemic forced everyone to become more dependent on computers for communicating. He mentioned two innovations: a lens with an anti-reflective coating called “Expression,” designed to remove unwanted reflections during video calls, as well as the “Autograph Intelligence” lens, a progressive lens tailored to each patient’s visual needs.
However, an even more exciting innovation, announced in the midst of war with Hamas, concerns a lens designed to prevent myopia in children. In myopia, there is a mismatch between eye size and eye focus ,and light rays that enter the eye focus in front of the retina. The prevalence of myopia is increasing rapidly. Today, more than 40 percent of Americans are myopic, and the numbers in Asian countries, such as China and South Korea can be as high as 90 percent.
Shamir Optical has developed a spectacle lens, the “Shamir Optimee,” where the optics of the outer zone of the lens differs from the center, resulting in myopic defocus at the outer (peripheral) retina. A study published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology showed that this lens significantly reduces myopia progression in young children. Shamir is not the only company making multifocal lenses for myopia control, but the company’s experience in producing progressive lenses gives it an advantage. Given worldwide concern for the myopia epidemic, this lens may end up as Shamir’s most important innovation.
After the United States, Israel is home to the largest number of start-up companies in the world. In fact, the Israeli kibbutz — a blend of Zionism and socialism — can be thought of as Israel’s first start-up.
In recent decades, the kibbutzim have transitioned from being solely agricultural, to also providing industrial goods and services. A majority of kibbutzim, including Shamir, have also shifted to embrace private ownership and differential salaries, while still trying to protect the ideology of equality as much as possible.
Shamir Optical is not the only kibbutz start-up success. There are many others, such as the drip irrigation system developed by the firm Netafim on Kibbutz Hatzerim, and Plasan, a company on Kibbutz Sasa, that produces armor vehicle protection. Nor is Shamir Optical the only enterprise associated with Kibbutz Shamir. The kibbutz, which has a population of about 900, also generates income from the production of toiletries and honey, as well as from tourism.
Far from being a relic of the past, the idealism, and sense of purpose that characterizes the traditional kibbutz still exists, and enables the kibbutzim of today to compete successfully in the development of new and innovative technologies. The example of Kibbutz Shamir suggests that the current war will not reduce the level of Israeli innovation.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, who taught at the University of Waterloo.
The post Israeli Kibbutzism Contain Startling Businesses – and Drive the ‘Start-Up Nation’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login