Let’s face it. Israel and the whole world are in a huge mess.
Mess? That’s an understatement.
Can we make sense of this balagan – a state of chaos, disarray, and confusion? Can we figure out where it may be headed, and find light and hope for the future? My friend, co-author, and former student Arie Ruttenberg, adviser to prime ministers and co-founder of Israel’s leading ad agency, has a possible solution. He invented a structured framework for coming up with world-changing innovative ideas, called Zoom in/Zoom out, and applied it with great success in business. We explained it in our 2014 book Cracking the Creativity Code.
Here is how it works.
- Identify a problem – e.g., global shortage of clean drinking water.
- Zoom in on the problem, to understand it in every detail. Do not leap to solutions too soon. First, analyze it in depth.
- Next, zoom out to possible creative solutions. Seek wild ideas. You can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them.
We know there is always water in the air, even in dry desert air. We call it humidity. Why not capture it?
Next, zoom in again. Analyze the ideas and test their feasibility and robustness. Reject many. If needed, zoom out again. Continue the process until you converge on a viable solution.
For instance, Watergen, an Israeli company based in Petah Tikva, produces a device that extracts drinking water from the air, everywhere, including, parched deserts. It is used worldwide, including, in the past, in Gaza. Let us apply Zoom in/Zoom out to make sense of the current global disorder and to understand how Israel can navigate it.
1. Zoom in: The October 7 earthquake
The entire world, including Israel, sits atop a set of moving plates known as tectonic plates. These plates have been slowly shifting under our feet for 3.4 billion years. There are places where two tectonic plates meet and collide. Israel lies atop one of them, known as the Syrian-African Rift.
Colliding tectonic plates create stored-up energy that builds and is eventually released as earthquakes. Geologists say Israel is due for a big earthquake one of these days, but they don’t know when.
Politically, socially, and economically, the world is experiencing a tectonic shift. The post-World War II global financial and economic ecosystem is undergoing massive, rapid change. It is not an exaggeration to call it a global earthquake. Once orderly, today the world is in disarray.
Israel’s own earthquake shattered our lives on October 7. The proximate cause was a somnolent army and bumbling government, whose overconfidence and negligence led to disaster.
But there was a deeper cause: a global clash of basic human values between Western liberal democracy and fundamentalist, autocratic values violently hostile to it. These two tectonic plates smashed together – on Israel’s borders, and within Israel, at one and the same time.
Choose life, our Torah says. Seek death, preach our enemies. They indoctrinate small children, giving them tiny mock suicide vests to emulate their vicious elders. This collision of opposing values is playing out all over the world, but lately most violently on Israel’s borders.
2. Zoom out: A history of new world orders
There is a long history of new world orders. President Woodrow Wilson of the US initiated one, the League of Nations, founded on January 10, 1920. It failed.
The disastrous 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed huge war reparations on Germany, impoverished it, and led to the rise of the Nazis and World War II.
In July 1944, in the midst of war, a US-led gathering of Allies at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, built a new world order, based on free trade; Marshall Plan aid to Europe oiled the wheels. Post-war trade and economic growth soared. Asia in particular reaped benefits.
On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, leading to unification of the two Germanies and, ultimately, fostering the European Union. When Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, a new world order of peace and stability was born. The vision was that when countries grow wealthy together, they will not go to war. And it worked. Almost.
In 1981, over 40 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Fast forward 43 years. Only eight percent of the world’s population is still in extreme poverty, and by some estimates half the world is middle class.Alas, it did not last. Russia’s Vladimir Putin sought to restore past power and glory and attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022. China and Iran joined Russia in an anti-Western bloc. North Korea, too.
Welcome to the New World Disorder!
Rational human beings do not scrap a win-win world order and replace it with lose-lose. But that is exactly what happened. Russia’s economy is limping. China’s economic growth has halved. World GDP growth will be a weak 2.4% this year – half what it was during some years of prosperity.What went wrong?
3. Zoom in: Clash of values
Values are defined as our preferences about what is important and how we should act. They reflect our sense of right and wrong and what ought to be. They are the glue that holds societies together.
Underlying the global balagan lies a fierce, often violent, clash of basic human values. It is particularly violent on the borders of Israel.
There is a terrible, cruel asymmetry in this global clash of values. It is highlighted by Metulla, a once-pastoral Israeli town on a finger of land jutting up toward Lebanon, in Israel’s North.
On October 6, some 1,800 people lived there. Today, it is a ghost town. Many of its houses have been destroyed by lethal Russian anti-tank Kornet rockets, fired from Lebanese hilltops just over the border. Its inhabitants have been evacuated, among thousands from 25 other communities near the border; a skeleton crew of defenders remains. Hezbollah regularly targets Metulla. Most recently, on March 6, Hezbollah dispatched a suicide drone against it. Across the Lebanese border lie several Lebanese villages. Among them, Kfar Kila, high on a 700-meter hill that overlooks Metulla. There are reports that villagers there who fled earlier have returned home and stroll with confidence in their fields and streets.
Metulla is in the crosshairs of Kornet squads in Kfar Kila and nearby villages. Hezbollah and Hamas also target Israeli civilians with impunity. In contrast, Israel and IDF are expected – demanded – by the world not to harm a hair on a civilian’s head – and are hauled before The Hague on genocide charges, despite strenuous IDF efforts to spare civilians.
Hezbollah and Hamas get a pass. Why? They are not countries, just terrorists. To the BBC and other Western media, they are militants. Blame the victim. Exonerate the criminal.
University of Michigan political scientist Ron Inglehart, who died in 2021, had a brilliant idea over 40 years ago. He initiated the World Values Survey, to study values worldwide and to see how they are changing, in 90 countries. The hypothesis was that as more and more people in the world escape poverty, they will think differently. Their values will change. They will give more weight to freedom, to individual liberties, to education, to modern Western democracy. As countries grow richer, people’s principles everywhere will align. Liberal democracy triumphs. A new world order. It didn’t happen.
As the business weekly The Economist notes in a recent cover article, “Western values are now steadily diverging from the rest of the world.” In much of the Islamic world – which comprises two billion people – conformity, tradition, security, religious supremacy, and power are key values. In the West, self-direction, self-enhancement, self-expression, democracy, human rights, and achievement dominate.
Russia’s Putin declares war on Western values. China and Iran join. A destructive divisive wall has been built between West and East. Populism spreads, as the underclass rebels against the educated elites. War and pandemics have generated insecurity that has led some countries to seek strong autocratic leaders.
Putin has clung to power for 24 years. A change in the Russian constitution will likely keep him as Russia’s autocrat until 2036, when he turns 84, despite his disastrous missteps.
Once, China regularly replaced its top leader every decade. Now, Xi Jin Ping grasps the reins and appears intending to rule forever. Elsewhere, too, leaders manipulate democracy to gain power, then dismantle it to retain power and steal. Hamas is near the top of the class. Had our Israeli leaders been paying attention, the lesson from the global values earthquake should have been “Mind the gap!”
Instead, following elections on November 4, 2022, with their anti-democratic “reforms,” the Netanyahu government turned the values gap into a self-serving destructive crevasse dividing the nation.
The global divide between Western liberal and traditional conservative values exists as a microcosm within Israel. The latest example is the ultra-Orthodox refusal to accept military service, to defend the country that supports them. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef declared that young men would leave the country rather than serve. When they do, I wonder whether Canada, the US, France, Germany, and the UK will pay them liberally to sit and study Torah.
For Israel, this values divide is a double whammy. As our creative young people launch start-ups and raise investment funds abroad, they now face stigma and approbation abroad, while dealing with a nation divided within, at home. The fault line within Israel is not solely political. It is value-based. Political views change. Values don’t. As one expert said, values that change are not values, they are opinions. The unity that the Gaza war brought to Israel is fading rapidly.
I find some comfort in history. Great progress has often emerged from horrific destruction and chaos. You can patch up an old building. Or you can tear it down and build a fantastic new one. The European Union, for example, arose from the ashes and destruction of World War II. So did a powerful global financial and economic ecosystem that lifted many out of poverty. As an old-timer, I recall this process of renewal occurring in Israel after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It was painful, slow, wrenching, and often frustrating. But renewal occurred. And so it will again.
4. Zoom out: What the future holds
In the past few days, my Neaman Institute colleague Dr. Gilead Fortuna and I have interviewed several Israeli business leaders. What we learned is disturbing.
Israel’s economy is in deep hot water. As I write this, the business daily The Marker reports a 50 percent rise in businesses seeking court protection from creditors; “Many businesses are deep in debt and taking their last breaths.”
We’ve been in trouble before. In 2007-8, there was a disastrous global financial crisis. Israel was impacted. Then, in March 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his term of office and led economic reforms that helped boost per capita GDP by 60% between then and 2020; unemployment fell to a record low of 3.4% in the months before COVID-19 began.
But today? Netanyahu has thrown the economy under the bus, to pander to the far Right and remain in office despite massive public opposition.
As nations scramble to reorganize in this New World Disorder, one key insight emerges. Major supply chain disruptions during COVID, the Russia-Ukraine War, the Gaza war, and Houthi blockade of the Red Sea have occurred. They are causing nations everywhere to rely far less on imports and far more on local production. Israel must become more self-reliant. The latest supply-chain disruption is Turkey’s decision to boycott sale of cement, steel, and other building materials to Israel.
A decade ago, in 2014, at its weekly meeting, Netanyahu’s cabinet approved reforms in the import of food to Israel “to facilitate a dramatic opening of the economy to the massive importation of food products.” The short-term goal? Lower the cost of living. The long-term cost? Israel’s vital self-sufficient agriculture. A very bad deal.
We do not need massive imports. We do need massive local production. As global famine looms, Israel must remain largely self-sufficient in producing food.
Consider Haifa Group (formerly, Haifa Chemicals). It is investing $200 million in a new ammonia plant in the Negev – part of a $350 million investment program to boost fertilizer production to meet world demand. Government support? Minuscule, slow, and bureaucratic.
Sooner or later – hopefully sooner – we, the people of Israel, will elect a new, competent government able to zoom out, analyze the situation at home and abroad, face reality, establish priorities, and zoom in to rebuild our economy in a way that responds to global disorder, while protecting our borders, returning our refugees to their homes, restoring our liberal democracy, and rebuilding trust in the IDF and our government, while restoring strategic cooperation with the US and other allies. All we need are a few good women and men.
Postscript: In the early morning hours of Sunday, April 14, Iran sent more than 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones to attack Israel. The IDF reported that nearly 99% were shot down, mainly by Israel, some by coalition forces. The attack was ordered by Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, an aged Shia religious cleric and politician, Supreme Leader of Iran for nearly 35 years. His 85th birthday was on April 19. Some 200 million Shia Muslims revere him, 10 percent of the world’s two billion Muslims. He controls the murderous Revolutionary Guards and guides their perfidy. Clash of values? Religious leader who sows death? I wonder if the ill-informed liberals in the world believe that Israel should respond by sending him a birthday bouquet of roses. ■
The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion. He blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com.