With Israel celebrating its 62nd birthday, I thought it important to reframe how we view Israel toward the positive, and not focus on the ongoing conflict with her neighbors (with help from The New York Times and Start-Up Nation):
Per capita annual gross domestic product is nearly $30,000, close to that of Germany; Israeli citizens live on average more than 80 years, on a par with life expectancy in Norway; the number of murders per capita is a third of that of the United States. Israel’s population has passed 7.5 million, more than nine times what it was at its birth in 1948, and is growing at 1.8 percent a year, a rate no other developed country approaches. Israel has more companies on the tech-oriented NASDAQ stock exchange than any country outside the United States – more than all of Europe, India, and China combined; and Israeli innovation is not limited to computers, security and communications; the Jewish state leads the world in medical device patents, and is a strong global player in clean-tech and biotech, making the world safer, healthier and stronger every single day.