Start-up Nation

13. In 1939, the British government created a ceiling of 10,000 Jewish immigrants per year into Palestine, with an additional allotment of 25,000 possible entries. It is true that in 1945, President Harry Truman requested a U.S. government investigation of treatment of Jewish displaced persons, many of whom were in facilities overseen by the U.S. Army. “The resulting report chronicled shocking mistreatment of the already abused refugees and recommended that the gates of Palestine be opened wide for resettlement,” writes Leonard Dinnerstein in America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). After several unsuccessful attempts to persuade Great Britain to admit the Jews into Palestine, Truman asked Congress to pass a law to bring a number of these refugees to the States.

While Truman’s bill became law in 1948, the year of Israel’s founding, a group of legislators, led by Nevada senator Pat McCarran, manipulated the drafting of the bill’s language so that it actually had the effect of discriminating against Eastern European Jews. Ultimately, historian Leonard Dinnerstein estimates, only about 16 percent of those issued visas as displaced persons between July 1948 and June 1952 were Jewish. “Thus McCarran’s numerous tricks and ploys were effective,” notes Dinnerstein. “Jews who might otherwise have chosen the United States as their place of resettlement went to Israel.”

14. The document can be found at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary .org/jsource/History/Dec_of_Indep.html.

15. Interview with David McWilliams, Irish economist and author of The Pope’s Children, March 2009.

16. This is not to suggest that there are not ethnic tensions among this very diverse country. Deep friction erupted between European Holocaust refugees and Jews from the Arab world as far back as the state’s founding. Sammy Smooha, today a world-renowned sociologist at the University of Haifa, was, like Reuven Agassi, an Iraqi Jewish immigrant who spent part of his childhood in a transit tent. “We were told not to speak Arabic, but we didn’t know Hebrew. Everything was strange. My father went from being a railroad official in Baghdad to an unskilled nobody. We suffered a terrible loss of identity. Looking back, I’d call it cultural repression. Behind their lofty ideals of ‘one people,’ they [the Jews of European origin] were acting superior, paternalistic.” Quoted in Donna Rosenthal, The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land (New York: Free Press, 2005), p. 116.

CHAPTER 8

. The Diaspora: Stealing Airplanes

1. Fred Vogelstein, “The Cisco Kid Rides Again,” Fortune, July 26, 2004; http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/07/26/377145/index.htm; and interview with Michael Laor, founder of Cisco Systems Development Center in Israel, February 2009.

2. Marguerite Reardon, “Cisco Router Makes Guinness World Records,” July 1, 2004, CNET News, http://news.cnet.com/Cisco-router -makes-Guinness-World-Records/2100-1033_3-5254291.html?tag=nefd .top; retrieved January 2009.

3. Vogelstein, “The Cisco Kid Rides Again.”

4. Marguerite Reardon, “Cisco Sees Momentum in Sales of Key Router,” TechRepublic, December 6, 2004, http://articles.techrepublic .com.com/5100-22_11-5479086.html; and Cisco, press release, “Growth of Video Service Delivery Drives Sales of Cisco CRS-1, the World’s Most Powerful Routing Platform, to Double in Nine Months,” April 1, 2008, http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_040108c.html.

5. Interview with Yoav Samet, Cisco’s corporate business development manager in Israel, Central/Eastern Europe, and Russia/CIS, January 2009.

6. Interview with Yoav Samet.

7. Richard Devane, “The Dynamics of Diaspora Networks: Lessons of Experience,” in Diaspora Networks and the International Migration Skills, edited by Yevgeny Kuznetsov (Washington, D.C.: World Bank Publications, 2006), pp. 59–67. The quote is from p. 60.

8. Jenny Johnston, “The New Argonauts: An Interview with AnnaLee Saxenian,” July 2006, GBN Global Business Network, http://thenewar gonauts.com/GBNinterview.pdf?aid=37652.