^{Wealth & Poverty Review} How a Tiny Country Launched a Tech Revolution: George Gilder on EpochTV

George Gilder recently sat down with Senior Editor of the Epoch Times, Jan Jekielek, to discuss Israel’s incredible contributions to the world. You can read more about this topic in the new edition of Gilder’s “The Israel Test.”

Full Transcript

Jan Jekielek: George Gilder, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

George Gilder: Great to be back.

Mr. Jekielek: George, we’ve been hearing a lot about Israel in the context of the war in Gaza. You’ve written a book, “The Israel Test: How Israel’s Genius Enriches and Challenges the World,” that talks about the important contributions of Israel, not just to the region, but to the whole world. Please tell us about those contributions.

Mr. Gilder: Sure. Our whole tech economy really is heavily based in Israel. It’s amazing. NVIDIA is our three trillion dollar corporation and created the key technology that made possible the transformation of graphics processors, processing pixels into these artificial intelligence leviathans with trillions of pixels. The first of the parameters is the networking tools supplied by a company called Mellanox that they purchased in Israel, which included a company called EZchip that I wrote about in the first edition of the Israel test. I actually featured the people of EZchip. It was Mellanox that endowed NVIDIA and Google.

Google Maps are greatly enriched by an Israeli company called Waze. Intel is our greatest chip company and it’s almost an Israeli company. Intel’s profits for its first five or six years were almost all in non-volatile memories invented by Dov Froman in Israel. The last stream of their microprocessors were invented in Israel, and they really endowed our cell phones with their capabilities, moving them towards supercomputers in our pockets.

All this stuff has its roots and branches in Israel; the research, the institutes, and a wafer fabrication process for chips. The IBM team that won the chess championship that first showed artificial intelligence in chess was Israeli. Our economy is heavily dependent on Israel. There is an illusion that really irritates me that somehow Israel is a dependent of the U.S. or some kind of abusive child.

But Israel really gives us far more than they take, and this is the capitalist principle. Israel is more relentlessly capitalist than the United States, because today, it has to be. They learned their lesson in 1985 when they almost went broke as socialist Israel. Inflation rates were close to 1,000 percent, but led by Netanyahu they turned Israel around and made it into a startup nation. Silicon Valley has 8,000 Israeli workers in key jobs, let alone all the workers in Israel that are connected to American companies.

It’s an amazing phenomenon that a tiny country occupying 4 percent of Middle Eastern territory gets charged with being too big and imperialistic and the occupiers of Palestine in the 1850s. There were only 200,000 to 300,000 Arabs in the Israel territory. Their average lifespan was a little over 30 years. Israel was transformed by the Jews.

There was a transformation with the water galore that was supplied with the desalination and the drip irrigation. It started with the 538 wells that were drilled in a massive effort. Bridges and waterworks that were all launched in Israel that made it a magnet for Arabs around the region and resulted in a massive migration of Arabs. It enabled them to take part in the suddenly blooming desert phantasmagoria that the Jews’ imagination and vision and creativity fostered. That’s The Israel Test.

How did the region respond to this amazing achievement? There were six wars attempting to completely obliterate Israel. These neighbors didn’t disguise their goal. Their goal was to exterminate Israel. They don’t talk about two-state solutions—they only want one state. They somehow believe that wealth springs from the land, rather than from the mind.

This is the great Jewish gift to the world. They show that our opportunities are really unlimited because we live in an infinite universe of mind. There is this great illusion that really blights our politics everywhere in the world. It is this idea that we’re all the same.

The fact is that Western civilization depends on a tiny minority that has the genius to thrust beyond these material constraints that dominated the world until the Industrial Revolution. Wealth is knowledge. Growth is learning. The Neanderthal in his cave had all the material resources we have today. The difference between our age and the Stone Age is entirely about the accumulation of knowledge.

If a fancy car crashes into a wall, all its value disappears, even though every molecule and atom remains. It’s knowledge that enables wealth. Knowledge comes from human minds, creative in the image of their creator. This is the great monotheistic vision that Jews have vouchsafed to the world, and that is crucial to Western civilization.

Thomas Sowell explained how the mystery of capitalism, with its amazing creation of wealth, arouses resentment and envy and hatred. Some people say, “How did they do it? They must be demons.” Taiwan is an embattled land that’s comparable to Israel in its contribution to the world economy. They are both amazing little centers of genius and creativity and entrepreneurial energy and aspiration that enrich us all. You destroy Taiwan or Israel, and the value of the world economy would drop by 50 percent. There would be so much disorder, because this is a huge architecture of ideas we occupy.

The leading figures in 20th century science and the winners of a third of the Nobel Prizes, and the most critical ones in my view, were Jewish. This is just incredible. Jews are 0.2 percent of the world’s population. It’s just an amazing phenomenon and we all benefit from it. But it’s a test for many people. Many people don’t like that. They say, “They must have done something wrong to emerge as such titans.”

We are dependent upon this mysterious gift of Jewish creativity and science and engineering and invention. We’re also dependent on the Chinese, but there are more of them, so it’s less amazing. But the interesting thing is they both have faced this hatred and resentment and efforts to destroy them. Sukarno had his whole movement in Indonesia to banish the overseas Chinese and Indonesia fell into poverty. This always happens when you banish the geniuses from your country. Nothing good happens.

Mr. Jekielek: To your point, you have a very interesting view on the key message of Hitler in Mein Kampf. It’s not what people think, but it’s very significant in terms of his purpose.

Mr. Gilder: It certainly is. I was surprised when I read Mein Kampf, the favorite book of the Palestinians, surprisingly. It was distributed by Palestinian leaders, the Grand Mufti, and everybody else who was close to Hitler. But Hitler’s point was interesting. It showed how he was fundamentally a materialist.

He believed that there was a limited planet and human beings were in a fight to the death to master it, and the warrior necessarily prevailed. The man who was willing to risk his life in war and to remove his rivals was the epitome of virtue. He thought that Jews were cheating. He thought that they somehow got rich without invading other countries or without seizing the wealth of others. They got rich by exchange and enterprise and finance and invention. This was cheating on the facts of life, which is a limited planet with a human population struggling against one another to capture land and limited resources.

That was Hitler’s vision, this warrior mystique. When you read it, it’s an attack on capitalism. This idea that the creation of wealth opens new opportunities for others and expands population and expands longevity and enriches human life was alien to Hitler’s vision, which fundamentally was a materialist vision. It was this materialist superstition, the idea that we have nothing but dirt, and we are in an eternal struggle for more dirt.

Mr. Jekielek: In the book, you use the term zero-sum.

Mr. Gilder: Yes, the zero-sum game. Economics is a zero-sum game. If one person wins, another person loses. It manifested itself before the industrial revolution, before the outbreak of human creativity transforming the dimensions of economic life. Bibi Netanyahu’s father wrote a study of the Inquisition and showed that the roots of anti-Semitism preceded Christianity.

The first pogroms were in Egypt. The evil in men’s hearts is to tear down accomplishment, excellence, and genius. It’s really a perverse envy that we all have to labor to overcome. Envy is natural to all of us. It is The Israel Test that cleaves the hearts of the world, and it continues to challenge us.

Mr. Jekielek: Ben-Gurion told Musa Alami, the Arab leader back in the 1930s, that he believed that Zionism would bring a blessing to the Arabs of Palestine and there would be no particular reason to oppose it. His reply was, “I would prefer the country remain impoverished and barren for another hundred years until we ourselves are able to develop it on our own.”

Mr. Gilder: It’s a confession that they recognized the Jewish achievement and the Jewish genius. They respond to it by hatred and resentment and a desire to exterminate it, rather than partake of it and benefit from it and learn from it. Since that period, the number of Arabs in the Palestine area has increased from a million to 5.5 million. This has all been enabled and made possible by the Jews, as I show in my book, “The Israel Test.”

It’s really a confession of futility and nihilism to say that it’s better to have the Arabs impoverished and immiserated rather than having to participate like everybody else in the world in an economy that depends on the genius of a relatively few people who are pioneers of new technologies, new enterprises, new visions, and new medical breakthroughs that make our lives longer and better and richer. Look at the fruits of the Zionist movement that Theodor Herzl pioneered with his associates like Benzion Netanyahu, who was the current Bibi Netanyahu’s father. This was a visionary movement that actually fulfilled its promise.

If we respond to this miracle by exterminating it, we’re really suicidal. It’s as suicidal as Nazism proved to be. In the laws of Palestine, they will increase your pension in proportion to the number of Jews you’ve killed, while at the same time impose capital punishment on anyone who sells land to the Jews. This warrior notion that the Arabs have to exterminate Israel is their religious commitment, their identity, their goal, and it’s what gives meaning to their lives.

The successes of Israel are a “Nakba,” as the Palestinian say, which means a catastrophe, even though Palestinians have massively benefited from it. With their longevity, their wealth, their opportunities, their jobs, and even now, in the face of all this war, Palestinians really have been great beneficiaries of Israel. They’ve actually been victims of the UN, and the UN Relief Works Administration that has turned them into victims and obsessed them with this view that the land is really theirs, and that somehow the Jews stole their wealth from the Palestinians.

This is the amazingly fantastic view that actually is taught in the schools in Palestine at the behest of UN functionaries. They actually disclosed their real motives when they participated in the attack on Israel on October 7th—the UN people collaborated with Hamas in contriving the attack on Israel.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s difficult to talk about the Palestinian people as being beneficiaries when so many have been killed right now.

Mr. Gilder: We don’t know how many have been killed. But when we endured 9/11, when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, we started a 10-year war in the Middle East to avenge it and stop it. A lot of people were killed in those wars. That was across an ocean rather than across a wall. What the Israelis are doing is quite targeted and very concerned with civilian casualties.

In the Second World War, we weren’t supplying food for the countries we bombed. Requirements are being imposed on Israel that I think are really outlandish. They wouldn’t be applied to any other group. It’s really a disguise for support for Hamas. Hamas can surrender any time they want.

Mr. Jekielek: During this war, we’ve seen the deployment of remarkable new technologies like the Iron Dome. Then there’s also the Iron Beam and a few different iterations of the Arrow project. Please tell us about the development of these technologies.

Mr. Gilder: They really began with Ronald Reagan. It takes me back to my youth when I gave Reagan his first microchip. Reagan was proposing a strategic defense initiative and I told him that this technology was available. I had a Micron memory chip that I showed him and gave to him. He took it and looked at it and we discussed it.

This can enable a distributed anti-missile capability that can hit a bullet with a bullet in the sky. The U.S. only partially did it. We made some Patriot missiles that failed against the Scud missiles during the Iraq war. But the Israelis really accomplished it. They accomplished the strategic defense. Iron Dome and the David’s Sling missiles have intercepted thousands of projectiles and drones and missiles. The Arrow system has actually intercepted intercontinental missiles above the atmosphere.

Iron Beam is the first laser-based anti-missile system. Lots of countries are competing to create a laser-based system. The Israeli Iron Beam system is still experimental, but it works some of the time. I believe that they will be the first to launch a successful defense against intercontinental missiles and really relieve the world of a real plague of the threat of thermonuclear war. If these missile systems can be intercepted and zapped from the sky at the speed of light, they become less menacing.

This is another facet of Israeli genius that’s manifested in their military capabilities. The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and its intelligence units have certainly been underestimated by their enemies over and over again, six times so far. This is The Israel Test again. We need to decide whether we want to be a successful civilization and recognize that we have to accept genius wherever it arises.

We can’t just imagine that all brilliant, creative entrepreneurs have to be Americans. Legal immigration is really good and that’s how we’ve thrived. That’s how the Manhattan Project emerged and how many of our greatest entrepreneurs were ultimately immigrants or sons of immigrants. When the Jews left as a result of the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe, people like John von Neumann fled and came through Europe to the United States. The first thing they did was the Manhattan Project that essentially won the Second World War.

You can talk about other ways we won the Second World War, but really, if we hadn’t had the Manhattan Project that produced nuclear weapons, the U.S. would not have emerged from the Second World War as the dominant power in the world and reshaped global politics. The Manhattan Project was driven by von Neumann who also invented our key computer technologies and game theory. He was really the greatest mind of the 20th century, if you ask me.

Mr. Jekielek: George, a final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Gilder: There may be amazing opportunities ahead and Israel is in the center of many of them, along with the U.S. and Taiwan. It’s an amazing world and we shouldn’t get all discouraged and grim about boycotting the future.

Mr. Jekielek: George Gilder, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Gilder: It’s great to be on.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.