I’ve been to Tel Aviv many times over the past 55 years. It has gone from a sleepy town where the main food was falafel, pita and eggplant sold from small windows to the most successful tech startup city in the world. Tel Aviv is a booming city which rivals San Francisco for the most tech start-ups, the best restaurants and Tel Aviv out does San Francisco for fun and innovation. For productivity and first rate infrastructure Tel Aviv outdoes Singapore.
Israel, with much of its tech offices in the greater Tel Aviv metro area is the second largest tech center on the planet, with more tech companies listed on the New York and German stock exchanges than any other location in the world outside the U.S..
This happened with virtually no natural resources including water or a natural harbor. Nothing more than Jewish immigrants. Israel also overcame the burden of a hundred million enemy neighbors who have started ten wars against Israel in half a century. Just as bad has been a socialist-union run government for its first 40 years.
It is a miracle. It is even more of a visible miracle when one looks 44 miles to the south of Tel Aviv.
44 miles south you will find an independent land with a larger area and a larger population than Tel Aviv that is a war torn ruin and has been a ruin for the past decade with no exports, virtually no local industry, no local power supply or water sources and almost total unemployment.
Gaza is a client state entirely dependent for food and survival on European and Arab nations. Gaza represents what an Arab land looked like 2,000 years ago, with the minor addition of a few combustion driven vehicles, military weapons and electricity.
Only 44 miles from the best of the modern commercial world with wonderful people and a wild nightlife to the worst self inflicted anti-commerce human misery on the planet.