Humanity and vision in Israel

On Thursday, our last full day in Israel, we dashed from school to nonprofit to one of Israel’s top corporate success stories. I was busy taking photos, so here are some of my notes, with pointers to longer writeups.

Bialik-Rogozin School

One of the week’s most touching visits came during a stop at the multicultural Bialik-Rogozin School  in Tel Aviv. (Read here about how  how the school is helping Darfur refugees escape genocide.) The school enrolls 726 students, chiefly children of immigrants and migrant workers. The children, ages 5 to 16, hail from 29 countries, such as the Philippines, Nigeria and 33 who escaped killings in the Darfur area of Sudan. 

"It’s the only place where the kids feel safe and are accepted regardless of their background," an official told us.

The school has an extraordinary agreement with the immigration police not to raid the school for undocumented immigrants. They’ve worked with the Israeli government to get citizenship for 230 of the students so far.

"Hiding kids in a Jewish state is someting that is very loaded," said Yossi Vardi, creator of the pioneering instant messaging program ICQ, who insists on not receiving recognition for his philanthropic contributions to the school. Dozens of volunteers and numerous organizations contribute as well.

Vardi pointed out aptly that education is not just about learning facts and imparting knowledge. "It’s also about what value system do you give to the kids. It’s about teaching young kids to be a mensch."

We spent a few minutes chatting up the kids in Hebrew (um, I had a translator) and watching classroom instruction. Inspiring.

Robert Scoble has a great post about his experience at the Rogozin School here. I took a few photos, but the CF card seems to have gotten corrupted.

Peres Peace Center

Next we visited the Peres Peace Center, whose philosophy can be summed up this way: "Peace must be made by the people and not just the governments. Peace has to be instilled in the hearts of the people." As one official told us, the idea is that "when a peace agreement happens, the ground will be ready for it."

The Center doesn’t engage in political advocacy, as OneVoice does, although it believes a two-state solution is a given. Instead, it conducts cultural outreach and runs an extraordinary range of educational programs for students, academics, mental health professionals, farmers and others.

We met with the heads of the Center’s IT department, who described how the Center uses computers and the Internet "to create an atmosphere of peace education and dialogue," beginning with a set of "peace computer centers" to create an atomosphere of cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian children."

I was struck by Project Manager Yarden Leal’s use of the term "peace journalism." By that she meant that in addition to traditional journalism’s usual panoply of reports about killings and bombings, there needs to be a parallel kind of reporting that addresses the conflict "through ideas of peace and cooperation."

Renee Blodgett has more on our visit to the Peres Center.

Gil Shwed and Check Point

Check Point is the most successful Israeli company you’ve never heard of.

So successful, in fact, that 98 percent of the Fortune 500 uses its information security software. Gil Shwed founded the company here, in Israel, 15 years ago and now supports 100,000 corporate clients connect more securely to the Internet.

While 90 percent of its business is focused on the enterprise — does your company use VPN? chances are it’s powered in part by Checkpoint — one-tenth of the company’s revenues comes from consumer-facing software such as ZoneAlarm. 

Shwed spent part of his half hour with us criticizing the technology regulatory environment of the United States. Bringing broadband and power to an office in the U.S. can take upwards of 2-3 months while it can be done overnight in Israel, he said.

Broadband still sucks in the United States, as we all know. Robert Scoble chipped in: "At Doug Englebart’s house in Silicon Valley, he didn’t have broadband, wifi or cell phone service — and he helped invent the Internet!"

Shwed went on to praise America’s role in creating the framework for successful technologies. "The U.S. creates public opinion for high tech around the world," he said.

Scoble will have a video of our conversation with Shwed later this month at FastCompany.com. Jeff Saperstein has more here. And Renee Blodgett has a thorough writeup here.

GoodVision

We had a fascinating conversation over a lunch of yummy falafels at GoodVision, an Israeli consulting company that specializes in planning and managing
corporate social responsibility proccesses in firms and governmental
agencies. General manager Ivri Verbin took us through the site’s mission and mentioned these sites, which also support community efforts:

• The Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire, a good U.S.-based resource for news about the space.
• Global-demos.org, which describes itself as "a transnational civil society platform. It pools the globally dispersed and fragmented knowledge on the social and environmental performance of corporations. It empowers citizens, unites civil society and democratically embeds global business practices."

• Koldor.org, the first Jewish global platform of young leadership. established seven years ago by professionals around the world.

But the highlight came when six young people trooped into the room. Ariel Markhovski, Moran Haliba, Polina Garaev, Yael Rozanes and Gregory Karp were brought in to discuss how Israel is perceived in the world, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and other high-minded issues. (Two of the young women wore their Army uniforms.) Their view of the prospects for peace ranged  from skepticism to hope. "I think when our own children grow up, then there will be a chance for peace," said one.

Said another: "Today every kid who graduates can go and start a company at age 20. There’s a spirit that tells you you can do whatever you want."

But they only really let their guard down — you could see their body language change — when I asked them about whether they and their peers were using social media tools like YouTube and MySpace.

Nearly all of them said they were using Facebook and YouTube because their friends do.

Deb Schultz asked: Why YouTube and not Israel-based Metacafe?

"What’s popular in the U.S. becomes popular here, because we have friends over there," said one of the 20somethings.

Scoble has already posted a Qik video of our talk with the youths, taken with his cameraphone, here.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.