GLOBAL CASE STUDY
Is Co-Entrepreneurship The Answer To The Israel Conflict?
By Martina Keens-Betts I
’m a big fan of Israel, having spent a period on a Kibbutz in the North of the Country in the eighties followed by Christmas in Eilat in 1999. I also worked full-time in the Arab world, so I feel very simpatico towards the Middle East generally and thus decided to spend Christmas 2012 in the Holy Land.
Flight availability was good which was probably due to recent sensationalist reports of bombing in Tel Aviv, so I didn’t book till the day before Christmas Eve. When I got to Tel Aviv, however, I chatted with a Jewish café worker who told me that the bombing was a fairly regular occurrence but that the City’s defence systems were generally pretty good at destroying the rockets before they hit the ground. And I must admit the atmosphere was pretty relaxed in and around the City.
In fact, the
accompanying feeling of surprise reminded me of my experience of arriving in Israel as a backpacker in July 1989, which was about 18 months post the Intifada and judging by the reports in the UK press back then (as well as now), Israel may just as well have been burning! Yes, there was some very low grade tension in faces here and there when the subject of the bombing was raised, but otherwise there was very much a casual and upbeat air of business as usual.
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In fact, I spent a sunny Christmas day lunch close to the beach chatting with another Jewish café worker about the troubles. Isaac came across as a very cosmopolitan guy and so it didn’t surprise me when I learned he’d lived in London and Zurich as a young man. And bearing in mind he was well travelled, I was interested in hearing his views on the conflict, at which his face promptly clouded over as he described the sheer helplessness everyone felt towards the conflict. I told him that I could only feel a sense of ‘second hand déjà vu’ as my Great, Great Grandfather who was an Irish Catholic living in Western Ireland in the late 1800s had had his brains blown out (literally) by his own people for working as a ‘Man Friday’ to the accountant of a British peer who owned land in Sligo.
Isaac was terribly empathetic when I told him this story and was keen to express his anger towards weapon suppliers for contributing to both past and present conflicts around the world. This was a sentiment I was to hear repeatedly from both Arabs and Jews across Israel. In fact, Isaac firmly agreed that an insidious ‘negative entrepreneurship’ exists in all conflict zones, i.e. weapons suppliers and those who exploit community friction and economic depression for their own ends. Isaac was also in complete
agreement that these conflicts don’t and never have belonged to
the
psyche of the decent, normal person anywhere in this world and the only way to achieve peace is for reasonable people on both sides to find each other and join forces to formulate their own joint economic and entrepreneurial goals, whilst actively mentoring those who are less fortunate, so that they don’t get involved with the ‘wrong crowd’ as it were – a strategy through which he believes the evil and ruthless will eventually be rendered impotent.
Isaac was also keen to point out that a sense of balance in all things must be actively taught in schools and the family environment. I couldn’t have agreed more and hearing this comment was rather serendipitous
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