A Stirring History of Israel's Founding

This book made the New York Times bestseller list for the year. It topped the best-books-of-the-year lists of Random House, The New York Times Book Review and The Economist, and it won the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and more.

About the Author

Ari Shavit is a well-known Israeli columnist. He was born in Rehovot, Israel, served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces, and studied philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In the 1980s he began writing for the weekly Koteret Rashit. In the 1990s he chaired the board of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. In 1995 he joined Haaretz, where he became one of the paper's leading writers. Shavit is also a prominent political commentator on Israeli television.

Excerpt: The Rise of Israel's Entrepreneurs, Seen Through the Richter Family

Israelis are remarkably fast, creative and daring. Even the way they work is captivating. They work tirelessly and without rest. They are driven by a competitive spirit, a need to be first across the finish line, and to be first across the finish line they will do anything. They never say "no." They never accept failure, and they never admit to it.

The Richter family's story is also a story of hope. Kobi Richter was born on Christmas Eve, 1945. His father, Kalman, was a disciple of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist Zionists. Born in Lvov, Poland, Kalman emigrated to Palestine in 1935, switched his allegiance to the Labor movement, worked at a potash plant in Sodom, and joined Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan in the north. Richter's mother, Mira, was born into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in Lvov; her family did not get out to Palestine in time and perished in the Holocaust. At Ramat Yohanan, Kalman became a welder and also served as the kibbutz's head of finance and economics (a kibbutz is an Israeli collective farm). Mira worked in the dairy barn and ran the clothing storeroom. Kalman and Mira were tough, strict people, and both were loyal soldiers of the Zionist revolution.

Richter's earliest memory is of war. In early 1948, as the family sat in the kibbutz bomb shelter, two-year-old Kobi slipped his fingers into empty peanut shells and pretended they were helmets. Yet his childhood was very peaceful. In the 1950s Ramat Yohanan thrived. No one spoke of the Holocaust, and the war was remembered as a heroic epic. There was no real danger anywhere in sight. To him, the kibbutz was the elite of Israeli society, the elite of the Israeli people, the elite of all humankind. To be lucky enough to be a son of the kibbutz was the summit of life.

Kobi Richter was extraordinarily gifted. He learned to read at 4; at 7 he could finish four books in a week; at 10 he was reading Dickens and Hesse. He learned to swim at 8, became the kibbutz swimming champion at 12, and at 16 came second in Israel's individual medley. At 7 he knew every kind of screw in the welding shop, at 10 he learned to weld, and at 15 he built a motorcycle. In his teenage years, Ramat Yohanan was paradise on earth. It had a swimming pool, a metal shop and wide wheat fields; it had tractors, horses and girls; you could hunt ducks, pick locks, gather mushrooms, and take a borrowed car for a drive at night. You could do anything there.

Ramat Yohanan was not merely a commune that fulfilled the dream of socialist Zionism. It was also a successful business. In its modern dairy barn, the cows gave twice as much milk as cows on dairy farms in the American Midwest. Its new plastics factory was the first ever built in the kibbutz movement. The kibbutz also had an avocado orchard, where 16-year-old Richter installed an innovative irrigation system, and a cotton field, for which 17-year-old Richter designed and built a mechanical cotton picker. Ramat Yohanan's farming had been industrialized, and its industry did precision work. The commune was a hothouse not only for romantic socialist Zionists but also for an optimistic, driven national spirit and striking technical skill. When Richter joined the Israeli Air Force in 1964, he found that what it valued most was excellence, competitiveness and advanced technology. He fell in love with the feeling of controlling these flying machines, built for men who dared to challenge altitude and speed. To Richter, the pilot was a lone knight, locked in a fight to the death with other lone knights. Richter loved combat. He believed in his own abilities and loved testing them every day. His sense of superiority did not endear him to his peers or commanders, but no one could deny his extraordinary talent. The outstanding student, welder, swimmer, hunter, dancer and technical prodigy became a brilliant fighter pilot. In the 1960s, the handsome, proud Richter was an iconic figure in the Israeli Air Force.

On June 5, 1967, Richter took off from Lod Airport in a French-built Vautour bomber. With his comrades of No. 107 Squadron he flew south at low altitude, in absolute radio silence, until the formation turned southeast toward Egypt. The air force had rehearsed this operation, Operation Moked ("Focus"), for years; Richter alone had rehearsed it dozens of times. Its strategy was to send up almost every Israeli warplane at once and strike 30 air bases in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq with precision. Now, as No. 107 Squadron circled over the western Negev, Richter watched with a thrill as the plan became reality. Dozens of aircraft filled the sky, some heading for Luxor, some for Amman, some for Damascus. Flocks of black hawks bared their beaks, ready to strike, and the sky was almost black with them. Richter felt as if little Israel had suddenly released an enormous energy, a rattling energy rushing across the whole Middle East. He felt he was part of this mysterious force, rising in an instant from Israel's promised land. Every bomber was in the right position, at the right altitude, on the right course. Everything happened in absolute silence and perfect coordination, like an extraordinary sacrament. Nothing like it had ever happened before, and nothing like it would ever happen again.

In his Vautour, No. 0745, Richter climbed from 300 feet to 3,000 feet. The El Arish air base looked exactly as he remembered it: the control tower, the runways, the MiG fighters. Richter fired 76 rockets at the anti-aircraft battery, and 30 seconds later the base's air defenses no longer existed. Then he came around and made three precision passes, destroying three MiG-17s on the ground. In 15 minutes, No. 107 Squadron put El Arish out of action. In 30 minutes, the Israeli Air Force wiped out the air power of four countries. As Richter flew home over the citrus groves of Rehovot and landed at Lod Airport, he knew this was the moment the war was won. Israel was now a regional power, the strongest country in the Middle East.

In 1968, Kobi Richter trained as an interceptor pilot. Between 1969 and 1973 he fought in a series of dogfights and shot down 11 enemy aircraft. He had become one of the air force's ace fighter pilots, helping Israel win air supremacy. While still in service he earned a doctorate in biology and biochemistry, and from 1979 to 1982 he did postdoctoral research in artificial intelligence at MIT. A few years later, Colonel Richter left the air force and, with four graduate students from military security systems, founded his first high-tech company, Orbot. Orbot developed an innovative automated optical inspection (AOI) system for the mass production of printed circuit boards, and its speed of production and drive to innovate were unprecedented in the field. Orbot brought its first products to market in 1986. By 1989 it controlled 60% of the global AOI market; after it merged with its Israeli competitor Optrotech, the new company, Orbotech, controlled 80% of that market. In the 2010s, Orbotech had 1,500 employees and annual revenue of more than $40 million. In 1992 Richter left the company to invest in other ventures, though he remained Orbotech's largest shareholder.

In December 1992, Richter founded Medinol. He saw that the next big thing in cardiovascular medicine was the stent, a small tube of wire mesh inserted into an artery to hold it open so blood can flow freely. The stents of the early 1990s had flaws: some were so rigid they were hard to insert, while others slipped or collapsed too easily once in place. What was needed was a new kind of stent, flexible while being inserted and stable afterward. Richter and Grisha Pinchasik, a Russian engineer who had recently immigrated to Israel, developed just such a stent, both flexible and stable. The first model was born in Richter's kitchen at Ramat Yohanan, carved out of an empty cottage-cheese container. Five years after Medinol signed a cooperation and distribution agreement with Boston Scientific, its stents were selling 100,000 units a month, for annual sales of $200 million. By the summer and fall of 1999, this tiny Jerusalem-based company held 35% of the world stent market.

What made Medinol's success even more legendary was the unique production method Kobi Richter invented. Thanks to it, Medinol earned 86 cents of after-tax profit on every dollar of revenue. In the late 1990s, Kobi and Judith Richter owned one of the most profitable companies in the world.

In 2000, a bitter legal battle broke out between the Richters and Boston Scientific, and production and distribution ground to a halt. After five years in court, the Richters won. They were awarded $750 million in damages. The money made the daughter of one of the Menger twins (she grew up in the Bitzaron public-housing neighborhood) and the son of a Zionist soldier (he grew up on Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan) one of the richest couples in Israel.

I have known Kobi for many years; he is a good friend. As usual, I met him at his seaside villa in the affluent suburb of Arsuf, north of Tel Aviv. Standing in his living room, he pressed an invisible button and summoned a hydraulic wine cabinet holding his finest bottles. He opened a 1964 Burgundy, poured it into a decanter, waited a while, then poured it into glasses. He asked what I thought of the wine, then told me what I ought to think. He told me a great deal about Burgundy, about the particular vineyard and winery that had produced this bottle, and about how local inheritance law had shaped Burgundy's winemaking traditions. Then, having tasted the wine, he delivered his final verdict: sublime. He raised his glass to fine wine, to fine books, and to all the work that had been done.

I put to Kobi the question I had once asked Michael Strauss: "What led Israel to success? What does Israel mean for Orbotech and Medinol?" The secret, Richter answered, was "beating swords into plowshares." Not because it was good for peace, he said with a laugh, but because it was good for plowshares. Forging swords was not just the call of the prophecies of Isaiah and Micah; it was also a sound business plan. What made Orbotech and Medinol possible, and what made Israel's high-tech boom a reality, was the enormous resources the state had poured into advanced military industry for decades. The defense industry means to Israel what the space program means to the United States. The remarkable human capital it built and the cutting-edge technology it developed eventually spilled over into high-tech manufacturing and drove it forward. No wonder Medinol's breakthroughs were made by three pilots and two winners of the Israel Defense Prize; no wonder they all rested on Israeli laser and missile technology. Over 50 years, what the state invested in defending itself paid off, yielding large dividends in the form of a flourishing high-tech sector.

But there was a second factor, Richter said. Orbot had a multidisciplinary team of outstanding individuals. "We had the best artificial intelligence, the best computer hardware, the best precision mechanics. That team could do anything. This is typically Israeli, too: a small elite team of highly qualified professionals working day and night toward a shared goal. Medinol was a variation on the same theme. At Medinol, one person dealt with every discipline in the company, his own included: biology, medicine, engineering, computer science and precision mechanics. In a big American corporation, getting a programmer to understand vascular biology, or a doctor to understand materials engineering, is almost impossible. So final decisions have to be hammered out by negotiation, a tedious and imprecise process. But at Medinol it was all integrated, just as Orbotech was a fully interdisciplinary company. We saved time and tripled our efficiency. The company worked like a tight-knit organism: focused, strong, healthy, and able to achieve the best results. In many young Israeli companies, similar systems run in different models and forms. Their small, unified teams have a loyalty, a pragmatism and a drive to innovate that you almost never see in American or European companies."

The third factor was immigration, Richter said. "In the 1990s, a million Russians came to Israel, among them several hundred thousand extremely talented engineers, technicians and programmers. Orbotech and Medinol both benefited. About 85% of our employees were Russian immigrants. A Russian immigrant invented the rigid-flex board and became a co-owner of the company. All of Israeli industry benefited from this wave of immigration. When Jewish creativity met Russian thoroughness, the collision produced outstanding, fruitful results. If you ask me what made me successful, and what made Israel's high-tech revolution successful, there are four reasons: the infrastructure of the defense industry, Israeli creativity, Russian skills, and small, fearless teams that bring together expertise from different fields. The unique combination that made my companies succeed also worked for Israel. It saved Israel by steadying this young nation."

Richter connected one historical moment to the next: "For the 20 years Israel was busy building kibbutzim, I lived on a kibbutz. For the 20 years Israel was busy building an army, I was in the army. For the 20 years Israel was busy developing high technology, I worked in high technology. I happened to be at every focal point of Israel's progress. My life carried me from one Israeli legend into the next."