Start-up nationalism: The rationalities of neoliberal Zionism

Introduction: Start-Up Nation

“Start-Up Nation” has gained popularity as a metonym for Israel, recasting the state as a model of successful, unique, entrepreneurial and technological activity. This article will analyze Senor and Singer’s 2011 book, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (where this idea first appeared) and the discursive claims that its authors make. I understand this “start-up discourse” to be part of an emerging, traveling narrative about Israel’s supposed economic and scientific exceptionalism. However, this discourse segregates economic development from the long processes of settler colonial expropriation of Palestinian assets and land. Further, I argue that this discourse represents a form of “neoliberal Zionism” that valorizes an entrepreneurial ethos syncretized with Zionist claims about history, modernity, and subjectivity. This discourse claims that Israel operates as an enterprising conglomerate, a successful management model that should be replicated in other capitalist states.

Start-Up Nation was published by the U.S. American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR is a United States based think-tank and membership organization with a long history of influence in U.S. foreign policy. Dan Senor is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the CFR and Saul Singer writes for the Jerusalem Post, one of the most popular English dailies covering Israel (Council on Foreign Relations, 2019). According to Laurence Shoup, the CFR has long been composed of business leaders, academics, and government officials who promote economic interests at home and abroad to position the U.S. in the center of a global capitalist system (Shoup, 2015). The CFR continually publishes position papers on foreign policy that are picked up by media organizations and government officials, and its own influential magazine, Foreign Affairs (Shoup, 2015: 70–71).CFR members have been well-represented in large U.S. corporations and successive presidential administrations. A significant number of senior foreign policy officials have been active members of the CFR, including secretary of states such as Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, and Condoleezza Rice, as well as several members of the executive branch itself, George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Bill Clinton. In all, as Shoup writes, the CFR “does not operate in isolation; rather it is at the center of an extensive network of key institutions in a number of interconnected realms of U.S. social life: politics, think tanks, finance and economics, higher education, philanthropy, media and culture” (Shoup, 2015: 91). In particular, the CFR has been central to disseminating neoliberalism as a preferred model for U.S. and global capitalism (Shoup, 2015).

The Council on Foreign Relations generally portrays Israel as a geopolitical asset for the United States (Shoup, 2015: 255). These kinds of discourses have long been used to tie the two countries together, de-politicizing shared U.S. and Israeli geopolitical interests, especially after the beginning of the so-called War on Terror (Veracini, 2007). In this way, the CFR helps produce a global discourse that celebrates Israeli innovativeness, especially in relation to its supposed technological, scientific, and economic expertise. Start-Up Nation should be read in this context. While the book was published by a U.S. think-tank, it still reflects a particular kind of traveling discourse on Israeli ingenuity, especially in relation to the international reputation of the country’s military and security expertise, as Rhys Machold has studied in great detail (2016, 2017). What I would like to focus on in this article, is the way that Start-Up Nation, as representative of neoliberal Zionism in general, tries to identify Israel as a perfect model for economic success by celebrating the state’s unique cultural entrepreneurialism premised on military conscription and training. Start-Up Nation does not reflect the actual neoliberal economy in Israel—which I will briefly attend to in my conclusion—but rather reimagines tropes of Israeli ingenuity that have long been used to legitimize ongoing settler colonial expropriation.

The discourse of Israel as a “start-up” relies on a general understanding of the virtues of this kind of economic activity. In the book, “start-up” is used to both describe the Israeli economy and its cultural attributes. It is understood that many small Israeli high-tech industries are start-ups (Swed and Butler, 2015). A plethora of start-ups does not necessarily mean success in the long-run—in fact, startups are often characterized by a high rate of failure (Cockayne, 2019: 83). In fact, The Economist has routinely questioned the basis of such a start-up economy in Israel. For instance, start-ups rely on a steady infusion of capital investment, and often the goal is not to create a long-term sustainable high-tech business but “cash out” to a company abroad. Israel has not produced a large tech multinational on the scale as those in United States, nor like other industrialized countries for that matter (2012, 2014). Israel does have a high number of start-ups in relation to other states (see Breznitz, 2007; Gordon, 2011; Swed and Butler, 2015) that also attract a lot of venture capital, but in Israel, the goal is to wield early success into contracts with large American multinationals like Google and IBM (The Economist, 2012).

But what is a “start-up”? Daniel Cockayne argues for understanding “start-up” less as a definition for a type of company and more of a “performative discourse” (2019: 79) “produced through working practices” (Cockayne, 2019: 84). Academic, industry, and popular sources all employ “start-up,” assuming a common-sensical definition that is, in reality, contradictory, “fuzzy,” and descriptive of a wide range of labor practices and company structures (Cockayne, 2019: 84). For industry-based as well as popular discourses, “start-up” seems to connote informal and flexible (yet intense) work environments and small-sized businesses in the process of developing their first product who are seeking to attract venture capital to spur exponential growth (Cockayne, 2019). Start-ups are heavily associated with entrepreneurialism, innovation meant to disrupt the status quo of the capitalist economy (see Goldstein, 2018). However, as Cockayne cautions, these definitions can still proliferate depending on how the term is used.

In what way do start-up discourses perform certain kinds of ideological work? What distinguishes how “start-up” is employed in Zionist discourses is its reliance on a discourse of cultural ingenuity. In Start-Up Nation, the building of the nation-state is itself marked by entrepreneurial energy, creativity, and innovation. In the book, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres writes that the state is “itself a perpetual start-up” (Senor and Singer, 2011: xiii). Not only does Israel represent economic success but it is in competition with other nation-states who fail to exhibit the unique cultural cocktail of Israeli society and therefore lack an “entrepreneurial culture” (Senor and Singer, 2011: 19, 106, 157). “Culture” is an important (and vague) marker for Israeli superiority. Backing such claims, Senor and Singer quote reporter Thomas Friedman who said, “I would rather have Israel’s problems, which are mostly financial, mostly about governance, and mostly about infrastructure, rather than Singapore’s problem because Singapore’s problem is culture-bound” (Senor and Singer, 2011: 271). Cultural difference persists throughout the book. Start-Up Nation represents Arab countries as the antithesis to neoliberal Zionism. According to Senor and Singer, these states lack Israel’s national purpose and economic and managerial flexibility, necessary to produce innovation (Chapter 13: The Sheikh’s Dilemma). Start-Up Nation “sells” Israel as a model for economic (and thus, societal) success—similar to how Israeli models of security are being exported to the rest of the world (Halper, 2015; Machold, 2016, 2017).

Start-Up Nation is not an isolated text. Since the publication of the book, the phrase has been employed in countless interviews, articles, institutional documents, advertisements, blogs, diplomatic communique and even in an episode of Conan O’Brien when the host visits the Tel Aviv headquarters of the popular road directions app, Waze (Team Coco, 2017). Similar claims to Israel’s business exceptionalism are appearing more and more in the world of nonfiction (and self-published) literature. With blurbs from people like Michael Bloomberg, Tony Blair, and Shimon Peres, Seth M. Siegel’s book, Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World, refurbishes the Zionist myth of the “conquest of the desert,” and argues that Israel can be a model for technological and sustainable solutions to climate change induced scarcity (2015). In the last several years, there have been other titles like The Weapons Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Superpower (Katz and Bohbot, 2017) and Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World (Jorisch, 2018), from authors with ties to Israeli and U.S. media outlets.

In addition, article after article reiterates these same tropes. The Times of Israel, an online English daily, has its own Startup Israel Blog (subtitle: All the News from Silicon Wadi) that tracks Israeli technological and scientific news (Startup Israel Blog, 2019). In Forbes, we find “New Silicon Valley in the Middle East” (Karie, 2015) in Bloomberg, “Israel Sows Cyber Hub in Desert to Make Beersheba Bloom” (Ackerman, 2015), in Foreign Affairs, “How Israeli Conscription Drives Innovation” (Braw, 2017) and “Israel’s Self-Driving Future” (Jorisch, 2017). The Economist has covered the Israeli tech industry often in the last decade, employing different iterations of the nickname to communicate either positive or negative economic futures (2011, 2014, 2017). The US Embassy in Israel also employs the brand, saying that “U.S. firms have been a big part of the Start-Up Nation story” (US Embassy, 2019).

These discourses about Israel are consistently used as a way to celebrate Israeli society and represent the state as a secular, Western-oriented, capitalist nation, eliding its more complex socio-economic realities. The book and these kinds of recent discourses de-politicize ongoing conflict with Palestinians, sanitize Israel’s history of any reference to settler-colonialism, and also erase the diversity of Palestinian and Israeli identities. “Start-up nation” discourses are not the first to celebrate Israeli ingenuity and economy. There are many who have celebrated various Israeli and Zionist achievements throughout the years, whether agricultural kibbutzim and infrastructural development (Lowdermilk, 1944), the transformation of the desert through technological progress (Morris, 1961), and Israel’s so-called unique combination of collective purpose and scientific enterprise (Popkin, 1971). One could even look back at Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel, Alt-Neu Land (Old-New Land) that imagines a Jewish state in Palestine which achieves great technological and economic wonder, benefiting the Middle East and the world as a whole (1987).

This article argues that the “start-up nation” is indicative of neoliberal Zionism, which emphasizes Israeli economic exceptionalism in relation to contemporary ideas about high-tech capitalism. To understand neoliberal Zionism, I will turn to scholarship that looks at neoliberalism, not merely as economic policy, but as a form of governmentality—that is, Michel Foucault’s term for understanding the way that liberal governance functions to produce its ideal subjects. This allows me to delve deeper into neoliberal start-up discourses and their present relationship to Zionism. I close-read the text, Start-Up Nation, as indicative of neoliberal Zionist governmentality. Start-Up Nation’s neoliberal Zionism refigures Zionist historiography to create a teleology of contemporary Israeli capitalism, emphasizes the role of the military in creating a unique Israeli “culture,” and frames Arabs and Palestinians as inferior, due to their perceived lack of entrepreneurial activity. I will first present a theoretical basis for understanding neoliberal Zionist governmentality as well as identify a gap in the literature on Israel/Palestine in order to show how neoliberalism and Zionism mobilize and constitute each other, rather than exist as discrete objects.

Neoliberal Zionist governmentality

Current scholarship on Israel/Palestine tends to view neoliberalism mostly as economic policy. For instance, many scholars look at how neoliberal economic policies have dismantled the welfare state, increasing social isolation and economic inequality (Ram, 2008), changes in unions and labor organizing (Preminger, 2018) and monetary and banking policy (Krampf, 2018; Shalev, 2000). An analysis of neoliberalism has also been central to understanding the changing forms of Israeli violent intervention into Palestinian lives. Scholars look at increased capitalization of military and security technologies and expertise as a global business (Clarno, 2017; Gordon, 2008; Hever, 2010; Halper, 2015). Shir Hever, in particular, shows how foreign aid, monetary policy, custom controls and the “outsourcing” of security to the Palestinian Authority, allows Israel to perpetuate the Occupation without accepting the full economic burden, all the while creating a niche for private capital to profit (2010).

Other scholars have also shown how neoliberalism, as economic policy, significantly impacts Palestinian governance and political aspirations. Toufiq Haddad (2016) extensively accounts how the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, along with the U.S. and Israel, sought to guide peace-and-state-building in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Along with changes in the Palestinian Authority’s own governance approaches, multilaterals were able to shift the parameters of the peace plan from Palestinian national liberation to economic stability, defined by consumerism and protections for foreign capital. Raja Khalidi and Sobhi Samour argue that Palestinian nationalism is becoming more about “neocolonial relations and exchange” rather than about anticolonial struggle (2011: 6). While this scholarship is incredibly important for understanding the political economy of Israel, Palestine, and the Occupation, this article diverges from them to understand the specific manifestation of neoliberal political rationality in relation to Zionism.

Geographers and other social scientists have come to understand the emergence of neoliberalism as neither globally homogenous nor locally determinative (Peck and Tickell, 2002). As Wendy Larner writes, neoliberalism has “different variants” and scholars should pay attention to the “hybrid nature of contemporary policies and programmes, or to the multiple and contradictory aspects of neoliberal spaces, techniques and subjects” (emphasis in the original, 2003). Since Larner’s article, there has been much scholarly attention to the different manifestations of what is called “neoliberalism” (see Birch, 2017; Springer et al., 2016). Below, I follow from these arguments to understand how Zionism (a type of nationalism) and neoliberalism can be co-constitutive in relation to Israel, Palestine, and the conflict itself.

For simplicity’s sake, I will chiefly refer to “Zionism” in this article. What is called “Zionism” represents the homogenization of different 18th and 19th century European Jewish groups who offered varied approaches to the so-called “Jewish Question,” that is, the Jewish future in European society. Attending to the Jewish Question relied on the formation of the very notion of Jews as a historical and territorial people, formed in relation to a European “biologically determined ethnoracial hierarchy” that excluded Jews based on their imagined difference (Geller, 2011: 6–7). Zionism claimed that Jews were a unified national people that deserved self-determination like other nations. Over time, specific Zionist groups were able to build the organizational structure to back their aims and support a decades-long program of settlement in Palestine (Laqueur, 2003; Shimoni, 1995).

Zionists across the ideological spectrum critically engaged with questions of political economy. In many cases, Zionists sought to counter European antisemitic tropes that imagined Jews as subversive to “normal” economic activity, as usurers controlling Gentile interests, or parasitic rag-pickers and tinkers at the margins, that is, unproductive, otherwise “incapable of honest labor” (Penslar, 2001: 5; Also see Geller, 2011). Drawing from dominant European nationalisms of the time, some forms of Zionism sought to prove that Jews, once given their own state, would evolve into economically productive subjects. Zionists adopted colonial ideas of “improvement,” which often classed indigenous and non-European varieties of cultivation as “wasteful.” In doing so, Zionist political-economy was especially racialized, imagining a separate Jewish nation in opposition to wasteful Palestinians (Bhandar, 2018: 117–135). Pre-state Zionist settlement organizations, especially those affiliated with the Labor Zionist movement—ostensibly socialist and ethnocratic—linked colonial ideas of improvement and waste to a rejection of antisemitic tropes about labor, emphasizing agricultural work—so-called honest labor. Derek Penslar calls this the “ideology of productivization” which carried a “profound belief in the moral elevation inherent in the efficient exploitation of the soil” (1991: 30). This new Zionist subject would be the key for developing a sovereign Jewish economy in Palestine. To produce a sovereign economy, Zionists ignored their economic and social commerce with Palestinians and pushed policies that sought to exclude them from the labor market (Lockman, 1996; Shafir, 1996).

In negotiating with the barriers to settlement such as the particular contours of land ownership, colonial rule, labor regimes, and Palestinian national aspirations, Zionists developed an ideological response that sought to valorize ethnocratic labor and aid in creating a bifurcated economy (see Khalidi and Shihadeh, 2017; Lockman, 1996; Shafir, 1996). There emerged a particular Zionist subject that would assist in the construction of this ideal state and society, what we could analyze as a nascent Zionist governmentality. The concept of governmentality, as I will explore more in-depth below, was introduced by Michel Foucault as a way to understand the operation of power in liberal societies through displaced management, rather than direct, disciplinary force. Governmentality is a way to analyze how “one conducts the conduct of men,” addressing the “management of the whole social body” (Foucault, 2008: 186). In a Zionist governmentality, certain kinds of behaviors and values were repeatedly re-inscribed as proper in relation to the nation itself. Jewish workers were reshaped as pioneers, infused with a nationalist fervor that celebrated the hardships of “frontier” life. Zionist governmentality sought to shape Jewish workers’ conduct through “self-conquest,” hoping they would become better adapted to the strenuous agricultural labor for which they were not as skilled as Palestinians (Shafir, 1996: 60).

A Zionist governmentality emerged that attempted to address the challenges of Jewish labor and mass settlement by emphasizing uniqueness and exceptionalism. Zionists did not only hope to prove Jews equal to Europeans; they argued Jews would become exceptional once given a state, or as Herzl claimed Jews “wish to be the most modern in the world” (1988 [1896]: 145). Max Nordau, Herzl’s friend and fellow Political Zionist said that, in fact, Jews are “more industrious and abler than the average European, not to mention the moribund Asiatic and African” in his speech to the First Zionist Congress (Nordau, 1997: 235). This exceptionalism was premised on a specific European Jewish subject, at the expense of non-Europeans and non-European Jews. Sephardim, from Southern Europe and parts of the Levant, Mizrahim, or “Oriental Jews” from Arab countries and North Africa, and communities from Ethiopia, Iran, India, and elsewhere, have long been the targets of colonialist practices of improvement (Shohat, 1988).

How might we further think of Zionism through a governmentality analysis? In particular, governmentality investigates the political rationalities that inform governance and subjectification (Lemke, 2002: 50). Many scholars have followed from Foucault and understand governmentality, as Wendy Brown writes, as “a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one that produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social” (2005: 37). As Thomas Lemke puts it, in general, governmentality “endeavors to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual codetermine each other’s emergence” (2002: 50–51). The Zionist subject emerges in relation to its specific contribution to nation and state-building.

Following from Foucault (2008), some scholars understand neoliberalism as a new kind political rationality, (Dardot and Laval, 2013; Lemke, 2002; Read, 2009), rather than as an intensification of capitalism; Wendy Brown writes, pithily, that neoliberalism is not “a bundle of economic policies with inadvertent political and social consequences” (2005: 38). In particular, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval define neoliberal rationality as the widespread use of the “logic of the market as a generalized normative logic” that forms the state and individual subjectivity and is a novel departure from liberal capitalist notions of governance (2013: 18). In neoliberal governmentalities, both states and individuals are judged according to their ability to operate as “enterprises” and “entrepreneurs,” that is, through generalized competition as the norm of social relations (Dardot and Laval, 2013). In this way, neoliberalism seeks to be an all-encompassing theory of society and of the individual. For instance, Brown writes that “neoliberalism carries a social analysis that, when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire” and does so by “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action” (2005: 39–40, emphasis in the original).

Neoliberal governmentalities employ the enterprise—a business or company—as their model of the state. The enterprise does not represent the “super-market society,” nor a “society subject to the commodity-effect, but a society subject to the dynamic of competition” (Foucault, 2008: 147). In this form, society, “all the way down,” reflect “basic units of the enterprise” (Foucault, 2008: 148). The enterprise, “by diffusing and multiplying … as much as possible” crowds out different social forms and degrades communal reliance on large institutional or state-scale organization and becomes the “formative power of society” (Foucault, 2008: 148). Enterprises compete with each other. The state will also come to be judged as an enterprise, evaluated by economic conduct and its ability to aid in the proliferation of enterprises. As Dardot and Laval write, the state then acts as “an enterprise in the service of enterprises” (2013: 228, emphasis in the original), “governed by rules of competition and subject to efficiency constraints similar to those experienced by private enterprises” (216). The state appears in a new form, running like a business, and valorizing specific types of economic and social relations. The very nickname, “start-up nation,” perhaps invites an analysis of Israel as an enterprise, one that is in competition with other countries and is presented as a model of business exceptionalism.

An entrepreneur—another term that is liberally applied in popular discourses—is someone who takes on risk to start new businesses and find new opportunities. An entrepreneur is a dynamic subject in motion, marked by their creative ability to adapt and innovate. Schumpeterian ideas of the entrepreneur (Joseph Schumpeter, Austrian political-economist) often focus on the individual as a “creator and disruptor” who helps upend the existing economic trends and assumptions, an image that is popular in tech fields (Goldstein, 2018: 38). Neoclassical ideas also see the entrepreneur as a “heroic example of economic man, or homo economicus, the rational economic actor who populates [neoclassical economists’] theoretical universe” (Goldstein, 2018: 38).

The neoliberal entrepreneurial subject is also homo economicus (Dardot and Laval, 2013: 259–263; Read, 2009: 31). This entrepreneur is self-possessed, impulsively seeking to accumulate human capital – a term that Foucault draws from American neoliberal, Gary Becker (Read, 2009). Neoliberal governmentality generalizes the enterprise into the entire social body. In neoliberal society, as Dardot and Laval write, there is a “homogenization of the discourse of man around the figure of the enterprise” where neoliberalism “[abolishes] any sense of alienation and even any distance between individuals and the enterprises employing them” (2013: 260). The individual is now an accumulator of their own capital. This sleight of hand abolishes the difference between worker and capitalist; the entrepreneurial subject now values their own exploitation as conducive to good economic and social conduct (Cockayne, 2016; Read, 2009). Entrepreneurial subjects then reproduce this relationship by celebrating their own precarity (Cockayne, 2016) and normalize competition as a general social form (Dardot and Laval, 2013; Foucault, 2008). In all, this valorization of the enterprise form and the entrepreneurial subject represents the novelty of “neoliberal rationality,” that is “the congruence it endeavors to achieve between a responsible moral individual and an economic-rational individual” (Lemke, 2002: 59).

Neoliberal Zionist governmentality combines the political rationalities intertwined with neoliberal subject-making with the nationalist, settler colonial goals of Zionism to claim economic exceptionalism. In neoliberal Zionism, the conduct of ideal citizen-subjects refigures the image of the pioneering settlers laboring on land as a forerunner to a high-tech entrepreneur, adaptive to the global market’s needs. While scholars have understood neoliberalism to produce an atomized, self-possessed individual (see Dardot and Laval, 2013; Mirowski, 2014), the neoliberal Zionist subject personifies the nation-state. As I will show in my reading of Start-Up Nation below, Israeli entrepreneurs are made to represent Israel both metaphorically, as idealized citizens, and literally, as emissaries to foreigners. The national history and its collective are central to this neoliberal Zionist governmentality. In neoliberal Zionism, Israeli entrepreneurs are not in competition with each other; rather, the enterprise of Israel is in competition with other states and peoples.

However, the relationship between neoliberalism and Zionism is not seamless, nor without its contradictions. Neoliberal Zionism is not necessarily a successful monolithic entity. Foucault tended to assume a direct, uninterrupted link between theoretical neoliberalism and the way social and economic realities were manifest (Mirowski, 2014: 97). It is not the case that seamless governmentalities result in perfect neoliberal subjects, but subjects are instead fractured, contradictory, and do not necessarily exhibit desired conduct (see Mirowski, 2014). Neoliberal Zionism, specifically seen through Start-Up Nation and similar discourses, is indicative of a perpetual attempt in Zionism to justify settler colonialism by attuning itself to shifting political-economic contexts. I see Start-Up Nation as mired more in anxiety than confidence. The constant reiteration of Israel as a “start-up nation,” is accompanied by a subliminal hum of insecurity. Foucault, also did not imagine a completely successful project, but also recognized the “permanent ‘failures’ of programs,” that produced unanticipated results (Lemke, 2002: 56–57). This article focuses on how start-up discourses work to justify specific narratives about the reality of Israel/Palestine.

Start-Up Nation

In the following section, I will close-read Start-Up Nation as representative of neoliberal Zionism. There are several components to how neoliberal Zionism functions in this text. Senor and Singer do not actively promote “Zionism”—instead, “Israel” functions as a signifier for a nationalist ideology. “Zionism” is in some ways absent from the text (though appears here and there without much explanation). However, the text operates as Zionist, reiterating its major historical claims in a neoliberal context. For instance, Start-Up Nation elides all mention of settler-colonialism (which contradicts any claims to a Jewish “return”). It also refigures Zionist socialist and non-capitalist histories in order to create a teleology of high-tech capitalism. Further, Start-Up Nation argues that Israel is exceptional because of its unique cultural attributes, that is, Israelis are entrepreneurs because of the social values that arise out of (near) universal military conscription, failing to mention is that universal conscription is far from the case in Israel (Hever, 2018: 45–46). In fact, in the book, military service is hardly about military endeavors at all, but instead serves as a training course for aspiring start-up entrepreneurs. And finally, neoliberal Zionism produces its own brand of entrepreneurial Orientalism, wherein Israel is placed firmly in the “West” as a universal site of exceptional conduct. Arab states and Palestinian-Arab citizens are seen as outside of this “West,” anti-entrepreneurial, lacking in the capacity for a creative, flexible, democratic capitalism. The book frames Israeli enterprise as in direct competition with Arab neighbors (failed enterprises) in order to impress upon American readers the state’s primary value as a model for business management.

How does Start-Up Nation frame its enterprising and entrepreneurial subjects? Senor and Singer argue that Israel is an exceptional hyper-democratic, egalitarian, pioneering culture with citizens who excel at science, technology, and economic activity thanks to a unique cocktail of cultural characteristics. While there is a brief attempt to show a strong cultural connection between Judaism and Zionism (2011: 61), for the most part, the quintessential start-up subject is the secular Israeli Jew. In the formation of the entrepreneurial subject, Senor and Singer do not include Palestinian citizens of Israel nor Orthodox Jews (except as anti-entrepreneurial), nor women (except as victims of Arab patriarchy).

This Israeli citizen is quintessentially an entrepreneur. Senor and Singer define entrepreneurialism as having “initiative, risk-taking, and agility” (2011: 106), with “tenacity, of insatiable questioning of authority, of determined informality, combined with a unique attitude towards failure, teamwork, mission, risk, and cross-disciplinary creativity” (Senor and Singer, 2011: 21), as employing “improvisation” (53), with “assertiveness … independent thinking … ambition” (65). Senor and Singer locate these subjects’ characteristics both in an imagined and revised Israeli history as well as in compulsory military service and even enlist David Ben-Gurion, the pre-state leader of the Jewish community and first Prime Minister, in the project of neoliberal Zionism. They reimagine Ben-Gurion a central fore-runner of managerial success—he is no longer the nationalist leader employing socialist rhetoric, nor directing a developmentalist, centralized state. Ben-Gurion becomes instead a pragmatic, proto-entrepreneur, symbolic of past Zionist pioneering now sanitized for contemporary capitalist consumption. He is the first “national entrepreneur” (29), or “in business terms, Ben-Gurion was the ‘operations guy’ who actually built the country” (130).

The authors call Ben-Gurion a bitzu’ist, a Hebrew-English portmanteau that means “someone who just gets things done” (131), and “the builder, the irrigator, the pilot, the gunrunner, the settler. Israelis recognize the social type: crusty, resourceful, impatient, sardonic, effective, not much in need of thought but not much in need of sleep either” (131). For the authors, bitzu’ist exemplifies a uniquely Zionist type that is “a thread that runs from those who braved marauders and drained the swamps to the entrepreneurs who believe they can defy the odds and barrel through to make their dreams happen” (132). These neoliberal Zionist discourses seek to form a particular type of subjectivity that links the pioneer and the entrepreneur, the old settler and the new, reimagining the frontier itself. Palestinians here are only “marauders”—obscured as political and historical subjects, subsumed into entrepreneurial business training and experience. The book mobilizes the cultural symbolism of non-neoliberal Zionist governmentality to claim contemporary neoliberal exceptionalism. The pioneer of the past is constitutive of the entrepreneur of the present.

Former Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, in his introduction, also revises Zionist settler history in order to imagine a seamless technological continuity that neoliberalizes the kibbutz. In Zionist histories, kibbutzim are often seen as self-avowedly socialist-communal ethnocratic farms, important for settlement, and key symbolic sites for Labor Zionism (Penslar, 1991):

The kibbutz became an incubator, and the farmer a scientist. High-tech in Israel began with agriculture. Even with little land and less water, Israel became an agricultural leader. Though many still consider agriculture the epitome of low-tech, they are mistaken: technology was 95 percent of the secret of Israel’s prodigious agricultural productivity. (Senor and Singer, 2011: xii)

Historical revision justifies the claim that past national cooperation and innovation produced specific kinds of entrepreneurial characteristics. However, for Senor and Singer, compulsory military service is the basis for the maintenance of citizens’ training and economic success in a contemporary economy. In Start-Up Nation, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) appears as a mandatory business internship. Soldiers are “battlefield entrepreneurs” (the title of Chapter 2) in a “purely merit-based institution” (96). The IDF is now an incubator of leadership skills and innovation, leading to the cultivation of business networks that extend into the civilian world. As Senor and Singer write:

The IDF’s improvisational and antihierarchical culture follows Israelis into their start-ups and has shaped Israel’s economy. This culture, when combined with the technological wizardry Israelis acquire in elite military units and from the state-run defense industry, forms a potent mixture (215).

Compulsory military service is not the sole reason for Israeli entrepreneurialism. As Senor and Singer write, about thirty nations have compulsory service but unlike Israel, many of these states are “developing or nondemocratic or both” (2011: 103). The Israeli military, for Senor and Singer, offers a radical “egalitarian” military experience without a crystallized hierarchy thanks in part to the uniqueness of reserve service in which “taxi drivers can command millionaires and twenty-three year-olds can train their uncles” (60). This culture reinforces the “chaotic, antihierarchical ethos that can be found in every aspect of Israeli society, from war room to classroom to board room” (60). This military institutional organization produces a cultural “fluidity” which is, “according to a new school of economists studying key ingredients for entrepreneurialism, is produced when people can cross boundaries, turn societal norms upside down, and agitate in a free-market economy, all to catalyze radical ideas” (122).

This specific cultural and historical cocktail produces a neoliberal Zionist subject that out-competes other national subjects while Israel is an enterprise society that out-competes other nations. The book frames Israel as the most exceptional manifestation of Western progress. This spatial imagination constructs a division within contemporary capitalism, a (potentially) entrepreneurial West against a static, anti-entrepreneurial East (mostly represented by Arab countries):

In a world seeking the key to innovation, Israel is a natural place to look. The West needs innovation; Israel’s got it. Understanding where this entrepreneurial energy comes from, where it’s going, how to sustain it, and how other countries can learn from the quintessential start-up nation is a critical task for our times (23).

The signifier of “Arab” as antagonistic to neoliberal Zionism appears in several guises. Peppered throughout Start-Up Nation are descriptions of Arab threats of violence and boycotts, which ultimately fail to hinder Israeli success. In particular, Senor and Singer focus on Dubai, made representative of the entire Arab world. Chapter 13, “The Sheikh’s Dilemma” begins with a long description of Israeli business practices and innovation of “clusters” that provide economic growth by combining different motivating facets of peoples’ lives. Israel not only innovates enterprising clusters but is an enterprising cluster itself; citizens have multiple commitments that grounds their business lives in family, community, and nation (Senor and Singer, 2011: 237, 244).

In contrast, business people in Dubai are transient, “their emotional commitment and sense of rootedness lie elsewhere” which is “a fundamental obstacle to a fully functioning cluster, and it may also be an impediment to cultivating a high-growth entrepreneurial economy” (244). Neoliberal Zionism has an egalitarian and dynamic citizenry. Insufficiently neoliberal Arab states are stagnant, tied to the individual and familial destinies of their decadent ruling class. In producing this binary, the text again relies on “culture” as the core reason behind entrepreneurial success. Arabs, racialized as a homogenous nation, lack the ability to compete with Israel in entrepreneurial activity. Orientalism constructs the objects of “Islam” and the “Arab world” as perpetually outside of the West. In this relationship, liberalism, as Joseph Massad argues, is consolidated through the production of Islam as its external, perpetual opposite (2015). Neoliberal Zionism grasps established Orientalist explanations, yet adds a new twist: “cultural” inferiority is now tied to a lack of neoliberal capitalist values.

Turning to Israel’s “problem” populations, Senor and Singer represent both Palestinian (in the text, “Arab”) citizens and Ultra-Orthodox Jews as outside of neoliberal Zionism’s governance. Both populations are defined by problematically high birth-rates, a reliance on government welfare, and their low rankings in a range of economic indicators. Both groups do not generally serve in the military, which excludes them from skills training and access to business networks (Senor and Singer, 2011: 269). Other factors that Senor and Singer give for Palestinian citizens’ lackluster entrepreneurial potential (which detach from a long history of settler colonial domination and expropriation) is over-population and a lack of woman’s empowerment. The authors highlight the gender gap that directly impedes the growth potential of the economy in Palestinian and Arab societies (258–259, 269). While it is true that Arab women are not well-represented in the Israeli workforce, Jewish-Israeli women also face significant barriers to employment equity, including a pay gap (67% of what men make, as of 2014), over-concentration in specific occupations, and lack of representation higher up the managerial ladder, according to the Adva Center, an Israeli research centered focused on equity and social justice. It is also the case that while Arab women do participate less in the labor force (27.6% in 2014) they make slightly more money than Arab men due to their high prevalence of college degrees (Dagan-Buzaglo and Hasson, 2015). The ease in which Senor and Singer make this argument shows how neoliberal Zionism draws from Orientalist narratives that conform to tropes of “Eastern” cultural inferiority (Massad, 2015), now indicative of a lack of “start-up” culture. It is also the case that in this argument, specific types of gender inequality only hinder Arab economic potential. And it is not just Arab peoples who are deemed as “outside” of start-up culture. Neoliberal Zionism also frames a homogenized demographic of ultra-Orthodox Jews as anti-entrepreneurial and a potential sap on state resources, thus reinforcing the ideal subject as secular. The line of cultural superiority is drawn around the secular Jew—excluding all those outside as a drain on the state’s human capital.Senor and Singer see these demographic 'bombs' as potential challenges for the start-up nation and present the “worrying” percentage that by 2028, 39% of Israel’s population will either be Arab or Haredi (a specific Orthodox group) (2011: 270).

Ultimately, Start-Up Nation cobbles together these components of neoliberal Zionist governmentality to try to answer the question: Why does Israel have such economic success? For Senor and Singer, “the answer … must lie in the stories of individual entrepreneurs … which are emblematic of the state itself” (2011: 21). Entrepreneurs represent all that is good about the enterprise society. However, they are not the atomized, neoliberal subject, but are rather intimately tied into the reproduction of a nationalist collective. Israelis embark on self-appointed diplomatic missions for the state in which they are not just selling their product but the Israeli economy and, by extension, Israel as conceived through neoliberal Zionism (78)—the “Israelis are always making a pitch for Israel” (81). All Israeli entrepreneurs ultimately clock-in for the start-up nation. The work of an ambassador for Israeli exceptionalism is a 24/7 job; the neoliberal Zionist subject is always at work.

What this neoliberal Zionism sells is an Israel whose economic and business acumen is beneficial to the United States and international capital. It is also a business model for war. Neoliberal Zionism, in its current manifestation, promotes regional conflict as economic opportunity. Senor and Singer set out to prove that, for Israel, conflict may not be an impediment to growth. As they write, “Israel has managed to divorce the security threat from its economic growth opportunities (2011: 183) because investors are confident investing capital in Israel no matter the situation. Bill Gates, for instance, traveled to Israel immediately after the 2006 war with Lebanon to proclaim a “defiant” business environment while Warren Buffett portrayed Israel as safe for capital investment (180–181). Similarly, in 2014, after a Hamas rocket landed near Ben-Gurion airport, Michael Bloomberg criticized the US Federal Aviation Administration for restricting flights to Israel, saying that, “Hamas would like nothing more than to close down Ben-Gurion, isolating Israel from the international community and seriously damaging its economy … the FAA has, regrettably, succeeded in only emboldening Hamas" (Bloomberg, 2014). It is somewhat strange to see a U.S. businessman/politician, running for president as of this writing, criticize federal agencies over a perceived slight to the Israeli economy—of course, “strange” would imply that it is not expected. The “start-up nation” has cultivated such currency in the English-speaking world that these perceived virtues are almost a cliché amongst specific groups of politicians and business people.

Ultimately, neoliberal Zionist governmentality, as exemplified in Start-Up Nation, frames its subject as Western, secular, and unique to modernity. It celebrates the supposedly innate cultural qualities of entrepreneurialism in Israelis, revises and sanitizes Zionist history, and claims Israel can out-compete other nations since it is a perfect model for enterprising economies. Differing from other Zionist governmentalities, neoliberal Zionism refigures the political rationality of contemporary capitalism to argue for Israeli exceptionalism. Zionism, itself, is framed as a force for business management and a template for economic success—not just as a national settler movement.

Conclusion

In this essay, I presented Start-Up Nation as a text indicative of a neoliberal Zionist governmentality in order to show how we might understand this particular relationship between nationalism and neoliberalism. The book’s neoliberal Zionist governmentality emphasizes severalideological facets of neoliberalism such as competition, entrepreneurialism, and the enterprise-state. However, it also seeks to produce a citizen-subject not wholly atomized as an individual, but part of a national collective—even if this collective is imagined as a homogenous population, excluding Palestinians and non-secular Jewish-Israelis. Neoliberal Zionist governmentality also sanitizes ongoing settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel and reduces Palestinian life to its value for Israeli entrepreneurs. I hope to show how neoliberalism, in this local manifestation, was co-constitutive with Zionism—both seek to benefit from the legitimacy that the other offer. To conclude, I will briefly offer some additional critique of this neoliberal Zionist governmentality in order to challenge the normalization of such start-up discourses.

As I have shown throughout this essay, neoliberal Zionist governmentality relies on the production of Palestinians and Arabs as opposites to entrepreneurial Israelis. And it is also the case that large numbers of Israeli-Jews do not benefit from the economic success claimed by start-up nationalists. Start-up discourses not only sanitize the Occupation, ongoing settler colonialism, and geopolitical conflict, but importantly obscures the inequality that has become endemic to Israeli society.

First, Israeli economic success (as envisioned in Start-Up Nation) is reliant on specific industries—such as communications, computer software, and military hardware—that, since the 1970s, are overwhelmingly export-based and tied into security research and development 1970s (Breznitz, 2007; Gordon, 2011; Krampf, 2018). As a result, there are reasons to question the supposed success of the Israeli economy. Israel has some of the worst inequality in the so-called developed world. The Economist, for instance, calls Israel the “left-behind nation” in which, “Oligopolies and monopolies abound, and over the past decade the country’s position in the World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business index has slid from 26th to 52nd. This has meant low wages and high prices. The cost of living is about 20% higher than in Spain and 30% higher than in South Korea” (The Economist, 2017). While neoliberal economic policy has resulted in inequality most everywhere, it seems to be much worse in Israel.

According to the Adva Center, in 2016, around one-fifth of all Israeli households were under the poverty line—though these numbers break down by ethnicity/national identity: 13.2% of Jewish Israeli versus 49.2% of Palestinian Israeli households. Ethiopian Jews had the highest Jewish poverty rate at 22.8% (Swirski et al., 2019). Further, while Start-Up Nation valorizes the Israeli economy as a whole by focusing only on high-tech, beyond this sector, Israel’s productivity is the lowest in OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation) countries. The Adva Center links this to governmental policy of keeping wages low that was instituted after the shift towards “neoliberal” economic policy. Many Israeli workers earn “low wages,” (2/3rds of the median wage), receive low investment, and many foreign workers toil in bad working conditions. Meanwhile, workers’ share in national income fell over the last several decades (Swirski et al., 2016). Housing prices continue to rise—between 2007 and 2015, prices doubled—while wages hardly increased (Swirski and Hoffman-Dishon, 2016).

Are start-ups a way out? A multitude of start-ups does not necessarily mean success in the long-run. In fact, The Economist (hardly a critical outlet) has routinely questioned the strength of such a start-up economy in Israel. For instance, start-ups rely on a steady infusion of capital investment (and since Israel has so many start-ups, they are all competing with each other to attract foreign capital). Israel has not produced a tech multinational on the scale of other industrialized countries (2012, 2014). Israel does attract a lot of venture capital, but since Israeli start-ups tend not to develop into multinationals, often these companies sell quickly to large American multinationals like Google and IBM (The Economist, 2012).

Second, this economic “success” is less about a cultivated entrepreneurial citizenry and more about Israel’s specific political-economic dependence on ongoing Occupation. The Palestinian economy is dependent on the Israeli economy, especially for consumer goods, which in turn, benefits employment in Israel, tax revenue to the government, and profits to Israeli companies, all while international aid—rather than Israeli spending—keeps Palestinians barely afloat (Hever, 2010: 38–39). Simultaneously, international donor pressure has pushed austerity policies and consumerism in the OPT, draining the potential for economic autonomy (Haddad, 2016). Palestinian horizons are repurposed into more policies employing start-up discourses. Instead of a negotiated political solution, Palestine should mimic Israel. In Foreign Affairs, for instance, the new solution is a “Start-Up Palestine,” since “technology start-ups offer the best path forward. High-tech start-ups create well-paying jobs and support growth elsewhere in the economy while avoiding many of the roadblocks that prevent other Palestinian businesses from succeeding” (Kaufman, 2017: 113). Occupation is diminished to “roadblocks” that undermine a self-sustaining Palestinian economy. Neoliberalism offers autonomy through the myopic horizon of the start-up.

Third, the idea that the culture engendered by the Israeli military is the basis for a successful private industry is also dubious. It is a system wholly dependent on the material support of long-term government investment (Breznitz, 2007; Gordon, 2011). In the 1980s, the recession resulted in cuts to the military that precipitated a large displacement of military personnel and draftees into the private sector, who not only have experience in different military technologies, but move in and out of networks formed during their military service. In all, the military and state end up subsidizing much of the research and development necessary to commercialize technologies in a short-term, volatile private sector (Gordon, 2011). As a result, Israel not only commercializes much of its military technologies and expertise but is also a key node in the production and proliferation of weapons globally (Halper, 2015). Success is not cultural—nor is it success. It is an overwhelming infusion of public assets into the private sale of weapons.

Fourth, Senor and Singer’s celebration of a universal Israeli subject also relies on the fallacy that conscription in Israel is universal. In fact, conscription rates have dropped precipitously since the 1980s and stand at around 48% of the total population as of 2010, 74.6% of Jewish men, and 56% of Jewish women (Hever, 2018: 45–47). This occurs for many different reasons: the state does not often enlist Palestinian citizens and the ultra-Orthodox enjoy (for now) high religious exemption rates, especially amongst women. Further, conscription rates correlate with structural class exploitation. Drug abuse and criminal records are grounds for exemption. The IDF tends to avoid recruiting soldiers who would need additional economic support; thus, Hever argues, the increased neoliberalization of Israeli society is a reason for lower conscription. The dismantling of the welfare state not only increased inequality and poverty, but eroded communal solidarity, normalizing the privatization of security (Hever, 2018: 47). The realities of Israeli conscription undermine Senor and Singer’s claims that the military is an egalitarian and universal “incubator” for Israeli entrepreneurial subjects. Instead, it exacerbates already existing divisions.

Finally, we could ask if “start-up” is even a good metaphor for the project of nation and state-building. While start-up implies certain kinds of valorized neoliberal attributes—creativity, flexibility, and innovative hard work—it also describes an enterprise in its early stages that statistically trends towards failure (The Economist, 2011). Start-ups quickly develop then cash out either for a public offering or acquisition by another company (Cockayne, 2019; The Economist, 2015). Start-ups are also reliant on precarious labor regimes (Cockayne, 2016). In Israel, especially, start-up jobs require years of military service and training (Swed and Butler, 2015). What does this say about an enterprise nation? The “start-up nation” is a contradictory attempt to valorize specific types of economic activities. It channels a precarious neoliberal existence into an argument for Zionist success. It refigures the nation as a short-lived, precarious company, bending towards unsustainability, statistical failure, an exhausted, underpaid workforce, and a reliance on foreign investment. Neoliberal Zionism asks its citizen-subjects to work all the time, less for the good of themselves, but the good of the settler nation. Ultimately, the start-up nation model, repackaged and sold to U.S. Americans and Israelis alike, seeks to obscure occupation, austerity, and inequality in the guise of national destiny.