How do you respond to people who excel you in invention, creativity and wealth?

Do you envy them? Do you feel their success somehow?

Diminishes you? Or do you admire what they've achieved and try to emulate it?

These questions sum up what I call the Israel Test.

In the 1880s, European Jews settled in Mandate, Palestine and brought an agricultural miracle in that desolate territory,

then sparsely populated by a few score thousand Jews and a couple hundred thousand Arabs.

The Jewish settlers drained malaria swamps, leaped salt from the soils,

terrorists, the barren hills, and planted millions of trees. They massively expanded the capacity of the land,

and enabled it to support a substantial Arab population.

In the two decades between 1921 and 1943, Jews quadrupled the number of enterprises,

multiplied the number of jobs by a factor of ten, and increased the level of capital investment a hundredfold.

Far from displacing Arabs, they provided the capital for a major expansion of Arab farms,

and enabled a sevenfold rise in Arab population by 1948 to a level of 1.35 million,

the largest in the long history of Palestine.

In other words, the Arabs came to what would soon be the state of Israel because of the Jews.

By comparison, Transjordan, now known as Jordan, with the same geological endowment and four times the land,

but no Jews was able to sustain a population density only one-tenth of the population density of Palestine.

Crucial to Israel's accomplishments were world-leading technological advances in the recovery of water through desalinization, drip irrigation, and sewage recycling.

Over the past 50 years, Israel has increased its population tenfold, its agricultural production 16fold, and its industrial production 50fold,

while actually reducing net water consumption by 10% since 1948.

This huge expansion of effective water resources enabled the land to support not only more Jews, but also millions more Arabs.

Today, the state of Israel, with its astonishing achievements in computer science and other high-tech fields, distills both the genius of the Jews,

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