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 wrought 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 malarial swamps, leet salt from the soils, terraced 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 quadruple the number of enterprises, multiplied

the number of jobs by a factor of 10, 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 seven-fold 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, Trans Jordan, 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 10-fold, its agricultural production 16-fold,

and its industrial production 50-fold, 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,

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