Israel to Boost Arab Employment in High-Tech

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Israel will fund a NIS 21.6 million ($6.1 million) program to train and integrate more than 2,000 Arab Israeli women and men into the local high-tech industry over the next two years as part of a continued effort to narrow the employment and income gaps between Jewish and Arab Israelis.

 The Israel Innovation Authority (IAA) together with the labor division of the Economy and Industry Ministry selected 12 programs for the training and placement of 2,239 people from the Arab population. The 12 selected programs will receive an aggregate government grant of NIS 12 million and the remainder is to be financed by private funds.

 Participation rates of the Arab population in the tech employment market remains low despite numerous government initiatives.

 Long touted as the growth engine of the Israeli economy, the tech sector accounts for around 25% of the country’s total income tax revenue and constitutes about 10% of the workforce. Arab Israelis make up some 20% of the population but just 2% of Arab men and 1% of Arab women working in the tech industry, according to government data. That compares with 12% of secular Jewish men and 8% of secular Jewish women.

 At the same time, the tech industry is facing an acute shortage of skilled engineers and programmers. This scarcity could cause the engine to stall, and the country is seeking to tap into new populations sectors to keep it going.

 Low-income populations have largely been left on the sidelines of the nation’s high-tech boom, including the ultra-Orthodox, Arab Israelis, and women, resulting in large income gaps. The ultra-Orthodox and Arab populations, among the poorest in Israel today, are expected to constitute half of the population by 2065, according to the OECD.

“This reflects a lack of the skills needed for them to get high-productivity and well-paid jobs,” according to the OECD report. “Integrating the Arab-Israeli and Haredim into the labour market remains one of the key challenges for the Israeli economy.”

 This year, over 10,000 workers from the Arab population were employed in the tech industry, but half of them were in non-technological positions, according to Tair Ifergan, director general of the labor division at the Economy and Industry Ministry.

 “Although the percentage of Arab citizens employed in the tech industry is still below the national average, in recent years, we have seen an increasingly positive trend of integration of the Arab population and a significant increase in the number of Arab students studying tech-related subjects in academia,” said IIA CEO Dror Bin. “We aim to increase the number of Arab citizens employed in tech and create a significant economic, social and regional change as part of the strengthening and diversification of the Israeli tech sector.”

 “Rapid and proper integration of graduates of these programs will be one of the significant steps toward reducing the shortage of tech personnel in the long term,” Bin noted.

 More than half of the selected programs in the project will train for advanced development positions in the tech sector, such as programming, and include theoretical and practical on-the-job training. Soft skills will also be part of the training to expand the candidates’ skill set and boost their chances of getting a high-quality job in tech.

 One of the funded programs will provide training and help in the job placement in the following four tech areas: robotics and automation, verification, DevOps and data analytics. Another program focuses on career development and promotion to managerial positions for tech workers in Arab society.

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Israel’s Tech Firms Do Business in Saudi Arabia

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By Jonathan Ferziger and Peter Waldman. BloombergBusinessWeek 2-2-2017

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Over the course of 30 years working in Israeli intelligence, Shmuel Bar immersed himself in the hermeneutics of terrorism. Using techniques of literary analysis more familiar to Koranic scholars and Bible critics, he came to recognize the distinctive language and religious phrases that suicide bombers used in their farewell videos. “Victory is with the patient” appeared frequently in the martyrdom declarations of Hamas recruits. Al-Qaeda adherents favored the call “God, count them, kill them, and don’t leave any of them.”

Bar, a tousle-haired 62-year-old with a wry sensibility, emerged from government service in 2003 amid the proliferation of global terrorism, and in the rising sense of doom he saw a business opportunity. He founded a company called IntuView, a miner of data in the deep, dark web—a sort of Israeli version of Palantir, the Silicon Valley security contractor. Tapping engineering talent in Israel’s startup hub of Herzliya, he adapted his analyst’s ear for language to custom algorithms capable of sifting through unending streams of social media messages for terrorist threats. He sold his services to police, border, and intelligence agencies across Europe and the U.S.

Then, two years ago, an e-mail arrived out of the blue. Someone from the upper echelons of power in Saudi Arabia, Bar says, invited him to discuss a potential project via Skype. The Saudis had heard about his technology and wanted his help identifying potential terrorists. There was one catch: Bar would have to set up a pass-through company overseas to hide IntuView’s Israeli identity. Not a problem, he said, and he went to work ferreting out Saudi jihadis with a software program called IntuScan, which can process 4 million Facebook and Twitter posts a day. Later, the job expanded to include public-opinion research on the Saudi royal family.

“It’s not as if I went looking for this,” Bar says, still bemused by the unexpected turn in a life spent confronting Israel’s enemies. “They came to me.”

“If it’s a country which is not hostile to Israel that we can help, we’ll do it”

Bar says he meets freely these days with Saudis and other Gulf Arabs at overseas conferences and private events. Trade and collaboration in technology and intelligence are flourishing between Israel and a host of Arab states, even if the people and companies involved rarely talk about it publicly. When a London think tank recently disinvited Bar from speaking on a panel, explaining that a senior Saudi official was also coming and it wasn’t possible to have them appear together, Bar told the organizers that he and the Saudi gentleman had in fact been planning to have lunch together at a Moroccan restaurant nearby before walking over to the event together. “They were out-Saudi-ing the Saudis,” he says.

Peace hasn’t come to the Middle East. This isn’t beating swords into plowshares but a logical coalescence of interests based on shared fears: of an Iranian bomb, jihadi terror, popular insurgency, and an American retreat from the region. IntuView has Israeli export licenses and the full support of its government to help any country facing threats from Iran and militant Islamic groups. “If it’s a country which is not hostile to Israel that we can help, we’ll do it,” Bar says. Only Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq are off-limits.

The Saudis and other oil-rich Arab states are only too happy to pay for the help. “The Arab boycott?” Bar says. “It doesn’t exist.”

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