Hatzeva

I missed my high school's 45th reunion this fall, as did Gail (née Zionts) Raz, a friend of mine from the school who now lives in Israel. Both of us live pretty far from Pittsburgh these days, especially Gail, but we didn't see any reason why we couldn't have our own reunion while I was in Israel.

So, on Friday I rented a car and drove down to Hatzeva, a small moshav in the southern Israeli desert, where Gail now lives with her husband of 40+ years, Micha.

A moshav is similar to the better known kibbutz, except in a nod to human behavior, the farms are owned individually, not collectively. However, a lot of equipment, such as plows and tractors, are owned collectively, making these a highly efficient form of farming.

The moshav Hatzeva is located in a very remote part of Israel, in the Arava desert, just south of the Dead Sea, and about 500 feet below sea level! In fact, the drive in is spectacular. Southern Israel is mostly flat and not very interesting, but when you reach the escarpment that marks the edge of the Great Rift, the same rift the Leakeys made famous in Kenya, the earth drops 3,000 feet down to the lowest spot on the planet, the Dead Sea, and the Raz's home.

Road hazards in southern Israel

The bottom of the Arava Valley, with Jordan to the east. Unfortunately, you can't go wandering out there because of buried mines, left over from the 1967 war. It was a very hazy day, so the picture doesn't do the place justice. 

Gail emigrated to Israel in the early 1970s to live in the Arava, so she easily wins the prize for the most far flung CAHS graduate, with a special certificate for the exotic location. When Gail and Micha started in the area, there was nothing there --- just dirt and sand. The sense of isolation and harshness is still striking, but the moshav has managed to carve out a living and an extremely pleasant community, despite the challenging environment.

The area only gets 20-30 mm of rain a year (about an inch), so everything is about water and its conservation. The farms use very sophisticated methods to wring every bit of use out of a drop of water.

Competition from Spain has made it tough to grow their former favored crop, fresh fruit and vegetables, but Micha is a shrewd businessman. He switched to flowers, specifically hibiscus, used for decorations. He's one of the few farmers in the world who grows them.

A field of hibiscus flowers, to be sold in Holland.

Micha and his hibiscus flowers.

Our 45th reunion out in the Alava desert!

Gaza epilogue

The challenges

Gaza is like a big, open-air prison camp, run by the inmates. It is surrounded by either water, or a long running barrier, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, except through a handful of border crossings, tightly controlled by either Egypt or Israel. The goals of the two countries are different, but both seek to undermine Hamas, in control of Gaza since 2006 elections.

While the list of restricted goods allowed through the fence has gradually been eased over the last few years, the effect has been to make it extremely tough to start any sort of business in Gaza. There is little opportunity to export any manufactured goods, and it is all but impossible to get a visa to visit a customer. While most goods cannot be exported, there is one exception: electrons. And so Gaza Sky Geeks was born.

Mercy Corps is generally not in the business of providing business opportunities for middle-class and upper middle-class youth and, let's face it, that's where the majority of the in-residence entrepreneurs come from, but in this case they made an exception. The reason is that the region is such a tinder box, so dangerous, and so easily provoked into violence, that the feeling is that an outlet, any outlet, is a positive influence.

My Israeli friends often ask me, "Is there hope? Or, do they hate us too much?" There is a lot of hate and a lot of history and the prospects do look grim, at least for a generation or two. But, that doesn't mean there are a ton of things that can be done to move in the right direction.

The first is that Prime Minister Netanyahu has to learn to keep his mouth shut. If he can't find it in himself to overcome his prejudices and reach out like his predecessors, he can at least not say provocative stuff at the worst possible times. We may not achieve world peace, but we don't need to be starting new fires in the middle of a burning region.

For the rest of us, there are little things we can do. I'm not under any illusion that Sky Geeks will singlehandedly create peace in the region, but it can move the needle a little bit. When mentors come and go, they leave behind a bit of good will and lots of fond memories. They allow businesses to be a little closer to sustainability, inspiring other young would-be entrepreneurs to give it a try rather than sit around and think dark thoughts.

The businesses

All this would sound condescending, except that these are real businesses, which would pique the interest of an investor anywhere, not just in Gaza. For example, MockApp has built a sophisticated prototyping tool for website designers. While these exist, MockApp has the unusual ability for the designer to work in English (best for working with teams of developers), while showing the results to a client in Arabic (essential for the non-English speaking Arab world). I am not aware of any other tool with these properties. If they can get it in the hands of their potential customers, they will do well. And that is where the mentors can help tremendously.

Another example. 5QHQH.com is a website and mobile app for user-generated humor in the Arabic world. Yes, of course people make jokes and laugh in Arabic. Yet, when they try it on an English language website, such as 9gag.com, they get driven off by racist comments. Plus, the right-to-left nature of written Arabic poses a special challenge to user content. How do you get an LOL-cat cartoon to line up properly? Or, just simply make the caption look good?

That's just two examples of the dozen plus companies I ran into during the week.

It's a long, long way to travel, but I hope to be back!

Gaza day 4

This morning we went out to the end of the jetty to take a look at the Gaza harbor.

Fishing boat. Mondo generator on the front powers umpteen lights to attract fish at night.

After the last war, there was literally tons of rubble lying around. So, they trucked it out to the harbor and used it as riprap.

View down the harbor jetty

We saw these guys fishing for sardines using a net. No motors involved.

Feral cat on the jetty. He was intently watching the sardine fishermen. I get the feeling they occasionally throw him something.

At the end of the jetty.

I'm told this was an attempt to generate power from waves. They hung this thing off the jetty, and the up and down motion drove some hydraulics and a generator.

Next we headed into the old city, about a half mile inland. But first, it was time to pick up some falafel sandwiches at the local shop:

The local falafel sandwich shop. These guys were very proud of their automated machine that made the falafel, but I was impressed by how fast the humans were!

For Temira. A Gazan WSV.

This sculpture was built out of a captured Israeli APC. It's worth taking a close look at the details.

Food merchant in the local bazaar.

The gold district.

Repairing shoes, out in the street.

I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition. A moslem mosque, right next to an orthodox church. They have been neighbors for 1400 years. Both are in active use.

A WSV disguised as a BSV. Wish I could have gotten a better shot, but it was out a moving car window.

The long walk back into Israel. It's about 1km across a no man's land.

Gaza day 3

After an evening of laying low, I felt much better this morning, so our hosts took us on a tour of the Islamic University of Gaza, located not too far away, here in Gaza City.

This is the main administrative building of the university, hit by a rocket in last year's war.

We met with the leaders of a business incubator housed in the university. 

Because Gaza sits on the crossroads of trade between Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, it has traditionally been a prosperous, multi-cultural city, much like Beirut. Of course, it has since fallen on hard times. But, that tradition led to a respect for education and entrepreneurship, so the incubator is very popular. They get nearly 1,000 applications each year, but can only host 20 to 30. So, the application process is rigorous. These gentlemen were charged with hearing the pitches, 36 each day, 10 minutes each!

The pitch panel

Afterwards, we exited through the rocketed administration building (still functional, albeit a bit smaller), and into the women's area for relaxing between classes. I (and our hosts) were the only men amongst 1,000+ women and a sea of head scarfs. 

Then it was back to the office and the start of another busy day working with the SkyGeeks startups. But, a highlight was taking tea on the roof of the building, with its beautiful view of the harbor.

The view from the roof.

In the evening, we went out for dinner at a local "fish restaurant." First you choose your fish,

then the owner cooks it up for you.

I thought the cigarette was a nice touch.

Gaza day 2

I was suffering from a bit of an intestinal bug last night, so I took it easy today. We had planned on going on a tour of the city, but I had to beg off. Instead, I'll give you a couple pictures of the colorful Gaza harbor, across from my room:

Taking the morning off gave me enough energy to get through the afternoon, spending about 6 hours with four different companies, reviewing their business plans and marketing ideas. They ranged from a company that inspired to make an insert for your shoes, which would generate electricity as you walked, to one who had a very elegant prototyping tool for web developers.

I have reviewed lots of business plans and watched a lot of pitches all over the world, but this is the first time I've seen pitches that have to be done from inside of what is essentially a giant prison camp. How do you do sales if you have no prospect of visiting a customer? How do you keep a developer up to date if s/he can't go to a conference or even visit a client? Everything has to be done remotely.

This affects the types of businesses that can be realistically created in Gaza. You look for companies that can do remote sales and marketing, entirely through the Internet.

On the other hand, they have the advantage of an extremely hard working, very motivated workforce, with surprisingly good technical skills,  at low cost. They have not worked in large teams in a world-class company, but many of them are quite familiar with state-of-the-art development techniques. They will know lots about Angular and JavaScript, not so much about Cassandra or Bigtable.

Gaza Day 1

As recently as Saturday, I wasn't sure I'd make it into Gaza. While most of the recent demonstrations and clashes have been in Jerusalem, Gaza hasn't been entirely free of conflict either. The Mercy Corps security team wanted to wait until the last minute to give us the green light. So, we decided to set out early Monday morning, arriving at Gaza around 8am, when we would get the final OK. If it didn't feel right, we'd just turn around and go back to Jerusalem, trying again the next day.

But, all was quiet and, indeed, there was almost no one around at the crossing into Gaza. Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed. The Israeli checkout building is a huge airport-like terminal, built for the days when thousands of Gazan workers would exit every day to work in the surrounding farms. But, since the Second Intifada (Sept. 2000), this border has essentially been closed to all but a select group of Gazans and to the many NGO workers.

The process of going through the Israeli side was straightforward. Lots of questions from a stern, middle-aged woman who looked you in the eye and asked what you were going to be doing. "What is this 'SkyGeeks'? What do they do? What will you be doing there? When do you leave Gaza? Israel?" All under her unwavering eye, with occasional glances at your passport to make sure you weren't morphing into somebody else under her withering glare.

Then a long walk down an open-air walkway (maybe 1km?) to meet our driver.

The long walk into Gaza (photo from the Guardian)

Then there was a cursory checkin with Fatah, who despite losing an election and a war with Hammas, still enjoys the fiction that they control who comes and goes into Gaza. Then a more rigorous checkin with Hamas, and ... we're in.

Near the Erez Crossing. Still lots of damage from last year's conflict with Israel.

The contrast with bustling, prosperous Israel just outside, with its sleek coffee shops and high speed expressways, was striking. Inside, Gaza is still recovering from the July, 2014 war with Israel. The poverty is obvious.

Since the border closing at the beginning of the aughts, an ordinary Gazan is unlikely to get a visa to leave, making the Strip a giant open air prison. Most people, particularly the young, have spent their entire lives in there and have never left, not even once.

Once at the Gaza SkyGeeks offices, they didn't waste any time putting me to work. Within minutes, I was listening in on a call with a Jordanian investor, where 4 entrepreneurs did 30 minute pitches, taking notes on the good and the bad. Next, was a session with Baskalet, a tiny startup offering mobile games with Arabic content.

Finally, I ran an hour and a half workshop on Business Models and Customer Acquisition. While I tried to speak slowly and clearly, much was lost by the audience, so we went around the room, pressing locals into service, translating the concept into Arabic. A great learning experience for all.

A brave crew stuck with me to the bitter end.

Second visit to Ramallah

Yesterday was the Friday salat (call to prayers) and the proclaimed "Day of Rage" by Hamas, so I kept a low profile. Mercy Corps's concern was that all those young men on their way to the noon prayers could mean trouble. So, I went for an early walk,  then pretty much stuck around the hotel the rest of the day. Pretty quiet in the part of East Jerusalem where I was located, but plenty of action elsewhere.

Today (Saturday) I casually inquired at the hotel desk about a "political tour" around Jerusalem and Ramallah. Five minutes later a guide came up to me in the hotel's restaurant and said, "We leave in 10 minutes." I decided, what the hell, and went.

I can't say the Palestinian guide was very good (a lot of loud hectoring directed at us, the clients), but it was interesting. It was easy enough to let him vent --- who can blame him? It's only a day for us, a lifetime for him --- but it gave me an idea of how deep the rage can go.

On the way to Ramallah, we stopped at a section of the "Security wall," a sinuous wall that separates the Israeli settlements embedded in the West Bank, from the surrounding Palestinian communities.

Most of the Palestinians who live in Jerusalem are not Israeli citizens. Instead, they hold "residency cards," which can be taken away for the slightest infraction. If they marry a Palestinian who does not hold a residency card, they cannot live together and, instead, must have "weekend relationships". Their children do not automatically get residency.

If they leave the area too long, they can lose their residency.

There are elaborate rules that govern how they can travel. They must go through certain checkpoints to pass from West Bank back into Jerusalem.

For a Palestinian who lives in the rest of the West Bank, she/he has no rights at all to enter into Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, there is a continuous slow process of ever expanding settlements, working their way outwards from Jerusalem. Most are in former "green areas" --- parks --- but some are where the land was simply confiscated.

This is one of Pisgat Za'ev, one of the many Israeli settlements around Jerusalem. Note the security wall that separates it from the Palestinian areas of Jerusalem (from which this picture was taken).

The wall. 

Once in Ramallah (my second trip in 3 days), we visited Yasser Arafat's tomb. Whatever you think of the guy, he sure got himself a nice place to rest.

The outside of Arafat's tomb.

His honor guard.

It's interesting to compare it now to my last visit, almost 10 years ago:

The tomb 10 years ago. They had run out of money so not much was happening.

The canonization of Arafat is now almost complete. Palestinians see the old terrorist as a "man of peace," who was duped, and possibly poisoned, by the Israelis after the Oslo agreements.

After a quick coffee in downtown Ramallah, it was time to head back. Rather than risk going through the Qalandia crossing, we decided to try the usually much quieter DCO / Beit El checkpoint to the north. It's only for "authorized persons," but our guide hoped that the 3 American and 4 Dutch passports in the car would do the trick. Unfortunately, once we got up there, it was in the middle of a raging rock battle, with several ambulances around. I only had time to take some hurried pictures from the window of the van, shown here as a GIF, before we got out of there.

The entrance to the DCO / Beit El checkpoint.

So, off to the Qalandia crossing we went. But then our guide got the idea that the Jaba checkpoint, which as I understand it, is a settlement-only checkpoint, might be doable if he could pass as an Israeli Jew. Again, the 7 foreign passports was our ace-in-the-hole.

We breezed right through.

Such is life for a Palestinian Arab.

Visit to Ramallah

Arabreneur is a business accelerator and seed fund with offices in Amman, Ramallah, Bahrein and, oddly, Toronto. I promised their Ramallah manager, Hanan, that I would stop by and run a 90 minute workshop on sales and marketing, with a focus on user acquisition. Parenthetically, it is with mild surprise that I find myself giving talks on this subject. I'm a techie guy! People used to want me to talk about designing distributed systems or managing a multi-threaded application! What do I know about sales and marketing? My old VP of Sales, Mike Foreman, would be laughing.

Yet, it makes sense. These days, there is lots of technical information on the web, but to get advice on how to scale a company means spending a lot of time with a mentor until he/she "gets it" and offers something useful. You can't get that through the static pages of the World Wide Web.

Workshop attendees in Ramallah.

Before the talk I spent about 3 hours with some young entrepreneurs learning about their businesses and the very unique challenges they face starting a company on the West Bank, currently occupied by the Israelis. It's tough to get goods in and out, so most startups focus on software products. But not all of them. I heard from a company wanting to make a wearable sporting goods electronics. Another a consumer goods product. Both wanted to manufacturer in West Bank, but recognizing how tough that would be, have reluctantly recognized that they will have to go to Eastern Europe or China to build the thing.

The talk went well. Or, at least I think it did. Nobody walked out, which I was told is a good sign.

Afterwards, Hanan, visiting mentor Elizabeth, and I went for a ride to visit the planned community Rawabi, on the northern outskirts of Ramallah. This is an incredibly ambitious project to build a planned community for 20,000+ residents, with schools, hospitals, commercial areas, and even an outdoor theater, from scratch, out of the hard scrabble rock of the desert. Seven hundred million dollars later, they are nearly done, and the first residents are moving in.

View of the planned city of Rawabi.

It's pretty dead now because the residents are just beginning to move in.

On the eastern side of the city is a remarkable outdoor amphitheater, where they plan to put on concerts and plays.

Outdoor amphitheater. All that stone makes for some great acoustics!

Hollywood movie stars line the inside box seats.

We were shown around by their director of sales, who rightly took great pride in what the Palestinians have been able to build out of nothing. He took special delight in the project as an in-your-face statement to all the surrounding settlements that the Israelis have built in the West Bank. This hilltop was originally slated to be yet another one, but Rawabi got there first. They too can change the facts on the ground!

Said the director of sales, "I take great pleasure in waking up each morning, knowing that the settlers have to look across at the Palestinian flag flying on the hilltop."

After an enjoyable and informative day, it was time to head back to my hotel in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, nothing is simple in the West Bank. Although the hotel is only about 8 miles as the crow flies from where I gave the talk, you have to go through an Israeli "checkpoint" to get back into the city. The obvious checkpoint, Qalandia, has been a site of recent unrest and a knifing or two, not to mention an hour or more wait. So, Hanan let me out at a diplomatic checkpoint, where I was able to make a lonely crossing by foot in the dark and meet up with a taxi on the other side.

The checkpoint at night. Intimidating, but an easy crossing.