How Great Are We?

Says David Brooks - speaking here about his fellow Jews. Pretty frigging great it seems. Besides constituting 50% or so of the NYT Op Ed columnists, it seems that:

Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction

Not to mention roughly 90% of television comedy writers.

Now one could quibble about a few of those numbers. Two of the greatest Chess World Champions, Fisher and Kasparov, had some Jewish ancestry, but Fisher was a notorious anti-semite. Does he count? Whatever. Jews are an accomplished group.

Brooks has another point though. Israel, he says, is becoming a technology hub.

Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.

...

Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.

If what Brooks says is true, and almost certainly it is mostly true, then it's probably game over for the Palestinians.

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