In the next three months, we will all be bombarded with more promises than ever. But before we dive into the trenches to avoid the bombardment of bullshit, let’s remember a promise we heard last year from Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett and that we will surely hear again in the next election campaign: the promise of “a million Israelis in the high technology”.
Doesn’t sound that bad, right? According to the Knesset Center for Research and Information, 344,000 Israelis worked in high-tech in 2020, just a drop in the bucket of the country’s 3.47 million workforce. Of the high-tech workers, only a third were involved in manufacturing: medicines, airplanes, microchips, fiber optic devices, and so on, and two thirds were in the “service sector”: communications, programming, cloud and IT services, research and development. A very small circle in any case. So, if the road to social and material success really goes through high technology, why not open a wider access road to it?
Because such a country would not be able to sustain itself. In Tel Aviv, this is already evident: for every worker who spends days and nights in front of a computer screen, there is a whole galaxy of service providers: cooks, meal packers, people who collect items from supermarkets, to Wolt deliveries, scooter rental suppliers, after-school program operators, chauffeurs. Take them all off the scene and the high-tech workers won’t last a week. You’ll find them dying of thirst in the hallway between the open-plan workspace and the gym.
The math is simple: for more people to work in high-tech, more people will be needed to serve them, and that’s something no one here is ready to do. Who wants their child to become a delivery boy, a forklift operator in a warehouse, a parcel sorter for Amazon? And will high technology solve the overload problem at the airport? No. You still need someone to sit at the counter and check your ticket. And the passport, oh the passport – does anyone want to work at the Interior Ministry branch in Rishon Letzion to process passport applications? Obviously not. But go ahead and complain as much as you want that there are no appointments available for passport renewal, this costs nothing.
We want a good education for our children, but we will not train them to become teachers. We want efficient public transport, but we don’t want to be a bus driver, nor do we want to give up any bus lanes to use. Likewise, we want quality care for our aging parents, but how can you expect us to work in nursing? We want new apartments, provided that Arabs and Chinese build them and not us. We want cheap fruit and vegetables that someone overseas will grow for us. We want everything to be clean, without us working as cleaners. We want to perpetuate the occupation, but not to serve in the territories. Our son will go to the 8200 elite intelligence unit. Shoot the Arabs? This is someone else’s child’s job.
And this without even entering into a discussion about what benefits high technology produces (such as the advertising implant in video games, a giant step for humanity). Because the problem is not necessarily high-tech: likewise, there is no possibility of having “a million Israelis in the aviation industry” or “a million Israelis in the police”. The problem is that behind the million priority workers there will have to be another three million, which are needed to serve them, just as behind every company of army soldiers are headquarters with all kinds of boring positions for which no soldier would voluntarily choose to enlist. This is why the IDF decided a long time ago to label these jobs as “combat support” in an attempt to mask boredom and disillusionment with a little pride and camaraderie.
When a politician promises that there will be a million Israelis in high-tech, what he is really promising is a future of “high-tech support” for everyone else. And anyone who has ever served at headquarters knows exactly what that kind of future will look like.
