Over the next three months, we will all be inundated with more promises than ever before. But before we dive into the trenches to avoid the bombardment of nonsense, let’s recall a promise we heard from Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett last year, and one we’re sure to hear again in the upcoming election campaign: the promise of “a million Israelis in high tech.”
That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? According to the Knesset Center for Research and Information, 344,000 Israelis were working in high-tech in 2020, just a drop in the ocean of the country’s 3.47 million workers. Of the high-tech workers, only a third were involved in manufacturing: medicines, aircraft, microchips, fiber optic equipment, and so on, and two-thirds in the “service industry”: communications, programming, cloud and computing services, research and development. In any case, a very limited circle. So if the road to social and material success really is through high-tech, why not pave a wider access road to it?
Because such a country could not sustain itself. In Tel Aviv, this is already clear: For every worker who spends days and nights in front of a computer screen, there is a whole range of service providers – cooks, meal packers, people who pick up items from supermarkets, Wolt delivery guys, scooter rental companies, after-school program operators. , drivers. Take them all out of the picture and high-tech workers won’t last a week. You will see them dying of thirst in the hallway between the open space workspace and the gym.
The math is simple: if more people want to work in high-tech, it takes more people to serve them – and that’s something no one here is ready for. Who wants their child to grow up to be a delivery man, forklift driver in a warehouse, parcel sorter for Amazon? And will high-tech solve the problem of airport overload? No. You still need someone to sit at the counter and check the ticket. And the passport, oh the passport – does anyone want to work at the branch of the Ministry of Interior in Rishon Letzion to process passport applications? Of course not. But go ahead and complain all you want that there are no appointments available for passport renewal, it costs nothing.
We want a good education for our children, but we are not going to train them to be teachers. We want efficient public transport, but we don’t want to be a bus driver or even give up lanes for the buses. Likewise, we want quality care for our elderly 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 fruits and vegetables that someone abroad will grow for us. We want everything to be clean, without working as cleaners. We want to continue the occupation, but not serve in the areas. Our child is going to the elite 8200 intelligence unit. Shooting Arabs? That’s for someone else’s kid to do.
And that’s without even going into the benefits that high-tech brings (such as implanting ads in video games, a giant step for humanity). Because the problem isn’t necessarily high-tech: Similarly, there’s no way to have “one million Israelis in the aircraft industry” or “one million Israelis in the police force.” The problem is that behind the one million priority workers will have to be three million others needed to serve them. Just as behind every company of combat soldiers in the army are headquarters with all kinds of boring positions that no soldier would voluntarily choose to serve. This is why the IDF long ago decided to label these jobs as “combat support”, trying to disguise the boredom and disillusionment with a little pride and camaraderie.
When a politician promises that there will be a million Israelis in high-tech, he is really promising a future of “high-tech support” for everyone else. And anyone who has ever served at headquarters knows what such a future looks like.
