I am very happy that an Israeli scientist has been awarded the prestigious Nobel price. It makes me proud to be an Israeli too. This makes me also wonder what was so special thirty years ago that allowed Israel to collect several of these awards during the last decade. I decided to make a little comparison of the state of the Israel's science today and thirty years ago. I used Scopus  research engine, a pretty exhaustive source of scientific citations, to see how many papers associated with Israeli institutions have been published in the last 30 days and compared this number with one-month worth of publications in 1980 in Israel and other leading countries. In order to provide a fair comparison with other countries and between different time points I divided the numbers by the population size so the results below represent a monthly number of publications per 1 million inhabitants.

To see the citation tables for 2011 and 1980 press here


These results show that Israel is loosing it's place as a leader of the scientific community. Although, in terms of the number of publications, Israel is still comparable with an average European country, the trend is worrisome. Israel retreated from a position of the "light upon the nations" to mediocrity. In 30 years it has increased its scientific outputs by several hundred percents, while the leading nations have done so by thousand percents, leaving Israel far behind.

However, the real increase in the scientific productivity is not reflected in these numbers. It comes from the developing countries that have, for now, a comparatively low per capita contribution. However, in gross numbers these countries are fast becoming the next powerhouses of science. China's scientific output is only marginally smaller than that of the US and is far ahead of any other country. No doubt it will soon overtake the US as being a leading publisher of the scientific papers. Other developing countries, such as Turkey and Iran, are growing constantly. In terms of the total number of publications they have overcome Israel several years ago and will soon overcome even larger Western nations.

This all means that to stay relevant Israel should increase amount of resource and the efficiency of their use. Otherwise very soon the technological edge will be in other people's hands. Judging by the state of the Israeli science today, this Nobel flourishing of the Israel's science may very well be its Indian summer. 

One should not underestimate the significance of what has occurred in the last couple of days: Israeli civilians have been murdered and Israeli ministers had reasons better than ever to grind Gaza to dust yet again. However it did not happen. What did happen was amazingly measured, according to the standards of the Israel's not too scrupulous practice of dealing with its neighbours, perfectly justifiable, local and accurate hit at the heads of the military wing of the organization known (or assumed) to be responsible. While some country may still raise their brows or at any rate consider it perfectly normal, Israelis right now have the feeling that they have been throughly duped. Indeed, Kadima, famous both for being left wing opposition to the government and for starting two bloody and very damaging for Israel wars against Gaza and Lebanon, adopted a usual for the Israeli leaders stance of calling for yet more punitive actions against Gaza. Only the Likud government headed by ferocious Bibi has got itself in this mess of self restrain.

So what is the meaning of this new policy and what are its ramifications? On the surface it is make no sense. Of course Israel has saved itself from yet another round of senseless bloodletting with the usual finale of international opprobrium. It has quite probably saved the lives of several (or several dozens) of young Israelis. On the other hand it failed to refocus country's attention to the problem of security at the expense of social issues. I don't tend to assume that Bibi or Barak have grown any conscience. For such a conclusion much more serious evidence is needed. Currently, the only thing that comes to mind is that finally some of the Arab spring effects kick in somewhere in the vicinity of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Not completely, but to the point when troubled Israelis are bound to take heed.

In fact, may be a tragic miscalculation on Israel's behalf of proceeding to attack the terrorists on the territory of sovereign and wary nation of Egypt has forced Egyptian to take some measures, which ultimately made Israelis reluctant to burn the bridges. May be it was the Americans who suggested that Israel owes them something and it's time to put some of it back. Maybe it's Turkey whose sheer schadenfreude in watching Israel loosing one partner after another has made Lieberman slightly more cautious. Whatever the reasons, the impression is that Israel at least in principle can forgo the policy of righteous “they had it coming” in favour of “are we going to be better off”.