Jews from 130 countries who speak more than 100 different
languages have immigrated to Israel. Nearly 70 years after its founding, Israel
is a technological powerhouse, in part because it is one of the most diverse
places on the planet, with citizens originating in the Middle East, Africa,
Iran, Asia, Europe, and North and South America, and with large numbers of
Jews, Christians and Muslims.
One outstanding example
of this diversity is a partnership between a Jewish Israeli medic who created a
revolutionary bandage and a Bedouin Israeli factory owner who employs women to
manufacture it.
Bernard Bar-Natan first
started thinking about bandages in the 1980s, a few years after he moved to
Israel from Brooklyn. When he enlisted in the medic corps of the Israel Defense
Forces, he was shocked to learn that the army’s standard bandages were made
around World War II and had not been modified since then. All the bandages had
a pad in the middle and gauze strings on each side, and Bar-Natan was taught to
grab a stone and add additional bandages over a wound to quell the flow of
blood. Not only were these methods unsanitary, they required medics to carry
large numbers of bandages.
By the early 1990s,
Bar-Natan had a prototype of a new concept. With the help of an Israeli
government grant and accelerator program he launched his business, but he
lacked a way to mass-produce his Emergency Bandage until he found an unlikely
group to help him: Bedouins in northern Israel.
Bar-Natan met Ahmed Heib
for the first time in 1996. An acquaintance in the garment industry made the
introduction, thinking the two could help each other. Bar-Natan needed a
manufacturer for his bandage, and Heib owned a factory. Their initial meeting
was awkward. On the surface, the two had little in common: Bar-Natan was a
cosmopolitan Jew from Brooklyn, while Heib was a Muslim who grew up in a rural
backwater, infamous for its crime and gangs. “He didn’t know who this Ahmed guy
[was],” Heib says. Bar-Natan seconds Heib’s assessment: “I thought tailors were
only called Mr. Cohen,” he jokes.
Heib, with his low-cost
business model and deep knowledge of tailoring, turned out to be the perfect
partner for Bar-Natan. Heib initially worked with Bar-Natan through his small
factory on the first floor of his house in Tuba-Zangariyya, a town of roughly
6,000 – mostly Muslim Bedouins – near the Jordan River.
The more Bar-Natan and
Heib worked together, the more they developed a friendship – especially after two
of Heib’s children died at birth. As Bar-Natan’s company grew, so did Heib’s
business. He expanded his factory to three floors capable of producing millions
of bandages a year. All 50 of his employees are women. “I know that if I didn’t
have this factory here, these women would not be working,” Heib says.
Bar-Natan’s bandage has been a success. Today, the Australian
military, the New Zealand military and most NATO countries have adopted it.
It’s also standard issue for the U.S. Army, the Israel Defense
Forces and the British Army. Diversity and innovation go hand in hand, Israeli
innovations like the Emergency Bandage are saving lives and making the world a
better place.
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