"Recently, everyone

 has been talking about the possibility of investors' money fleeing the country, and I actually wanted to emphasize something else," says medical device entrepreneur and pioneer of the Israeli medical aesthetics industry Dr. Shimon Eckhouse. "Entrepreneurship grows out of a sense of freedom. When people have no freedom of thought, they don't think. It's true, Hungary, Russia and Turkey also have entrepreneurship, but about a thousandth of what there is in Israel, and not by chance."

Eckhouse participated last week in a protest by high-tech companies in Yokne’am against the judicial reforms being advanced by Justice Minister Yariv Levin. Says Eckhouse, "Thirty years ago, when I raised funds for ESC Medical (later Lumenis), about $30 million of venture capital was being invested in Israel. Today - about

 $100 billion. We’ve all benefitted from this crazy growth to the point of becoming dependent on it. The money came mainly from the US. We built an amazing infrastructure in Israel, and the politicians here act like bulls in a china shop. Any damage to this system can lead to irreversible consequences."