Had Steve Jobs been an Israeli, Apple's slogan would not have been "Think Different." It would have been "Think Like Everyone Else."

(Inspired by the bestseller Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson )
  1. Had Steve Jobs been an Israeli, his father - who was of Syrian extraction - would have been hunted by the Oz immigration police. Instead of completing a doctorate in international relations at the University of Michigan, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali would have been shoved into some prison truck in the middle of the night and from there thrown into the "prison facility" near Hadera. Jobs wouldn't have been born at all and, even if he had, he would quickly have been spotted in the gunsight of Interior Minister Eli Yishai and kicked out of here, the sooner and the further the better.
  2. Had Steve Jobs been an Israeli, it is doubtful whether his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hill, would have noticed his exceptional talents. It is also doubtful whether his literature teacher would have taken him, in his senior year, on an "inspiring snow hike in Yosemite National Park." Instead, Jobs would have been required to memorize the difference between "chalky soil" and "clay soil"; to swallow, every year, the pornography of violence toward children called "Holocaust studies in school"; and, in his last year in high school, to be preoccupied with only one question - whether to enlist in the elite Maglan unit or the elite Duvdevan unit in the Israel Defense Forces.


  3. Had Steve Jobs been an Israeli, instead of walking around undisturbed on the paths of Reed College dressed as a Buddhist monk, one of his fellow students would have taken him into some corner and broken his bones for being a "no-good freak." Right-wing Zionist organization Im Tirtzu would have leaked to one of the journalists from the daily Maariv that the "son of a Syrian" was hanging around the campus.
  4. Had Steve Jobs been an Israeli, it is doubtful whether he would have considered computers "a symbol of self-expression and liberation," just like LSD and Bob Dylan albums. He would have been drawn into IDF unit 8200, which specializes in cyber warfare, or Mamram, the IDF computer unit, and there he would have learned that computers are a tool for surveillance, a tool for eavesdropping, an electronic fishnet that can and must be used in order to catch people like barbounias.
  5. Had Steve Jobs been Israeli, he would have worked less on designing Apple products and more on maximizing their cost and lowering production costs. Instead of "shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality," as he put it, he would have been shooting for the quality of the Everything for a Shekel chain. Instead of investing hundreds of millions of dollars from his own pocket to improve Apple and its products, he would have distributed mega-dividends to himself, leveraged himself to death and dated models.
  6. Had Steve Jobs been an Israeli, he would not have been able to develop the revolutionary animation mammoth Pixar, and he certainly would not have been able to sell it to Disney for $7.4 billion. Instead, Jobs would have been appointed the chairman of the Rabinowitz Foundation for the Arts, written a report commissioned by the Ministry of Culture on "Reform in the Film Industry" (which would quickly have been rejected ), and handed out the prize for "Zionist creativity" together with actor Haim Topol, at an impressive ceremony in the new cultural center in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
  7. Had Steve Jobs been an Israeli, he would have refused the invitation of U.S. President Barack Obama to come and help get him elected in order to defeat the extreme right. Instead, he would have been a member of the Trajtenberg Committee for social and economic change, as an expert.
  8. Had Steve Jobs been an Israeli, Apple's slogan would not have been "Think Different." It would have been "Think Like Everyone Else."