Senor and Singer point out that, despite Israel’s modest population of 7.1 million on an embattled slice of land in the Middle East, they’ve got more start-ups than far larger, more stable countries like Canada, Japan, India, Korea and the U.K. The authors calculate that as 3,850 Israeli start-ups at the time of the book’s close for publication — one for every 1,844 Israelis; they also note that there are six more Israeli companies on the NASDAQ than from all of Europe combined.

Something about coming from an embattled sliver of a country—home to just one one-thousandth of the world’s population—makes Israelis skeptical of conventional explanations about what is possible.

Senor and Singer use VC money — the mother’s milk of start-ups — as another metric for their assessment:

In 2008, per capita venture capital investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China, and 350 times greater than in India. Comparing absolute numbers, Israel—a country of just 7.1 million people—attracted close to $2 billion in venture capital, as much as flowed to the United Kingdom’s 61 million citizens or to the 145 million people living in Germany and France combined.

They also point out that the Israeli economy keeps on growing, despite the ongoing conflict and frequent violence in the region. They write:

During the six years following 2000, Israel was hit not just by the bursting of the global tech bubble but by the most intense period of terrorist attacks in its history and by the second Lebanon war. Yet Israel’s share of the global venture capital market did not drop—it doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent. And the Tel Aviv stock exchange was higher on the last day of the Lebanon war than on the first, as it was after the three-week military -operation in the Gaza Strip in 2009.

So what gives? A young entrepreneur, now on his second or third successful company, put it this way the other day in Tel Aviv: “The best thing Israel can export is our minds — we don’t have natural resources to export, so we invest in education and innovation. This is the best natural resource we have in Israel.” (By the way, this guy sold his first company when he was 16.) It’s not just founders, either — Israel is chock-a-block full of the IT technicians and engineers and experts that keep a company on the cutting edge. An eBay exec tells the author: ““Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, eBay . . . the list goes on. The best-kept secret is that we all live and die by the work of our Israeli teams.” For companies planted firmly in Silicon Valley soil, those faraway roots in the desert are even more amazing.

Does this mean you have to learn how to dodge Katyusha rockets and subsist on falafel to launch a successful start-up? Of course not, though falafel is delicious. Senor and Singer trace the stories of several Israeli companies, entrepreneurs and decision-makers, and come up with a few takeaways that can apply across the board (hint: a little chutzpah helps). On the next few pages, Mediaite has an exclusive excerpt from Start-Up Nation which shows a little of the Israeli start-up mentality in action.

>>>EXCERPT: Start-Up Nation (or, how to raise $200 million, and why hybird cars are like mermaids)

It’s also the land of tension. Even in the jet-lagged jumble of my wide-eyed whirlwind-toured first few days, it is apparent that this place is in a constant state of tension – and not just the kind that brings people fruitlessly to Camp David. No, the tensions here are many-fold: Between history and modernity; religion (and religions!)and unabashed secularism; the official Jewishness that underlies this nation’s raison d’etre; the changing, polyglot demographics that are ushering in an unmistakable shift; politics and security; culture, tradition and innovation.

SLIDESHOW: WELCOME TO ISRAEL!

Roger Cohen wrote yesterday that Israel was in danger of losing its “exceptionalism,” and I’m not sure I agree, changing demographics and fading urgency of the Holocaust notwithstanding. This country is exceptional all right – even excepting its exceptionalism! – as noted by the upcoming book Start-Up Nation by Saul Singer and my friend Dan Senor as they explore how Israel, with its 7.1 million people, heightened violence, and hair-trigger existence on the edge of war, somehow mints more startups than places like Japan, China, India, Canada and the UK. That has nothing to do with Israel’s original “exceptionalism,” or its historical exceptionalism, either.

Or does it? “You can’t unentangle things here,” my friend Jeremy, who has long worked on issues relating to the complex conflicts of the region, remarked last night. By then we were on our hotel roof in Jerusalem. Since I started this post giddy in Tel Aviv I have toured a school integrating immigrant children from 48 countries, including refugees from Darfur; seen the arresting, prizewinning work of Israeli war photographer Ziv Koren, graphic and bloody and real; met asylum-seeking immigrants who spent months languishing in Israeli detention centers; been hissed and spat at in Mea Shearim; wrote a note of prayer for my family at the Wailing Wall, and collided with centuries of both history and sexism as I approached it to pray…on the skinny slice allotted to women; looked over Bethlehem and the West Bank, and seen our group waved through a checkpoint that would have taken a Palestinian 2 hours; heard three different versions of what happened at Ein Kerem; buried my feet in a glorious sandy beach; buried my face in a delicious, tangy shawarma. This country will keep you busy, that’s for sure.

So – while I fight off jet lag and acclimatize to a millennium of history under my feet, I’ll do my best to take you with me in this rather unorthodox (ha) column for Mediaite. (You know Moses would TOTALLY have dug the logo). I will also be including slideshows for each of the above-mentioned adventures, because I’m pretty sure that “Thou Shalt Turn Your Vacation Photos Into Pageviews” was written on a stone tablet once. Here’s the first, detailing Day One. More to come – in the meantime, check updates at my Twitter feed for those interested – and thanks for joining me in the Holy Land.

SLIDESHOW: WELCOME TO ISRAEL! DAY ONE IN TEL AVIV