History
Rafael was established in 1948 as the Science Corps (Hebrew: חיל המדע, known by the acronym HEMED, Hebrew: חמד) under the leadership of Shlomo Gur. It was renamed the Research and Design Directorate (Hebrew: אגף הפיתוח והתיכנון) in 1952. In 1952 David Ben-Gurion decided to split into two agencies the activities of HEMED. The pure scientific research was left with HEMED, while the development of weapons was placed in the new EMET agency.
In 1954 Ben-Gurion decided to change the name of EMET to RAFAEL. It was reorganized as Rafael in 1958.
In 1995, Yitzhak Rabin asked Amos Horev to become Chairman of the Board of Rafael, following many years in which Horev had served as chairman of Rafael's advisory committee. Horev served as Chairman until January 2001.
Read more about this topic: Rafael Advanced Defense Systems
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“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
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“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
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