Last month, Israel used its Arrow 3 long-range air defense system for the first time. When the Yemen-based Houthis fired rockets toward southern Israel in the name of religious camaraderie with Hamas and Iran, Israelis were prepared, having started to develop their state-of-the-art defense system back in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Iron Dome, which was also developed by an Israeli company, has been protecting Israelis from short-range rockets fired with increased frequency from Lebanon and Gaza. Reports say Israel has also accelerated the development of Iron Beam, another revolutionary air defense system that would use laser technology to bring down incoming drones and rockets.
Last month, Israel used its Arrow 3 long-range air defense system for the first time. When the Yemen-based Houthis fired rockets toward southern Israel in the name of religious camaraderie with Hamas and Iran, Israelis were prepared, having started to develop their state-of-the-art defense system back in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Iron Dome, which was also developed by an Israeli company, has been protecting Israelis from short-range rockets fired with increased frequency from Lebanon and Gaza. Reports say Israel has also accelerated the development of Iron Beam, another revolutionary air defense system that would use laser technology to bring down incoming drones and rockets.
It is no secret that billions of dollars in annual military aid from the United States has helped Israel build its military. But the war against Hamas has demonstrated that the foundation of Israel’s military might be the unparalleled collaboration between its military and its technology companies. In Israel, the tech economy has assumed responsibility for keeping Israelis safe and the nation standing.
Technology and national security have been tightly bound in Israel since its founding in 1948. “We lost 10 percent of our population” in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War against the joint forces of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, said Isaac Ben-Israel, a former head of weapons development at the Israeli Defense Ministry. That led the country’s founding fathers to conclude that Israel didn’t have the numbers to beat an Arab army or a united force from Islamic nations and needed a qualitative advantage. “That meant investing in human capital, in science and technology, primarily for our defense.”
From the very beginning, he said, steps were taken to teach science and technology and have a sufficient number of people with a scientific bent of mind, primarily to defend the country. For instance, under a program called Academic Reserve, the compulsory military service of 1 percent of the total number of high school students was delayed. They were first encouraged to pursue academic degrees. Ben-Israel was among those chosen to pursue his academic interests—an investment that clearly paid off, since he later became chairman of the Israel Space Agency.
“Twelve years ago, the prime minister asked me for solutions to cybersecurity,” Ben-Israel told Foreign Policy from Tel Aviv. “I proposed, and it was made a government regulation, to make cybersecurity a subject in schools. Now, high school students in Israel learn about cybersecurity.”´
Ben-Israel shared how his country, despite its size, has the second-highest number of tech start-ups. “The U.S. has 40 percent of the world’s start-up companies … while Israel is home to 20 percent of the world’s start-ups,” many of which are deeply linked to the needs of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “In cyber start-ups, we are No. 1,” he said, adding that Israel was home to 35 percent of the world’s tech unicorns, or companies worth more than a billion dollars.
The Israeli tech ecosystem is the second-largest behind Silicon Valley and accounts for 14 percent of total jobs and a fifth of the country’s GDP. Ben-Israel said 96 percent of start-ups fail—yet each one with any merit gets up to $300,000 as seed money from the government. “It’s not a loan,” he said, “which means if you fail, you don’t have to give it back to the government.”
Fewer bureaucratic hurdles; a common cause (i.e., security of the country over profit); a more hands-on approach by the IDF to test the technology; and perhaps above all a common culture, since techies today have been in the armed forces and done mandatory military service, are behind Israel’s success in the field.
“Tens of thousands of demobbed soldiers exit the Israeli military each year with the kind of skills that transfer to the high-tech environment, providing a highly skilled and motivated workforce,” Jon Medved, a venture capitalist dubbed “the startup nation’s guru,” told Foreign Policy via email.
“There’s a sort of ping-pong between a tech company and the IDF,” said Itamar Yaar, a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council. “Long before there’s a marketable product, the tech companies offer it to the IDF, the police, or the intelligence agencies, and they try it out, sometimes in ongoing operations, to test and to improve it. If it is good, then it is procured fairly quickly.”
A confluence of interests paves the way for a unique collaboration that saves both time and money. It saves the tech companies from going through what is labeled in California as the “valley of death”—or the long wait between the development of a product and its procurement.
In the United States, for instance, profit is the main motive, and there is deep mistrust of how law enforcement agencies might use the technology—a very different ethos than exists in Israel. Employees of leading companies have protested that government departments may use their labor and skills to target immigrants. Moreover, strict regulations and a cumbersome bureaucracy hinder collaboration.
In Israel, “informal connections” between the industry and the Defense Ministry “are much closer,” compared with anywhere else in the world. “The circle is smaller and progresses quicker,” Yaar added.
In a 2015 research paper, sociologists Ori Swed and John Sibley Butler highlighted the role of the military as a socialization institution. Since most tech companies are led by senior IDF or intelligence officers and are staffed with men and women who were soldiers themselves, “the conversation back and forth is very organic,” Swed, now at Texas Tech University, told Foreign Policy.
In the United States, the ecosystem is vastly different, and profit is the main motive, he added. But in Israel, interests are common when the tech being produced is meant to support the soldiers—children or family members or friends of the owners of the companies.
Shmuel Bar, a former Israel intelligence official, runs IntuView, one such company. Bar’s firm has relocated to the Gaza front line and uses artificial intelligence to go through troves of texts online, and documents procured by the IDF in physical searches, to decipher the meaning of communication between or about Hamas operatives and their activities. It is not a translation but an interpretation service that mines the meaning of texts often hidden in cultural metaphors and religious sayings. It is looking for clues on where Hamas could have hidden hostages or the whereabouts of Hamas’s leadership, among other crucial intelligence, and providing whatever it learns in real time—although the accuracy rate is currently at 70 percent.
“It will be months before we finish the R&D. In the meanwhile, hundreds of soldiers would have died because the IDF didn’t receive the intel it needed,” Bar said. “We are minimizing the losses even though the system isn’t yet perfect.”
A team of Israeli tech workers got together soon after the Oct. 7 attacks and used facial recognition software to search for the missing and for where and when the hostages were last seen.
Israel has also been at the forefront of AI used in war—although the technology has also been blamed by some for contributing to the rising death toll in the Gaza Strip. In 2021, Israel used Hasbora (“The Gospel”), an AI program to identify targets, in Gaza for the first time. But there is a growing sense that the country is now using AI technology to excuse the killing of a large number of noncombatants while in pursuit of even low-ranking Hamas operatives. There are concerns that the IDF is hiding behind the technology to deliberately avenge those who were killed on Oct. 7 or has been genuinely blinded by the technology to its devastating effects on civilians.
Meanwhile, whatever its achievements, Israel is now relying on its tech sector for a more prosaic military advantages. The people building defense tech in peace time have doubled up as soldiers in war and comprise a large chunk of the 300,000 reservists mobilized for the current conflict.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Rami G Khouri
visit website
