Israeli hi-tech companies raised $15.6 billion in 2025 despite the war, while major global companies expanded their presence in Israel, according to an opinion piece in The Jerusalem Post. The same article says the tech sector remains 20% of Israel's GDP and over half of its exports, a reminder that the machinery of profit keeps humming even as the broader society is forced to live under conflict and militarized normalcy.
Who Gets the Money
The article places the biggest numbers up front: $15.6 billion raised by Israeli hi-tech companies in 2025. That capital did not appear in a vacuum. It arrived alongside the continued expansion of major global companies in Israel, showing how corporate power keeps finding room to grow even in wartime conditions. The piece frames this as resilience. Read another way, it is the concentration of resources in a sector already central to the economy, with the benefits flowing upward through the same structures that dominate the rest of life.
The article says the tech sector accounts for 20% of Israel's GDP and over 50% of its exports. Those figures make the sector a strategic asset not just for business elites, but for the state apparatus that depends on it. When one sector carries so much of the economy, ordinary people are left exposed to the decisions of investors, executives and institutions far above them.
The Innovation Machine
The article says Israel ranked 14th in the Global Innovation Index 2025 and 1st in its region, continuing to excel in research, patents and hi-tech innovation. It also says Israel ranked 3rd globally in energy innovation, according to the World Economic Forum. The language is celebratory, but the underlying picture is one of a tightly managed innovation economy, praised for output while the social costs of war and hierarchy remain outside the frame.
The piece describes Israel as still being Start-Up Nation and says its defense tech sector surged in 2025, becoming a major strategic asset and integrating AI and new technologies rapidly into real-world use. It also says Israel and the United States launched a $200 million AI and quantum technology center aimed at global technological leadership and regional cooperation. That is the language of power dressed up as progress: military-linked technology, state partnership, and a new center built for leadership, not liberation.
What They Call Normal
The article moves through a series of scenes meant to show continuity under pressure. It says the Tel Aviv Museum of Art was included on the list of the world's top 100 most visited art museums of the past year. It says the nation comes to a two-minute standstill on Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day and on Memorial Day, and that two million persons have listened to Holocaust survivor stories in small groups in private homes in the Zikaron BaSalon program in the last 15 years. It says the names of Holocaust victims are read aloud in the Knesset in the Unto Every Person There Is a Name program, and that President Isaac Herzog read the names of his own relatives killed in the Holocaust.
The article also says Joel Mokyr was the 18th Israeli to win a Nobel Prize, that S.Y. Agnon was the first, and that Mokyr won for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress. It says Mokyr was born in Leiden, Netherlands, in 1946 to a family of Dutch Jews who survived the Holocaust, and that his widowed mother, Gonda Jacobs Mok, brought him up in Haifa. These details are presented as part of a national success story, one that ties memory, prestige and technological growth into a single narrative.
The piece says Israel was in this year's top 10 list of happiest countries in the world, that Israelis under the age of 25 ranked as the happiest group within the country and placed third worldwide, that Israel ranks 4th among OECD nations in longevity with an average lifespan of 83.8, and that it ranks second among OECD countries for the lowest mortality rate from preventable causes. It says 81% of Israelis receive critical cardiac catheterization within 12 hours, and that the public health system covers everything, including fertility and cancer treatment. It also says Israelis have invented an app for when you can take a shower during the war, and that most baby booms happen after a war but Israel has a baby boom during a war, with a 7% to 10% growth rate in births. Hadassah Mount Scopus chief midwife Elisheva Levin is quoted as saying, "The glorious cries of the newborns drown out the sound of the missiles."
The article says purchases of baby equipment have risen sharply despite the economic challenge. It says Israel leads in water tech start-ups, including smart irrigation systems, leak detection and efficient desalination, and that per capita Israelis use far less electricity and between a third to half of the water that Americans use. It says the new Gordonia Hotel in Zichron Ya'acov, named for Zionist leader A.D. Gordon, has a 70-meter swimming pool and a Watergen drinking faucet that pulls water out of the air, and that the hotel opened for the first time while the airports were closed and in the midst of Operation Roaring Lion and the ongoing battle with Hezbollah.
The article says Israel has four different beaches — the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea, the Red Sea and the Sea of Galilee — and is small enough so you can swim at all four in a single day. It says the country's beach volleyball team took third place in the Goa India Beach Pro Challenge in March when the temperature was 38 degrees and humid. It says the road from Jerusalem is lined with flags, Israeli flags and American red, white and blue, to honor allies, and that prayers in synagogues are now also said for American soldiers joining in battle. It says the Tel Aviv Marathon resumed on February 27, the day before the war began, with a record number of runners. It says nothing kept Tel Aviv café goers from their favorite cappuccinos and matcha among missile attacks, that some street mendicants now accept bank phone money transfer by BIT, and that an ice cream truck on Passover boasts dairy and parve ice cream with and without kitniyot.
The article says archaeologists uncovered in 2025 a rare First Temple period structure in Jerusalem, a Second Temple stone vessel workshop and a coin from the Great Revolt against Rome. It ends by quoting US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as saying, "When the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps looks up, says Hegseth, they only see two things on the sides of aircraft – the Stars and Stripes, and the Star of David – the evil regime’s worst nightmare."