The Iraq-Turkey pipeline, which previously carried around 450,000 barrels per day from northern Iraq, was halted in 2023 after an arbitration ruling and stayed closed for two-and-a-half years. Its resumption only came after negotiations between Iraq, Turkey and Kurdistan. That’s the kind of reminder the article can’t quite escape: in Kurdistan, as in the rest of the region, the economy still moves when states decide it can.
The State Sets the Terms
A Jerusalem Post analysis says the Kurdistan Region is trying to change its image in the world and can learn from Israel’s path to becoming a start-up and tech superpower. The piece says outsiders have long focused on Saddam Hussein, genocide, ISIS, oil and security, but argues that if a place is known mostly through survival, it will struggle to attract investment that could give Kurdistan a prosperous future. The framing is tidy enough for investors. Less tidy is the machinery underneath: oil exports depend on politics Kurdistan cannot control, its banking system is still modernizing, and it operates inside a federal system that keeps the region’s future tied to decisions made elsewhere.
The analysis says Israel built one of the world’s leading start-up economies with permanent geopolitical pressure and limited natural resources. It says Kurdistan faces a different set of constraints: it does not have Israel’s military-tech pipeline or its access to American venture capital. Even so, the article says Israel showed that a small and politically exposed economy can be taken seriously by investors through years of public policy, research institutions, diaspora networks, venture capital and an environment that investors learned to trust. The state, in other words, creates the conditions, then congratulates private capital for showing up.
Israel’s Yozma program, launched in 1993, used public capital to attract foreign venture investors and build local venture funds. By the early 2000s, Israel’s venture capital market was driven by the private sector. The success that followed is reflected in the numbers: Israel spends more than 6% of GDP on research and development, its hi-tech sector accounts for roughly 12% of the workforce, around a fifth of GDP and more than half of exports, and in 2025 Israeli hi-tech firms raised $15.6b. in private funding. The article presents this as a model. It’s also a model of how states prime the pump, then let the market wear the crown.
Who Gets Wired In
The article says Kurdistan’s next step is to shift to innovation specifically. It says a hotel or housing project might create jobs, but building a start-up ecosystem like Israel’s means addressing access to risk capital, university-to-industry pipelines, banking infrastructure, organized diaspora investment and foreign investors who understand the market well enough to take a risk on it. It says the state should not be picking who gets investment, but should share risk with investors, especially those from the Kurdish diaspora who may have business or personal interest in the region.
That’s the language of managed opportunity. Public money takes the first hit, private investors collect the upside, and the region is told this is development. The article says a Kurdish innovation strategy could include a co-investment fund. It also says education can be an economic institution, citing Tel Aviv University’s Ramot as an example of identifying and commercializing university inventions, and says Kurdish universities can use this structure. Universities, then, are not just places of learning. They’re being cast as feeders for the investment pipeline.
The Kurdistan Region is not starting from zero, the article says. Since 2003, the region has expanded from four higher-education institutions to around 50 public and private institutions. The British Council’s research found that 76% percent of young people in the Kurdistan Region were interested in starting their own business, while only 51% felt their education had prepared them well for work. Those numbers sit side by side like a warning and a sales pitch. Young people want out of stagnation. The system hasn’t prepared them for much.
The NGO Mirage and the Diaspora Pitch
There are early routes, the article says, including Five One Labs, which supports entrepreneurs through training, mentorship, access to finance and ecosystem-building, and Orange Corners KRI, which helps entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses through incubation, mentoring and market access. The article also points to banking and financial reform as absolutely crucial, and to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s MyAccount program, which aims to transition public sector employees away from cash-based payments to modern digital banking. In May 2026, the KRG Ministry of Finance and Economy said more than 900,000 public-sector beneficiaries had registered for bank accounts and more than 800,000 bank cards had been delivered.
The article treats these programs as infrastructure for a future innovation economy. They also show how much of that future still runs through institutions, programs and intermediaries. The entrepreneurial class doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It gets trained, mentored, banked, incubated and routed through the proper channels. The language is all empowerment. The structure is administration.
The diaspora is presented as a particularly notable point of comparison between the Israeli and Kurdish cases. The article says Israel has long used the Diaspora as a strategic economic asset, utilizing Jewish communities abroad to provide capital, mentorship, political backing and access to global markets. It says the Kurdish case shares some of this, with large, established communities across Europe and North America, but differs in that these networks have not yet been integrated into a coordinated economic strategy driven by the KRI. Some Kurdish diaspora money already goes back to the region through family support, the article says, and a start-up strategy could create more formal channels for investment.
Kurdish angel networks in London, Berlin, Washington and the Gulf could be linked to founders in Kurdistan, the article says, and mentorship programs could connect Kurdish professionals in the diaspora with students and entrepreneurs. Opportunities for Kurdish start-ups to present themselves to international investors could help shift the narrative around Kurdistan to economic potential rather than political sympathy. The launch of the Kurdistan Society in London is described as a strong, albeit early-stage, example of this. It was created as a platform for strengthening ties between the Kurdish and British peoples in cultural, academic and economic areas.
The article’s final measure of the stakes is migration. The British Council’s Next Generation Iraq research found that 59% of young people in the Kurdistan Region would consider moving to another country. If opportunity remains limited, the article says, ambitious young Kurds will continue to look abroad. If they can build and scale companies at home, they will strengthen the region’s economy and its long-term stability. That’s the promise on offer: stay, build, and plug into the system. The article concludes that Kurdistan is not Israel, the constraints are different, but the raw material for a Start-Up Nation already exists in Kurdistan and what it needs is the wiring to switch it on. The wiring, naturally, runs through the state, the banks, the universities, the investors and the people who already know how to turn survival into a business plan.