The tech sector in a country at war
When I described ordinary life in Israel in the past issue, I left out the place where I spend most of my day: work. I write from inside the Israeli technology world, and two years of war have changed that world as much as they have changed anything else here.
The view from a Herzliya office park and the view from a kibbutz kitchen window turn out to be the same story told from different chairs. For American readers whose image of Israel's tech sector comes from conference keynotes, the war version is stranger, sadder, and in some ways more impressive.
Start with the strangest part: the uniform hanging on the office chair.
In the war's first months, roughly 300,000 reservists were called up, and the technology sector, which drives a large share of Israel's exports, lost somewhere between 15% and 20 % of its staff at many firms. Engineers disappeared from standup meetings with a day's notice. Managers learned to ask not who is available this quarter, but who is available this week. A friend's company planned releases the way a hockey coach plans lines, rotating whoever remained so the product never stopped moving. Nobody called it heroic. They called it Wednesday, and then they went back to work.
The desk with a rifle under it
The personal side is harder to put into writing. A person who is a senior architect on Monday is a platoon technician on Tuesday, and the phone in their pocket carries both lives at once. I have watched a product review pause while someone stepped out to take a call from Gaza, then resume as if the agenda had simply waited its turn. Spouses run households alone for months. Founders interview investors in the same week they interview their own reserve unit about a deployment date. The load does not show up in any quarterly report, which is exactly why I want to describe it.
American Jewish communities hear constantly about Israeli brilliance and Israeli crisis. The two live in the same person, on the same day, far more often than anyone abroad imagines.
What a war does to an industry
Economically, the sector took a real punch. Investment fell in the first year. Growth in tech employment, which had been a straight line upward for a decade, went flat. There were layoffs and there was drift, and the mood at industry conferences in 2024 was grim. Some predicted the whole engine would stall. The data told a harder and more interesting story: Israel's enemies can disrupt its economy, but they have consistently underestimated its ability to rebuild, and the recovery that followed proved the point again. By last year the numbers were climbing once more, and the recovery was being led by exactly the kind of work the war had demanded.
The comeback nobody predicted
Defense technology became the fastest-growing corner of the industry, with hundreds of new companies founded since the war began, many of them by reservists who saw a problem firsthand and came home determined to fix it. Exports hit new records, and today the world is buying more of what Israel creates than ever before.
The artificial intelligence partnership between the United States and Israel, which had been building for years, deepened under wartime pressure rather than pausing. When I look at where the sector stands now, the surprise is not that it survived. The surprise is that a country under this much strain kept producing things the rest of the planet lines up to buy.
Why this matters in Providence
I bring this back to Rhode Island readers for a simple reason. The Israeli technology sector is one of the strongest bridges between Israel and the United States, and it is held up by people who spend their weeks the way I have described: half code review, half call-up orders, all endurance.
When your community discusses Israel, this is the part worth knowing. Not the miracle caricature and not the crisis caricature, but the ordinary, stubborn, talented people who keep shipping product from a country at war.Two years in, that is the view from my desk, and I would not trade the chair.
MARK GINSBERG lives in Efrat, Israel, and writes about Israeli society and technology.
Keywords
Israel, technology
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