Thinking about Israel’s high tech industry can bring to mind images of sleek, high-rise buildings in the coastal cities of Tel Aviv, Herzliya, and Haifa. But the next generation of tech founders may hail from peripheral villages far from these urban hubs. That much was clear at a recent tech conference in Tel Aviv, where a group of schoolchildren from the northern Arab-Israeli village of Daburiyya presented a fully functional AI-integrated school entry system, complete with facial recognition technology, smart gate access, and automated attendance tracking.
Nadeem Azaizah, a software engineer and the father of one of the students on Al Tur Elementary School’s Future Engineers robotics team, explained that 12-year-olds at the school are learning how to program AI with the Scratch programming language.
“This is the future of education, and it’s happening in places far from Tel Aviv,” Azaizah told The Media Line.
The school’s principal, Haifa Masalha, said that the school’s focus on tech is meant to empower the students. “Our goal is to prevent hidden dropout rates and keep kids engaged using AI to personalize education,” she told The Media Line.
The story of Al Tur Elementary’s Future Engineers is the story of Israel’s tech sector as a whole these days—a tale of beating the odds. Amid war, political turmoil, and credit downgrades, Israel’s high tech ecosystem remains one of the main engines of the nation’s economy, and it continues to grow.
“The success of Israeli high tech is in spite of the government, our geography, and our enemies,” Noam Bardin, former CEO of Waze and one of Israel’s most vocal tech leaders, told The Media Line. “All we need from the government is not to get in the way. Just stop destroying this beautiful and amazing country. We’ll do the rest.”
Bardin emphasized that Israel ought to be thought of not just as the “startup nation” but also as the “grit nation.”
“Grit doesn’t come from comfort. It comes from crisis,” he said.
He attributed Israel’s innovation miracle not to state support but to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of thought. “Great companies come from great societies, and great societies are liberal democracies,” he said. “That’s the only model that works. You want to see a threat to the economy? Undermine the court system. Investors read that as instability.”
Some high tech businesses are developing systems to help preserve liberal democracy. Brinker, an Israeli startup developing AI-powered tools to fight disinformation campaigns, is one example.
Importance of using tech in battle against disinformation
Daniel Ravner, co-founder and CEO of Brinker, told The Media Line about the importance of using tech in the battle against disinformation. “While governments are focused on land, sea, and air, adversaries are creating chaos online—uninterrupted,” Ravner said. “They’re mimicking citizens, spreading disinformation, and eroding public trust. And Western governments often can’t respond because democratic norms limit how they can investigate domestic-looking threats.”
Brinker’s AI-powered platform, developed with the help of recent advances in large language models, is designed to detect and neutralize coordinated influence campaigns without infringing on civil liberties. “Two years ago, we couldn’t have built this,” Ravner said. “But now, AI allows us to understand behavior patterns and content in real time. It’s a technological leap, and one that has come just in time.”
Ravner said that disinformation is now considered one of the top global risks by the World Economic Forum, surpassing even climate change and cyberattacks. His company has already begun collaborating with Israeli governmental agencies and is attracting interest from other Western democracies, particularly in Europe, where disinformation and hybrid threats are on the rise.
Venture capital funding for Israeli tech businesses slumped during the beginning of the war, and many businesses struggled as large numbers of workers were called up to serve in the military. One and a half years since the start of the war, the defense tech sector seems to be thriving, a fact that Rotem Mey-Tal, CEO of Robel Innovation, attributes to widespread military service.
“Before the war, people were building apps to find parking in Tel Aviv,” he told The Media Line. “Now they’re coming back from reserve duty and building drones, battlefield support systems, and paramedic technologies.”
Mey-Tal expects to see over 200 new defense and homeland security startups in Israel by the end of 2025. “This is the time to invest, not just in profits, but in the protection of nations and individuals,” he said. “Investors need to understand that defense tech is not just about Israel—it’s about providing protection to every democratic society, everywhere.”
Seed rounds for defense start-ups are now reaching $4 million, Mey-Tal said, with early-stage funding rising dramatically as venture capital firms turn toward national security-oriented innovation.
“Israel is uniquely positioned because we are battle-tested, and that gives us a huge advantage when it comes to developing cutting-edge defense technologies, which are the backbone of the start-up ecosystem today,” he explained. “When we solve the problem of national security, we also solve challenges in tech, innovation, and global collaboration.”
Indeed, international investors and tech leaders are highly interested in learning from Israel. Maurizio Rossi, co-founder of Italy’s Innovation Way, described Tel Aviv as “the heart of global innovation.”
“Because Israel’s domestic market is so small, Israeli companies are forced to think globally from day one,” Rossi told The Media Line. “This instinct, paired with an embedded culture of resilience, continues to give the country a competitive edge worldwide.”
Theodoros Loukaidis, director-general of the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation, is likewise inspired by Israel’s tech sector. Since Cyprus is a small island nation, “working with more advanced ecosystems like Israel is key to building capacity and opening opportunities,” Loukaidis told The Media Line.
In Bardin’s eyes, though, Israel’s central challenge isn’t just holding onto global investment—it’s holding onto the spirit that attracted global investment in the first place.
“This country is a startup,” Bardin said. “[National founder David] Ben-Gurion was the original founder. Now it’s on us to keep scaling it, fixing bugs, and pushing forward.”
