Israel put 6.35 percent of its GDP into research and development in 2023, the highest share in the OECD and more than double the OECD average of 2.7 percent. South Korea was next at 4.96 percent.
Science — SSTI, from OECD data, 2025Israel began COVID-19 vaccinations on 19 December 2020 and had given more than half its population a first dose within about two months, the fastest campaign in the world. Its data gave other countries the first real-world evidence that mass vaccination bends the curve.
Medicine — The Washington Post, 2021Israel’s defense exports reached a record $13.1 billion in 2023, the third record year in a row and double the figure of five years earlier. More than a third of the deals were missile, rocket and air defense systems.
Defense — Israel Ministry of Defense, 2024Venture investors put $10.5 billion into Israeli startups in 2025, from a country of ten million people, and the first half of 2026 was on track for $14 billion.
Venture Capital — Dealroom, 2026In 2017 Intel bought Mobileye, whose cameras and chips let cars read the road, for $15.3 billion, the largest purchase of an Israeli company ever. Its systems held 70 percent of the world market for driver-assistance and collision avoidance.
AI — CNN, 2017Israeli cybersecurity companies raised a record $8.8 billion in 2021 across 131 deals, about 40 percent of all cybersecurity investment worldwide that year. One in three cybersecurity unicorns in the world is Israeli.
Cybersecurity — The Times of Israel, 2022More than 87 percent of Israel’s treated wastewater is reused, most of it to irrigate crops, the highest rate of any OECD country. Spain, the next highest, reuses about 20 percent.
Water & Agriculture — OECD, 2021Engineer Simcha Blass and Kibbutz Hatzerim founded Netafim in 1965 to make the first practical drip irrigation system. It now waters crops in 150 countries and cuts water use by up to half compared with flooding a field.
Water & Agriculture — The Times of Israel, 2015On 19 September 1988 Israel launched Ofek 1 into orbit on its own Shavit rocket from Palmachim, becoming the eighth country able to put a satellite in space after the Soviet Union, the United States, France, Japan, China, Britain and India.
Space — The Times of Israel, 2018After the February 2023 earthquake, a 230-strong Israeli delegation flew to Kahramanmaraş and brought a damaged city hospital back into service. In under a week it treated about 470 people, including 150 children and Syrian refugees.
Humanitarian Aid — The Times of Israel, 2023Israel’s population passed ten million at the end of 2024. Of them, 2.1 million, or 21 percent, are Arab citizens, with full voting rights, seats in parliament and a place on the Supreme Court.
Coexistence — The Jerusalem Post, 2025Muhammad was the single most popular name given to boys born in Israel in 2024, with 1,740 newborns. A Jewish state’s most common boy’s name is the name of the founder of Islam.
Coexistence — The Times of Israel, 2025In 2023 Arabs were 25 percent of Israel’s physicians, 27 percent of its nurses and dentists, and 49 percent of its pharmacists. In 2010 only 8 percent of physicians were Arab.
Coexistence — Israel Journal of Health Policy Research, 2024More than 60,000 Arab students were enrolled in Israeli higher education in 2022–23, 18 percent of all students. In 2009–10 they were 10 percent of undergraduates.
Coexistence — Council for Higher Education, 2023Ghassan Alian, a Druze from Shfaram, took command of the Golani Brigade in 2013, the first non-Jew to lead it. He later rose to major general and became the army’s coordinator for the Palestinian territories.
Coexistence — The Times of Israel, 2013Bibras Natcho, a devout Muslim from the Circassian village of Kfar Kama, was named captain of Israel’s national team in 2018, the first non-Jew to wear the armband. He won 88 caps and a presidential decoration.
Coexistence — The Jerusalem Post, 2026In May 1991, as rebels closed on Addis Ababa, Israel flew 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to citizenship in 36 hours on 35 aircraft. One El Al 747 carried 1,122 people, still the most passengers ever on a single flight.
Coexistence — The Jewish Agency, 1991Salim Joubran, an Arab Christian, sat on Israel’s Supreme Court from 2004 to 2017. He was on the panel that sent former president Katsav to prison, writing that he had fallen “from the loftiest heights to the deepest depths.”
Coexistence — The Times of Israel, 2023The Baha’i faith, whose members are persecuted in Iran, keeps its world headquarters and its two holiest shrines in Haifa and Acre. UNESCO listed the sites as World Heritage in 2008.
Coexistence — UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 2008Israel counted about 34,000 Christians in 1949 and 180,300 at Christmas 2024, a community that keeps growing while Christians leave most of the region.
Coexistence — Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024Tel Aviv Pride is the biggest LGBT event in the Middle East and Asia. About 150,000 people marched openly through the city in 2023.
Pride — The Times of Israel, 2023Israel’s military lifted all restrictions on gay and lesbian service in 1993, the same year the United States adopted “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Studies found no effect on unit cohesion or readiness.
Pride — NPR, 2010Uzi Even became the region’s first openly gay legislator in 2002. In December 2022 Amir Ohana became Speaker of the Knesset, the first openly gay person to lead a parliament in the Middle East.
Pride — The Times of Israel, 2022Israel’s High Court ordered the state to register same-sex marriages performed abroad in 2006. Since January 2022, same-sex couples can also have children through surrogacy.
Pride — Library of Congress, 2021In El Al v. Danilowitz the Supreme Court ruled that the airline had to give a flight attendant’s male partner the same benefits as a spouse. The ruling opened pensions, benefits and inheritance to same-sex couples.
Pride — International Commission of Jurists, 1994Dana International’s “Diva” won the Eurovision Song Contest in Birmingham with 172 points, Israel’s third victory. Her win is credited with bringing trans identity into the mainstream across Europe.
Pride — Eurovisionworld, 1998A February 2022 Health Ministry directive bars psychologists, doctors and licensed therapists from offering or referring anyone for so-called conversion therapy. Those who do face disciplinary action and can lose their licence.
Pride — The Times of Israel, 2022The Israel Defense Forces let transgender conscripts serve under their identified gender and fund hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery. The first openly transgender soldiers served years before most Western militaries allowed it.
Pride — Palm Center, 2015Thousands march through the holy city each year, protected by about 3,000 police, and the march has gone ahead every year since 2002 despite opposition from religious groups and the murder of a 16-year-old marcher in 2015.
Pride — The Times of Israel, 2023About 90 LGBT Palestinians live in Israel on protective permits after fleeing death threats at home. In June 2022 Israel told its High Court they could also work legally. Ahmad Abu Markhiya, 25, who had lived in Israel for two years, was found beheaded in Hebron four months later.
Pride — The Times of Israel, 2022Startup Nation Central counted 434 multinational R&D centers in Israel in 2024, among them Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Amazon and Meta. They employ a third of the country’s tech workforce and produce 60 percent of its high-tech exports.
Tech — Startup Nation Central, 2024Google completed its purchase of the cloud security firm Wiz in March 2026, the largest acquisition in Israel’s history and the largest Google has ever made. The deal is expected to bring about $3.2 billion in tax to the Israeli treasury.
Venture Capital — The Times of Israel, 2026Acquisitions and IPOs of Israeli tech companies totaled $82.4 billion in 2021 across 171 deals, up from $15.4 billion the year before. Seventy-two companies went public, including ironSource, SentinelOne and Monday.com.
Venture Capital — The Times of Israel, 2021Israeli tech companies raised $10.6 billion in 2024, according to Startup Nation Central. Startups across the entire rest of the Middle East and North Africa raised $1.9 billion, with Saudi Arabia at $750 million and the UAE at $613 million.
Venture Capital — Arab News, from MAGNiTT data, 2025As of September 2026, Tracxn counts 42 privately held Israeli startups valued at more than a billion dollars, 26 of them in Tel Aviv alone. The count moves as companies are bought or go public; this figure is checked at each release of this page.
Venture Capital — Tracxn, 2026The CWTS Leiden Ranking for 2025 placed the Weizmann Institute of Science sixth in the world for research quality, its highest position since the ranking began in 2006, up from tenth in 2024.
Science — Weizmann Institute of Science, 2025Dan Shechtman discovered quasicrystals in 1982, a structure his field said was impossible. Linus Pauling declared there were “no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” Shechtman won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.
Science — NobelPrize.org, 2011Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko of the Technion shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, the process by which cells label and destroy proteins.
Science — NobelPrize.org, 2004Gavriel Iddan, on sabbatical from a defense company, began designing a swallowable camera in 1981. Given Imaging’s PillCam was cleared by the FDA in 2001 and made capsule endoscopy a routine procedure.
Medicine — NoCamels, 2013Amit Goffer, quadriplegic after a 1997 accident, developed ReWalk, a powered exoskeleton that lets people with spinal cord injuries stand and walk. In June 2014 it became the first personal exoskeleton cleared by the FDA for home use.
Medicine — Medgadget, 2014Copaxone was synthesised by Michael Sela, Ruth Arnon and Dvora Teitelbaum at the Weizmann Institute and developed by Teva. The FDA approved it in December 1996 as the first non-interferon treatment for relapsing MS.
Medicine — Weizmann Institute of Science, 1996OECD data for 2023 put Israel’s life expectancy at 83.8 years, behind only Switzerland, Japan and Spain, on health spending of 7.6 percent of GDP against 11 to 12 percent in the countries around it on the table.
Medicine — The Times of Israel, 2024Save a Child’s Heart, based at Wolfson Medical Center since 1995, has operated on 6,000 children from 63 countries. Half are Palestinian children from Gaza and the West Bank, seen at a weekly clinic in Holon.
Medicine — Israel Hayom, 2021M-Systems of Kfar Saba patented the first USB flash drive in November 2000 and sold it as the DiskOnKey. It replaced the floppy disk within a few years.
Tech — Technion, 2025Intel’s Haifa centre, its first outside the United States, opened in 1974 and designed the 8088, the processor IBM shipped inside the original PC in 1981.
Tech — The Seattle Times, 2007The Pentium M, codenamed Banias after a site in the Golan, was designed in Israel and shipped in March 2003 inside the Centrino platform. It anchored three years of 13 percent annual sales growth at Intel.
Tech — The Seattle Times, 2007ICQ, released by Mirabilis in November 1996, was the first standalone instant messenger. AOL bought the company for $407 million in 1998 and built AOL Instant Messenger on it.
Tech — Britannica, 1998Google paid $966 million for the navigation app in 2013. Earlier talks with Facebook had collapsed over Waze’s insistence that its staff remain in Ra’anana rather than move to California.
Tech — Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2013Nvidia employs about 4,500 people in Israel, built on its $6.9 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2020. The networking business that came with it now earns more than $31 billion a year.
Tech — Ctech, 2026Intel employs about 12,000 people in Israel and runs chip fabs in Kiryat Gat. In 2023 it announced a $25 billion expansion there, the largest investment by a company in Israel’s history.
Tech — The Times of Israel, 2023Microsoft opened its first development centre outside the United States in Haifa in 1991. Its Israeli centres remain among the few strategic development sites the company runs abroad.
Tech — NoCamels, 2016In 2024 high-tech employed 391,000 people, 11.4 percent of Israel’s workforce, and produced about half of the country’s exports.
Tech — Israel Innovation Authority, 2025Arrow, developed by Israel Aerospace Industries with the United States, was declared fully operational in October 2000, the first system designed and built specifically to intercept ballistic missiles.
Defense — Army Recognition, 2000Rafael’s 100-kilowatt Iron Beam was handed to the air force in December 2025 after downing rockets, mortar shells and drones in trials, the first high-power laser interceptor anywhere to reach operational use.
Defense — The Times of Israel, 2025Since its first intercept in 2011, Iron Dome has logged more than 10,000 combat interceptions of rockets, mortars and drones, with success rates above 90 percent.
Defense — The Jerusalem Post, 2026Israel accounted for 3.1 percent of global arms exports in 2020 to 2024, eighth in the world, and supplied 13 percent of Germany’s arms imports.
Defense — SIPRI, 2025Rafael’s Trophy made the first combat interception by an active protection system in 2011. The US Army began fitting it to Abrams tanks in 2019.
Defense — Leonardo DRS, 2021Israeli companies exported $4.6 billion of unmanned aircraft between 2005 and 2012, more than the United States, according to Frost & Sullivan.
Defense — The Times of Israel, 2013The Sorek plant south of Tel Aviv became fully operational in October 2013, producing 624,000 cubic metres of drinking water a day, the largest seawater reverse-osmosis plant in the world at the time.
Water & Agriculture — WaterWorld, 2013Roughly 85 percent of Israel’s drinking water is desalinated, turning a country in chronic shortage into one with a surplus it sells to its neighbours.
Water & Agriculture — KUER, 2023Under the 1994 peace treaty Israel supplies Jordan 50 million cubic metres of water a year. In July 2021 it agreed to sell 50 million more, doubling the flow to its parched neighbour.
Water & Agriculture — The Times of Israel, 2021Israel’s dairy herd averages 12,265 kilograms of milk per cow per year, the highest yield in the world. Denmark, in second place, averages 10,571.
Water & Agriculture — The Jerusalem Post, 2024SpaceIL’s Beresheet, launched in February 2019, became the first privately funded spacecraft to enter lunar orbit. It crashed during its landing attempt in April, and NASA congratulated the team anyway.
Space — The Planetary Society, 2019Every other spacefaring nation launches eastward to borrow the Earth’s spin. Israel launches westward over the Mediterranean, against the rotation, so nothing falls on populated land, at the cost of extra fuel or smaller payloads.
Space — Spaceflight Now, 2023Ilan Ramon flew on the shuttle Columbia in January 2003 with a copy of “Moon Landscape,” drawn by 16-year-old Petr Ginz before he was murdered at Auschwitz. Ramon died with the crew on re-entry on 1 February 2003.
Space — Israel Space Agency, 2003After the January 2010 earthquake the IDF field hospital was fully operational 89 hours after the quake. In ten days it treated 1,111 patients, performed 244 operations and delivered 16 babies.
Humanitarian Aid — Annals of Internal Medicine, 2010After the 2015 earthquake Israel’s delegation numbered 260 people, more than every other aid team counted by CNN combined. Britain, the next largest, sent 68.
Humanitarian Aid — The Times of Israel, 2015Operation Good Neighbor brought almost 5,000 Syrians, including more than 1,300 children, across a closed border for treatment in Israeli hospitals between 2013 and 2018.
Humanitarian Aid — The Times of Israel, 2018The 66-bed hospital at Mostyska, named Shining Star, opened in March 2022 and treated more than 6,000 patients in six weeks.
Humanitarian Aid — The Times of Israel, 2022IsraAID has responded to more than 110 emergencies in more than 65 countries since 2001, from earthquakes in Nepal and Turkey to refugee crises in Europe.
Humanitarian Aid — IsraAID, 2026The IMF puts Israel’s GDP per capita at $54,300 for 2024, against $53,300 for the United Kingdom, $46,100 for France and $33,800 for Japan.
Economy — International Monetary Fund, 2025Israel became the 33rd member of the OECD in September 2010 after a three-year review, twenty years after it first asked to join.
Economy — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2010The state was founded with 806,000 people. At the end of 2024 the Central Bureau of Statistics counted 10.03 million.
Economy — The Times of Israel, 2025Gas from the Leviathan field began flowing to Jordan and Egypt in January 2020. A $35 billion export agreement with Egypt followed, Israel’s largest ever.
Economy — Al Jazeera, 2020The 2025 Global Innovation Index places Israel 14th of 139 economies and first among the 18 in its region, and first in the world for R&D spending and venture capital received.
Economy — WIPO, 2025In 1978, 1979, 1998 and 2018, and hosted the contest in 1979, 1999 and 2019.
Culture & Sport — Eurovoix, 2018About 4,000 modernist buildings, built by architects who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s. UNESCO listed the White City as a World Heritage Site in 2003.
Culture & Sport — Wallpaper, 2019Violinist Bronislaw Huberman secured 70 exit visas for musicians dismissed from European orchestras and their families. Arturo Toscanini conducted the first concert in Tel Aviv on 26 December 1936.
Culture & Sport — Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, 1936Israeli athletes won seven medals in Paris, one gold, five silver and one bronze, with windsurfer Tom Reuveny taking the gold.
Culture & Sport — The Times of Israel, 2024Hebrew was not spoken as a daily language for some 2,000 years. Revived from the 1880s, it is now the native language of millions.
Culture & Sport — National Geographic, 2023A 2012 law bars advertisers from using models with a body mass index below 18.5 and requires them to disclose images that have been digitally slimmed.
Culture & Sport — CBS News, 2012From 1977 Menachem Begin’s government gave citizenship, full rights and subsidised homes to about 360 Vietnamese refugees, comparing their plight to that of Jewish refugees in the 1930s.
Coexistence — The Times of Israel, 2012Of roughly 850,000 Jews who fled or were driven from Arab countries after 1948, about 586,000 were resettled in Israel by 1972, most arriving with nothing.
Coexistence — Jewish Virtual Library, 1972Nearly 1.1 million people arrived from the former Soviet Union from 1990, about 400,000 of them in the first two years, equal to 19 percent of the existing population.
Coexistence — CEPR, 2017Tel Aviv took 43 percent of the vote in a 2011 American Airlines and GayCities poll of LGBT travellers, ahead of New York, Toronto and Berlin.
Pride — The Jerusalem Post, 2012Israel devotes 6.35 percent of GDP to research and development. The UAE spends 1.49 percent, Egypt 1.03, Iran 0.73 and Saudi Arabia 0.64, according to World Bank data.
Science — World Bank, 2025Inventors in Israel were granted 4,844 US patents in 2020. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar and Kuwait together were granted 1,576.
Tech — USPTO via FRED, 2020Israeli startups raised about $1,060 per resident in 2024. Saudi startups raised $21 per resident and Emirati startups $54, on MAGNiTT’s figures for the region.
Venture Capital — Arab News, from MAGNiTT data, 2025Israel has 42 private startups valued above a billion dollars. The rest of the region, with fifty times the population, has 17.
Venture Capital — Multiples VC, 2026In the Nature Index for 2025 Israel’s share of articles in leading journals works out to 71 per million people, against 7.6 for Saudi Arabia, 4.4 for Iran and 3.7 for Turkey.
Science — Nature Index, 2025The 2025 Shanghai Ranking places the Weizmann Institute 71st, the Hebrew University 88th and the Technion 97th. The highest-ranked Arab university, King Saud, sits in the 101 to 150 band.
Science — The Times of Israel, 2025The 2025 Global Innovation Index ranks Israel 14th. The UAE is 30th, Turkey 43rd, Saudi Arabia 46th, Qatar 48th, Iran 70th and Egypt 86th.
Economy — WIPO, 2025World Bank data for 2023 put life expectancy in Israel at 83.2 years, against 72.1 for the Middle East and North Africa, 72.3 in Iraq and 71.6 in Egypt.
Medicine — World Bank, 2023The IMF puts GDP per capita for 2024 at $54,300 in Israel, $35,500 in Saudi Arabia, $4,800 in Iran and $3,600 in Egypt.
Economy — International Monetary Fund, 2025Israel has around 6,000 startups, about one for every 1,400 people. The United States has roughly one for every 4,500.
Venture Capital — Startup Nation Central, 2024Intel bought Habana Labs of Caesarea in December 2019 for about $2 billion. Its Gaudi processor trained neural networks and stayed in Israel, where Intel already ran its largest operation outside the United States.
AI — TechCrunch, 2019Israel-1, announced in 2023, delivers up to eight exaflops of AI computing from Nvidia’s Israeli campus and came online two months ahead of schedule, running on BlueField chips designed in Israel.
AI — The Jerusalem Post, 2023Nvidia completed its purchase of Run:ai, a Tel Aviv company whose software schedules work across AI chips, in December 2024 after a European antitrust review, and then made the software open source.
AI — Yahoo Finance, 2024Funding for Israeli AI companies jumped from $4.9 billion in 2024 to about $7.9 billion in 2025. Nearly 3,000 AI companies operate in Israel, about a third of all its high-tech firms.
AI — Ctech, 2025LinkedIn’s AI Talent Index found 1.98 percent of Israel’s workforce holds AI skills, the highest share of any country, ahead of Singapore at 1.64 percent and Luxembourg at 1.44.
AI — The Times of Israel, 2023AI21 Labs of Tel Aviv, founded in 2017 by Amnon Shashua, Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen, reached a $1.4 billion valuation in 2023 with Google and Nvidia among its investors, on the strength of its Jurassic models.
AI — The Times of Israel, 2023Gil Shwed conceived stateful inspection while serving in Unit 8200 and founded Check Point in 1993. Its FireWall-1, shown in 1994, was the industry’s first stateful inspection firewall, and the patent still bears his name.
Cybersecurity — Check Point, 1994Nir Zuk, a Unit 8200 veteran and early Check Point engineer, founded Palo Alto Networks in 2005. It became the most valuable cybersecurity company in the world, and its Israeli centre is its second largest.
Cybersecurity — Ctech, 2026The 2025 all-stock purchase of CyberArk, founded in Israel in 1999, was the second-largest exit in Israeli history, behind only Google’s purchase of Wiz.
Cybersecurity — Ctech, 2025Israeli cyber companies raised $3.8 billion in 2024, up 56 percent in a year of war. They are 7 percent of the country’s tech companies and took more than a third of its funding.
Cybersecurity — Ctech, 2025SentinelOne, founded in Tel Aviv in 2013, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2021 at a valuation of about $9 billion, the biggest initial public offering by a cybersecurity company.
Cybersecurity — Ctech, 2025Google bought Siemplify for $500 million in January 2022, its first Israeli cyber acquisition, and built its Google Cloud security operations in Israel around it.
Cybersecurity — The Times of Israel, 2022The Peres Center for Peace and Innovation’s Saving Children project arranges treatment in Israeli hospitals for children from Gaza and the West Bank whose conditions cannot be treated at home. More than 13,000 have come through it.
Humanitarian Aid — Peres Center for Peace & Innovation, 2025Road to Recovery collects Palestinian patients at West Bank and Gaza checkpoints and drives them to Israeli hospitals, about 2,700 people a year. Yuval Roth founded it in 2010 as an act of reconciliation for his brother, who was kidnapped and killed by Hamas in 1993.
Coexistence — The Times of Israel, 2023Hadassah Medical Organization was nominated for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize for treating Israelis and Palestinians identically, in the same wards, by the same doctors, through the worst years of the Second Intifada.
Coexistence — Hadassah International, 2005Surgeons at Hadassah Ein Kerem in Jerusalem fitted cochlear implants in sixteen children aged eighteen months to fifteen years, from Gaza and the West Bank, in a program run with the Peres Center.
Medicine — The Times of Israel, 2017The Peres Center has placed hundreds of Palestinian physicians in Israeli hospitals to specialize in fields that cannot be studied in Gaza or the West Bank, then return home to practice them.
Humanitarian Aid — Peres Center for Peace & Innovation, 2025MASHAV, Israel’s agency for international development, teaches agriculture, water management and public health to the developing world. Since 1958 it has directly trained more than 350,000 men and women.
Humanitarian Aid — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2025MASHAV was founded in 1958, a decade after independence and while Israel was still rationing food, on Golda Meir’s conviction that a young state which had just learned to farm a desert should be teaching others how.
Humanitarian Aid — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2025In 2016 the World Health Organization certified the IDF field hospital as the first Type 3 emergency medical team, its highest classification. Of thirty-seven teams classified worldwide by 2023, only two held it.
Humanitarian Aid — The Times of Israel, 2016Under Operation Good Neighbor, Israel ran clinics on the Syrian border from 2016 to 2018 for a country it was formally at war with, delivering over a thousand babies and treating some 1,500 Syrian children in Israeli hospitals.
Humanitarian Aid — The Times of Israel, 2018MASHAV’s Tipa kit lets a smallholder drip-irrigate with no water pressure and no electricity. Kits have gone to farmers in Senegal, Kenya, South Africa, Benin and Niger.
Water & Agriculture — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2025IDE Technologies has spent sixty years exporting the desalination and water treatment Israel developed for itself, and its plants now produce more than 1,600 million gallons of clean water a day.
Water & Agriculture — IDE Technologies, 2025The Carlsbad desalination plant in California, designed and equipped by Israel’s IDE Technologies, is the largest in the Americas and supplies 400,000 people.
Water & Agriculture — IDE Technologies, 2025Bernard Bar-Natan designed the Emergency Bandage after being issued dressings manufactured in 1942. It applies thirty pounds of pressure one-handed and is standard issue for American, German, Australian and New Zealand forces.
Medicine — Emergency Bandage, Wikipedia, 2024United Hatzalah’s GPS dispatch system, which routes the nearest trained volunteer to an emergency rather than the nearest ambulance, was first adapted overseas in Panama in 2013 and has spread since.
Humanitarian Aid — United Hatzalah, Wikipedia, 2024Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping the ribosome, only the fourth woman ever to win it, and went on to show how more than twenty antibiotics bind to it.
Science — The Nobel Prize, 2009Fourteen Israelis have won the Nobel Prize since 1948: six in chemistry, three in economics, three for peace and one in literature. The country’s population is under ten million.
Science — List of Israeli Nobel laureates, Wikipedia, 2025Measured by laureates per head of population, Israel ranks eleventh in the world, ahead of all three.
Science — List of Nobel laureates by country, Wikipedia, 2025Raphael Mechoulam of the Hebrew University isolated THC in 1964, a year after establishing the structure of CBD. Every cannabinoid drug prescribed today rests on that work.
Medicine — International League Against Epilepsy, 2019In the 1970s Nahum Kedar and Haim Rabinowitch of the Hebrew University bred cherry tomato varieties that ripened slowly and survived shipping, turning a South American curiosity into a supermarket staple worldwide.
Science — American Friends of the Hebrew University, 2018Newsweek ranked Sheba Medical Center seventh globally in 2026, after eighth, ninth and tenth in the years before, alongside Mayo, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General.
Medicine — Globes, 2026Teva produces more than 1,800 molecules and fills roughly one in every ten generic prescriptions written in the United States. Generics are the business that makes medicine affordable.
Medicine — Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, 2024Azilect was developed by Technion professors Moussa Youdim and John Finberg and commercialized by Teva. It slows the loss of dopamine in the brain.
Medicine — American Technion Society, 2024Marta Weinstock-Rosin of the Hebrew University developed Exelon, now prescribed for mild to moderate dementia caused by Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.
Medicine — The Times of Israel, 2013United Hatzalah’s 8,000 volunteer medics answered more than 750,000 calls in 2023 on a fleet of 1,000 ambucycles, averaging under three minutes nationally and ninety seconds in the cities.
Medicine — United Hatzalah, Wikipedia, 2024Israel had no natural forest. The Jewish National Fund has hand-planted more than 260 million trees across 250,000 acres, and Israel entered this century with a net gain in trees.
Water & Agriculture — Jewish National Fund, 2025Apple entered Israel in 2012 by buying the chip designer Anobit for about $390 million. Tim Cook has said the Herzliya center is Apple’s second-largest research office anywhere, after Cupertino, and most of its roughly 800 staff are chip engineers.
Tech — The Times of Israel, 2015Nvidia bought the networking company Mellanox in 2019. Its networking division, whose InfiniBand, NVLink and Spectrum-X technology is largely developed at the Yokneam campus that came with the deal, now earns more than $31 billion a year moving data between AI chips.
Tech — Calcalist, 2026Fab 38 in Kiryat Gat is the largest investment any company has ever made in the country, due to open in 2028. Intel has been in Israel since 1974 and employs nearly 12,000 people there.
Tech — Al Jazeera, 2023Wix was founded in Tel Aviv in 2006 by three friends who could not get a website built for their own startup. It now has more than 282 million registered users and 6.2 million paying subscribers.
Tech — Wix.com, Wikipedia, 2025Amdocs, founded in Israel in 1982, runs the billing and customer systems behind AT&T, Vodafone, T-Mobile and hundreds of other carriers, with more than 350 clients in over 60 countries.
Tech — Amdocs, Wikipedia, 2025monday.com passed $1.2 billion in revenue in 2025, fifteen years after it was founded, selling the software other companies use to organise their own work.
Tech — monday.com, Wikipedia, 2025ironSource, which helps app developers make money from their games, closed an all-stock merger with Unity in November 2022 and took 26.5 percent of the combined company.
Venture Capital — TechCrunch, 2022About 111 Israeli companies trade on the Nasdaq today, and more than 250 have floated on it since the 1980s, from a country of ten million people.
Economy — List of Israeli companies listed on the Nasdaq, Wikipedia, 2025Startup Genome’s 2025 ranking puts Tel Aviv behind only Silicon Valley, New York and London, with an ecosystem valued at $198 billion and a top-ten placing for knowledge, funding and talent.
Venture Capital — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2025High-tech exports reached $78 billion in 2024, the highest share of total exports on record, and nearly three-quarters of that is software and services rather than hardware.
Economy — The Jerusalem Post, 2025Employees of the high-tech sector accounted for about 36 percent of all income tax collected in Israel, from under a tenth of the workforce. The sector is roughly a fifth of GDP.
Economy — The Times of Israel, 2024Ehud Olmert, prime minister from 2006 to 2009, entered prison in 2016 for bribery, fraud and obstructing justice. Moshe Katsav, president from 2000 to 2007, was convicted of rape in 2010 and served five years.
Accountability — Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2016The Agranat Commission investigated the failures that left Israel unprepared for the 1973 war and found no fault with the prime minister. She stepped down a week after it reported, saying she could no longer ignore the public anger.
Accountability — Agranat Commission, Wikipedia, 1974The Kahan Commission found Ariel Sharon personally responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed when he let Phalangist militia into Sabra and Shatila. The cabinet removed him from the defense ministry in February 1983.
Accountability — Kahan Commission, Wikipedia, 1983Benjamin Netanyahu testified in his own bribery and fraud trial in December 2024, a first in Israeli history, in a fortified courtroom in the middle of a war.
Accountability — NPR, 2024The 1995 Mizrahi Bank ruling established that Israel’s Basic Laws outrank ordinary legislation and that the court may void a statute that breaches them. It has done so 23 times since.
Accountability — Israel Democracy Institute, 2023The protests against the 2023 judicial overhaul ran every week for months and became the largest protest movement in the country’s history, with organisers counting 500,000 people on a single Saturday.
Accountability — Al Jazeera, 2023Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas, joined the Bennett–Lapid coalition in June 2021, the first independent Arab party ever to sit in an Israeli government rather than in opposition.
Accountability — The Times of Israel, 2021Turnout in the 2022 Knesset election was 70.6 percent, up from 67.4 percent the year before. Israel has no compulsory voting.
Accountability — 2022 Israeli legislative election, Wikipedia, 2022April 2019, September 2019, March 2020, March 2021 and November 2022: the highest election frequency of any established democracy since 1996, and every transfer of power was peaceful.
Accountability — Israel Democracy Institute, 2022The Agranat Commission called for the dismissal of the IDF chief of staff, the head of military intelligence and the commander of Southern Command over the failures of 1973. All left their posts.
Accountability — Center for Israel Education, 1974
