At the beginning of the war, amidst the initial shock, the prime minister tried to market to the public the message "what was - will not be". He probably meant Hamas and Gaza, but we all quickly discovered that this phrase is at least as true internally as it is for us outwardly. Time will tell whether the State of Israel will succeed in eliminating Hamas, but one thing is already clear: when the war ends, nothing will be the same in the country. Everything will change, including the technology industry and the high-tech sector.
Countless words have already been spilled about the long-term process of fusion between technology and resilience and national security. This is true all over the world and in Israel sevenfold. The output and output of the technology sector in recent decades formed the basis for Israel's branding as a high-tech nation. This branding is one of the main sources of support for Israel's national security architecture, our self-image like Israel's image in the world.
Soldiers of the National Cyber Headquarters. Archive, photo: IDF Spokesperson
The level of faith in national technology systems – intelligence, cyber, artificial intelligence, tunnel detection, smart fences with endless sensors, etc. – Israel's security concept and the doctrine of protecting our borders, certainly in the Gaza envelope, have merged with the concept of the startup nation. And like many concepts that collapsed on October 7, it is worth examining whether Israel's technological advantage has stood the test of reality.
This examination should be conducted on three main levels:
First, question marks arise as to whether technology "delivered the goods" in the months and years preceding the surprise attack at the level of war preparedness identification. Did technological intelligence actually succeed in gathering the relevant data and the failure was mainly in analyzing and understanding the enemy's intentions? In other words, could it have been possible to rely on technological systems to help neutralize the effects of human conceptions and know how to raise red flags when the truth data does not align with the reality on the ground?
At the operational level, there is no choice but to clarify why the enormous technological systems that supported the physical barrier, the perimeter fence, failed, and were supposed not only to detect an attempted infiltration, but also to prevent the barrier from being breached. Were the technologies used up-to-date? Have lessons been learned from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the massive use of drones in battle there, for example, and has the fence defense method been adapted to those lessons? On the face of it, the footage of the attack and the destruction of the surveillance cameras immediately at the beginning of the attack raise a grave suspicion that the IDF did not prepare in practice for the drone threat.
A soldier points a weapon at a drone, photo: courtesy of a police officer
The second level is the complex of interfaces between the technology industry and the national security systems. As with many, perhaps all, issues in which the State of Israel has no strategy, in the technological sphere there is no national strategy.
This cries out to the sky, and a comprehensive study by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) will soon be published with a proposal for a national technology strategy. The study examined the connection between Israel's technology industry and national security for two years and identified huge gaps at all levels. One of the study's conclusions is that in the absence of a strategy, there is no national compass to guide the development of technologies in Israel and ensure that they match the changing and evolving needs of Israel's national security, from the macroeconomic level of the country to the micro-tactful level of exploitation and use of mature, evolving and emerging technologies.
Bodies such as Mapat or Rafael are more entrepreneurial and execution bodies, but it is not their role to integrate technological needs as a derivative of the national strategy. In the past, the technological entrepreneurship of the State of Israel stemmed in many cases from military developments that were naturalized and turned into commercial companies. Today, in many areas of technology, the direction of the flow of innovation is the opposite -- mostly commercial in origin and the military adopts civilian technologies and developments and adapts them to its needs. In any case, in the absence of a national technology strategy, it is doubtful whether an organization like Mapat is capable of integrating technological development needs efficiently enough.
IDF soldier in the multidimensional unit, photo: Oren Cohen
Having identified the tactical and organizational issues that will require in-depth clarification at the end of the war, we must now review the third and most important level: Israel's technological position after the war. At this time, technically we may still be in a local war, but one with different fronts involved at different levels of intensity. As is well known, there is the danger of a regional war that could also expand into an even larger conflict. The American efforts to contain the arena leave no doubt about the danger of the war expanding on the one hand, nor does President Biden's desire – perhaps like Kissinger in 1973 – to leverage the situation in the direction of a new strategic architecture at the end of the battles that may one day become the basis for a political process.
It is impossible to detach the actions of the United States in this war from its larger global context and the nephilim struggle between it and China for control of the sources of technology. The enormous military might it has chosen to project on the region and the world through the aircraft carriers, President Biden's visit, and the huge aid package to Israel that he is asking Congress to approve – all these should affect the Middle East, the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as a possible future Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Israel, as usual, tried to walk between the drops and enjoy economic opportunities in the Chinese technology market without upsetting the Americans too much.
But the United States has long expected Israel to choose sides in the global technology war and curb technological-economic cooperation with China. Netanyahu, too, as usual, tried to walk between the drops and play between China and the United States. It should be remembered that Netanyahu was supposed to visit China in the coming weeks, apparently partly because he thought he could pressure the Americans by waving at China as a threat that we have a substitute for the United States. Presumably, the past two weeks have reminded Israel that China is not its friend. On the contrary, despite appearances and declarations of neutrality and even, at last a very belated recognition of Israel's right to defend itself. In practice, China has taken a place of honor on the list of countries that condemn Israel and support the Palestinians, including Hamas!
And as in any war – as soon as the guns eventually go silent – the economic guns will immediately thunder and jump at enormous economic opportunities for commercial companies at its end. In the Gulf War, for example, oil companies were just waiting to negotiate contracts to rehabilitate oil wells. In our age, it's tech companies that will see the greatest opportunities. It can be assumed that the Israeli technology market will internalize and remember China's moral wretchedness and hostile attitude towards Israel, and the high-tech industry will turn its aspirations westward toward the United States. And if, for some reason, the Israeli government continues to try to play between the two superpowers, the United States will remind Israel much more explicitly of its demand for Israel to stand by it in the technological struggle against China.
Over the past year, the Israeli high-tech industry has proven its power to be among the first to identify the government's attempts to harm democracy. The enormous mobilization of the sector, of human capital, as well as the economic capital accumulated by that human capital, made a decisive contribution to stopping the legal revolution and to the fact that the United States identifies Israel as a moral ally and partner. If the industry were made up of people like Nissim Vaturi and his opinion of the United States, it is easy to imagine that Biden's treatment of us in our most difficult hour would have been a little less warm and sympathetic. The bottom line is that just as the high-tech sector knew how to unite and act with enormous force to prevent Israel from becoming a dictatorship, so too it knew how to help direct the Israeli government to explicitly side with the United States in its technology war with China.
The writer is a senior researcher, Glazer Center for Israel-China
Policy, Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Tel Aviv University (INSS)
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