The occupation army began its brutal war against the residents of the Gaza Strip about a year ago. During this period, the war witnessed various rounds that caused damage within the occupied territories as well as the Palestinian territories. While the majority of the data focuses on civilian or human damage, the technology sector in Israel incurred More losses than it seems at first glance.
These losses varied from human losses to the founders of leading Israeli technology companies to deals and offices of international companies that closed their doors. Finally, Iran’s recent attack almost caused the destruction of silicon factories in Israel. Will this war destroy the dream of “Israeli Silicon Valley”?
The largest occupation project since 1967
In June 2020, the Jerusalem Municipality of the Israeli occupation came out with a new project called “Silicon Valley,” similar to its counterpart in the United States of America, a project that the municipality described as the largest of its kind for the occupation.
This project embodies one of the undeclared plans that the occupation government is trying to support and implement on the lands of Jerusalem, which is to build a technology city that will attract major international companies to invest in it and build factories and offices in the region directly in it, and this is to take advantage of the distinguished location of the occupying state that connects all economic roads in the world. .
It cannot be said that these endeavors have failed, as Israel alone has a huge number of emerging technology companies in various sectors, from cybersecurity and hacking to mapping and analytics companies, as well as artificial intelligence companies.
It is estimated that Israeli technology companies have been able to raise billions of dollars in recent years as well as this year, without looking at the technology companies that have offices in Israel, such as “Google,” “Amazon,” “Microsoft,” and “Intel,” as well as a group of companies. There are large factories in Israel, such as the Intel factory and the Samsung factory.
These factories and companies provide an ideal growth environment for emerging Israeli technology companies, in addition to training cadres in various technical sectors, which later allows them to establish successful companies in the future.
Huge human losses
The war on Gaza caused the death of many Israeli technical entrepreneurs, whether through direct attacks from Hamas or through being called up to work in the occupation army, including Avinatan Or, who was 30 years old and worked at Nvidia, in addition to Danielle Waldman, who is the daughter of NVIDIA’s largest partner in Israel.
The list continues to include Adam Bismuth, founder of Sightbit, which works to facilitate the role of the Coast Guard in rescuing drowning people and forecasting floods, Itamar Ben Hammou, who is responsible for developing the cloud services company Rivery, and Joseph “Seifi” Genis, founder of “Rivery.” Fire Fly, which manages enterprise cloud assets valued at more than $23 million.
These losses directly affect the Israeli economy, which in recent years has become largely dependent on technology companies, as technology companies constituted more than 20% of the Israeli gross domestic product in 2023 and constituted 48% of the total Israeli exports in 2022, with more than 400,000 employees and more than 850 investment companies worked in the Israeli technical sector before the start of the war on Gaza, according to a report by the Arab Center in Washington DC.
Losses estimated at billions without explosions
The Middle East Monitor website reported on the Israeli companies that closed their doors in the year of the war on Gaza. According to the report, more than 40,000 companies closed their doors, with the majority of them being small Israeli companies. The report also indicated that most sectors Hardest hit by the closures was the construction sector, followed by the technical sector.
The losses of the technical sector in Israel were not limited to the companies that closed their doors only and caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands, but also extended to international companies that left their offices in Israel, perhaps the most prominent of which was “Google,” as well as “Alibaba” and “Electronic Arts” for developing games ( Electronic Arts, Drop Box, and Ford.
The Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz also lost a large investment from Google, and although the company provided many reasons for rejecting this investment, one of the undeclared reasons was the instability of the region and the war on Gaza, which is what the newspaper’s report indicates. The Israeli government indicated a decline in investments following the Gaza war.
It is worth noting that Hamas shells reached the Harzalia area, which is a center for Israeli technical investments and includes a group of major technical factories, in addition to being close to Tel Aviv, as it is only 10 kilometers away.
Do these losses affect the course of the war?
Israel has significant financial support from various companies around the world, and it also enjoys in-kind support in the form of weapons and other materials that it receives, so it can withstand the war for a long period from a military standpoint, but the question that arises after observing all these economic losses is, can Will the Israeli economy bear all these losses of billions of dollars? If the support coming to Tel Aviv is directed entirely to the army, how can the internal economy continue without its presence?
