Here’s a number that should surprise you: Israeli startups raised $15.6 billion in 2025. That’s more than double what they raised two years earlier—during a war. The Tel Aviv stock exchange was the best-performing equity market in the world last year, up 51%. Google just agreed to pay $32 billion for Wiz, an Israeli cybersecurity company founded four years ago.

Counterintuitively, the Tel Aviv market tends to rise during wartime — bucking the global pattern in which conflict and uncertainty trigger a sell-off as investors retreat to safer assets. The historical context of the earlier Gaza-related phase resulted in a drawdown on the order of 7%, but the 2025-26 pattern today has been of rapid recovery and in this current episode of the US-Israeli War against Iran , outright gains with these early days of conflict.

None of this fits the story most people have been told. The story most people have been told is that Israel is a risky bet in a dangerous neighborhood—brilliant at technology, maybe, but too volatile, too small, too geopolitically complicated for serious capital allocation.

That story was always incomplete. Now it’s becoming obsolete. And the reason isn’t just that Israel’s tech sector keeps producing winners. It’s that Israel is quietly rebuilding the plumbing—the market structure, the trading rules, the listing frameworks, the bond architecture and equity securities design—that determines whether capital can actually flow to where the innovation is.

The Discount Nobody Talks About

If you’re a pension fund manager or a family office allocator, you’ve probably heard the bull case for Israel’s tech economy a hundred times. What you may not have heard is that you can still buy into it at a discount.

The 2023–24 conflict compressed Israeli asset valuations across the board. Credit agencies downgraded. Foreign capital retreated. The shekel weakened. All the things that happen when geopolitical risk moves from........

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