Israeli independence was not be secured by a flag, a speech, or a line in a Basic Law. What secures sovereign independence?

It is the boring spare part that keeps an aircraft flying.

It is the cloud account that keeps a hospital, bank, ministry, or emergency service online.

It is the ability to keep building homes when a foreign government decides that cement and steel are now political weapons.

Israel understands this in military language. It has understood it since 1948. What we have not yet done well enough is translate the same instinct into an investment map for the whole economy.

I decided to fix that. So I built the Claw & Talon Dependency Atlas. The atlas is available for the general public and totally free of charge to use.

The Atlas is not some random policy document PDF to sit politely in the back of a rarely seen website. It is a public, data-driven allocation dashboard for Israeli sovereign independence. The first build asks a simple question: What should Israel fund if it wants more freedom of action?

The current version found serious problems in maritime rerouting and trade-continuity infrastructure, sovereign cloud and compute resilience, munitions and defense-industrial depth, and labor substitution in construction, agriculture, and care.

It begins with the actual shape of Israel’s dependence on the outside world. I analyzed thousands of sources to get a complete picture of what Israel imports and what Israel depends on and how seriously it would impact other dependencies if it was removed.

Israel is not a closed economy, and it should not become one. In 2023, Israel imported about $91.9 billion of goods, across 4,159 HS6 product categories, from 187 countries. Its trade in goods and services amounted to nearly 58 percent of GDP. The top goods import sources included China, the United States, Germany, and Turkey. (Reference: World Bank)

No doubt Israel is small, brilliant, plugged into the world, and built to trade. But a small country at war and with diplomatic and geopolitical risk cannot treat every dependency as harmless just because it was available........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)