From Start-Up Nation to Platform Nation: Israel’s Real Power in the Global Economy

Antisemitic ignoramus Tucker Carlson has been carrying on about how the United States gives so much to Israel and gets so little back. He dismisses it as “a completely insignificant country” with “no resources,” and demands to know, “what are we getting out of this?”

In the Free Press, Michael Doran responded ably that crucial U.S. defense programs rely heavily on Israeli research, development, and field experience. He noted that President Trump’s Golden Dome anti-missile defense system would be inconceivable without Israel’s long prior experience with its own Iron Dome defense system.

All true. Yet Doran vastly understated America’s dependence on Israel. Nearly every major American or European technology firm depends in some way on Israeli engineering, research, or product development.

Israel has the highest concentration (per capita) of scientists and engineers in the world, as well as the highest research and development (R&D) spending as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), reaching 6.3%, compared with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 2.7%. Many of those engineers work at the more than 450 Israel-based research and development institutes owned by U.S. and other western companies. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Meta (NASDAQ: META) Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), Samsung (OTC Markets: SSNLF), and SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) only skim the cream.

Via acquisition, the intellectual property of many hundreds of Israeli startups has been injected into U.S. companies. In 2024 alone, there were over 100 first-time M&A deals for Israeli high-tech companies. Major U.S. acquisitions in recent years include Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz (2025), Palo Alto Networks’ (NASDAQ: PANW) $25 billion purchase of CyberArk (2025), Intel’s $15.3 billion purchase of Mobileye (2017), and Nvidia’s (NVDA) $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox (2020).

Every one of the “Magnificent Seven” depends on Israel. Nvidia as we know it would not exist without networking technology developed at Mellanox. NVDA acquired it for $6.9 billion so that its graphics processing units (GPUs) could be woven in webs of thousands of chips to yield generative AI. When Intel dominated the semiconductor world, its Israeli R&D centers supplied much of the technology that powered its ascent. Meta’s Israel R&D focuses on its AI, security, and integrity systems. These and dozens more American technology leaders rely on Israel for some of their most innovative capabilities.

And it’s not just classic “high tech.” This small desert nation leads the world in agricultural technology. It exported $2.8 billion in crops in 2024. It exports water, thanks to global leadership in desalination and wastewater recycling. It has become one of the world’s most important defense exporters, reaching $15 billion in sales in 2024 and still climbing.

Even Israel’s rep as “Start-Up” Nation vastly underestimate its contribution to the global economy and how much firms headquartered in the United States depend on Israel. For the wealth and well-being of the world, far more important is that Israel has become “platform nation.”

A platform is not a product. It is an enabling layer—something other systems build on, depend on, and integrate into, often without the end user ever seeing it. Platforms become embedded inside other nations’ industries, supply chains, and critical systems and would fail without them.

Consider advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Israel does not run the world’s leading fabs, but it supplies the metrology, inspection, and process-control intelligence that allows those fabs to operate at all. Companies like Nova (NASDAQ: NVMI), Camtek (NASDAQ: CAMT), and KLA NASDAQ: KLAC) provide systems that sound the alarm if manufacturing process is drifting. These systems sit deep inside the fab, unseen by end users, yet indispensable to performance, safety and scale, and trusted with billion-dollar production lines. Remove them, and the systems they support do not merely slow down; they break.

The economies of platform nations can look deceptively small. Most of the many trillions of dollars of value produced by those foreign owned R&D centers in Israel do not show up in Israel’s gross domestic product. The value of a platform nation is not measured by logos on storefronts, but how much of the world’s wealth—and yours—would disappear if the platforms collapsed.

Israel’s platforms reach far beyond semiconductors in fields even less visible. In cybersecurity, companies like Check Point Software (NASDAQ: CHKP) and CyberArk (NASDAQ: CYBR) do not compete for user attention. They enforce boundaries. Check Point governs how digital traffic is allowed to move across corporate and government networks; CyberArk controls privileged identity, determining who may touch the systems that control everything else. Their very successes are invisible, measured by the fact that nothing bad happens.

Israeli enterprise software firm NICE (NASDAQ: NICE) embeds observation and decision intelligence into institutions—banks, regulators, call centers, law enforcement—making complex human systems legible and governable at scale. Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX) operates even deeper underground, running the billing and operational backbones of global telecom networks. Consumers never see Amdocs, but entire national communications systems depend on it working flawlessly.

For the U.S. military, Elbit Systems (NASDAQ: ESLT) supplies the sensors, avionics, command-and-control, and electronic warfare subsystems that determine how much larger weapons platforms perceive, decide, and act. It makes helmet-mounted display systems for U.S. pilots, night vision and electro-optical systems for U.S. Army and Special Operations units, and sensor and guidance systems for unmanned aircraft.

Netafim. 80%-owned by Mexican multinational company Orbi Advance Corporation, transformed water into a precision control system, enabling farming in the desert. CropX Technologies embeds sensors beneath the soil to guide irrigation and fertilization in real time. You will never see CropX on a banana label or Netafim adorning an orange.

In medical tech, privately held Insightec, which your doctor will never name, is a therapeutic platform providing non-invasive, image-guided intervention without opening the body. Itamar Medical (NASDAQ: ITMR) did something similar diagnostically, using peripheral signals and algorithms to infer sleep apnea without the infrastructure of a sleep lab, allowing diagnosis to scale beyond a narrow clinical bottleneck. Medtronic Israel (NYSE: MDT) does subsystem innovation: sensing, control, and minimally invasive technologies that become embedded inside worldwide medical platforms.

Across cybersecurity, enterprise software, defense, agriculture, and medicine, the pattern is strikingly consistent. Israeli companies build platform capabilities that embed themselves quietly, shape how larger systems behave, and become difficult to remove without consequences. That is the signature of a platform nation: quiet, durable leverage inside the machinery of the modern world.

Oh! But what have I done! Here I am trying to write in praise of my second-favorite nation, and all the while I’ve been burnishing an antisemitic trope. It’s the Rothschilds all over again!

The antisemite complaint against that family was not that they were bankers who leant money to kings and supported nations. Everybody knew that. The complaint was that they did so much more known to so few. They not only financed Europe’s monarchs, they controlled them secretly, conspiratorially. They were “platform bankers,” quietly “embedded inside other nations’… critical systems,” which “would fail without them.”

Shush! Don’t tell Tucker!