Science and technology in Israel
Science and technology in Israel is one of the country's most developed sectors. In 2019, Israel was ranked the world's seventh most innovative country by the Bloomberg Innovation Index.
Israel counts 140 scientists and technicians per 10,000 employees, one of the highest ratios in the world. In comparison, there are 85 per 10,000 in the United States and 83 per 10,000 in Japan. In 2012, Israel counted 8,337 full-time equivalent researchers per million inhabitants. This compares with 3,984 in the US, 6,533 in the Republic of South Korea and 5,195 in Japan.
Israel is home to major companies in the high-tech industry. In 1998, Tel Aviv was named by Newsweek as one of the ten most technologically influential cities in the world. Since 2000, Israel has been a member of EUREKA, the pan-European research and development funding and coordination organization, and held the rotating chairmanship of the organization for 2010–2011. In 2010, American journalist David Kaufman wrote that the high-tech area of Yokneam, Israel, has the "world's largest concentration of aesthetics-technology companies". Google chairman Eric Schmidt complimented the country during a visit there, saying that “Israel has the most important high-tech center in the world after the US.” Israel was ranked 14th in the Global Innovation Index in 2025, down from 10th in 2019. The Tel Aviv region was ranked the fourth global tech ecosystem in the world.
History
Jewish settlement in Israel was motivated by both ideology and flight from persecution. Return to the homeland was an important aspect of Jewish immigration and was perceived by many as a return to the soil. To establish the rural villages that formed the core of Zionist ideology and produce self-supporting Jewish farmers, agronomic experiments were conducted. The foundations of agricultural research in Israel were laid by the teachers and graduates of the Mikveh Yisrael School, the country's first agricultural school, established by the Alliance Israelite Universelle in 1870. On a field trip to Mount Hermon in 1906, the agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn discovered Triticum dicoccoides, or emmer wheat, believed to be the "mother of all wheat." In 1909, he founded an agricultural research station in Atlit where he built up an extensive library and collected geological and botanical samples. The Agricultural Station, founded in Rehovot in 1921, engaged in soil research and other aspects of farming in the country's difficult climatic conditions. This station, which became the Agricultural Research Organization, is now Israel's major institution of agricultural research and development.File:Einstein technion.jpg|thumb|left|Albert Einstein at the Technion in 1923
In 1912, the first cornerstone of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology was laid at a festive ceremony in Haifa, which was then occupied by the Ottoman Empire. The Technion would become a unique university worldwide in its claim to precede and create a nation. As Jews were often barred from technical education in Europe, the Technion claims to have brought the skills needed to build a modern state.
Established before World War I, the Hebrew Health Station in Jerusalem, founded by Nathan Straus engaged in medical and public health research, operating departments for public hygiene, eye diseases and bacteriology. The station manufactured vaccines against typhus and cholera, and developed methods of pest control to eliminate field mice. The Pasteur Institute affiliated with the station developed a rabies vaccine. Departments for microbiology, biochemistry, bacteriology, and hygiene were opened at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, founded on Mount Scopus in 1925. In 1936, Jewish workers in the center of the country donated two-days' pay toward the establishment of the "Hospital of Judea and Sharon," later renamed Beilinson Hospital. In 1938, Beilinson established the country's first blood bank. The Rothschild-Hadassah University Hospital on Mount Scopus opened in 1939 and was the first teaching hospital and medical center in the country. Since renamed the Hadassah Medical Center, it has become a leader in medical research.
File:Weizmann Automatic Calculator.jpg|thumb|WEIZAC in 1954, the first modern computer in the Middle East
Industrial research began at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, was also initiated at the Daniel Sieff Research Center, established in 1934 in Rehovot. The Dead Sea Laboratories opened in the 1930s. The first modern electronic computer in Israel and the Middle East, and one of the first large-scale, stored-program, electronic computers in the world, called WEIZAC, was built at the Weizmann Institute during 1954–1955, based on the Institute for Advanced Study architecture developed by John von Neumann. WEIZAC has been recognized by the IEEE as a milestone in the history of electrical engineering and computing. IBM Israel, registered on June 8, 1950, was the country's first high-tech firm. The company, located on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, assembled and repaired punch card machines, sorting machines and tabulators. In 1956, a local plant was opened to produce punch cards, and a year later, the first service center opened, offering computerized data processing services.
Scientific and technological research in Israel was boosted by the appointment of a chief scientist for the Industry and Trade Ministry at the recommendation of a committee headed by Ephraim Katzir, later president of Israel. The Israeli government provided grants that covered 50–80 percent of the outlay for new start-ups, with no conditions, no shareholding and no participation in management. In the early 1980s, Control Data Corporation, a partner in Elron Electronic Industries, formed the country's first venture capital firm.
The Israel Innovation Authority warned in September 2025 of a slump in tech manufacturing. The tech sector is the largest and fastest-growing driver of growth in the Israeli economy. However, the sector has experienced stagnant employment and manufacturing growth, as hiring has not been matched by investment in startups.
Origins of Israeli high-tech industry
Israel's high-technology industries are a spin-off of the rapid development of computer science and technology in the 1980s in such places as Silicon Valley and Massachusetts Route 128 in the US, which ushered in the current high-tech era. Up until that point, Israel's economy had been essentially based on agriculture, mining and secondary sectors such as diamond polishing and manufacturing in textiles, fertilizers and plastics.The key factor which enabled high-tech industries based on information and communication technologies to take root and flourish in Israel was investment by the defense and aerospace industries, which spawned new technologies and know-how. Israel devoted 17.1% of its GDP to military expenditure in 1988. Even though this share had dropped to 5.8% of GDP by 2016, Israel military spending remains among the highest in the world. For the purposes of comparison, the United States devoted 5.7% of its GDP to military expenditure in 1988 and 3.3% in 2016. This heavy investment in defense and aerospace formed the basis for Israel's high-tech industries in medical devices, electronics, telecommunications, computer software and hardware.
The massive Russian immigration of the 1990s reinforced this phenomenon, doubling the number of engineers and scientists in Israel overnight. Between 1989 and 2006, about 979,000 Russian Jews and their relatives migrated to Israel, which had a population of just 4.5 million in 1989. These immigrants were extremely educated and quickly assimilated into Israeli society. More than 55% of them had a high level of education and one of the highest rates globally were engineers, architects, physicians, technicians, and other professionals. This huge immigration boosted the Israeli economy and high-tech sector significantly.
The purchase of Mirabilis in 1998 marked the first big exit of high technology in Israel and caused a rush of Israeli companies as part of the Dot-com bubble.
Contemporary high-tech industry in Israel
Currently, Israel has the world's most research-intensive business sector. In 2018, 4.95% of its GDP was invested in research and technology. Meanwhile, Israel's technology sector plays a crucial role in the country's economy. In 2021, the Israeli high-technology sector accounted for around 12% of the country's economic output and 10% of its national labour force.Competitive grants and tax incentives are the two main public policy instruments in supporting business research and development. Thanks to generous government incentives and the availability of highly trained human capital, Israel has become an attractive location for the research and development centers of leading multinational corporations around the world. The country's national innovation ecosystem relies on both foreign multinationals and large corporate investors in research and development, as well as on start-ups.
As of 2019, some 530 foreign research centres were currently active in Israel. Many of these centers are owned by large multinational firms that have acquired Israeli companies, technology and know-how and transformed them through mergers and acquisitions into their own local research facilities. The activity of some research centers even spans more than three decades, such as those of Intel, Applied Materials, Motorola, and IBM.
In the late 2010s, Israel saw a sharp increase in the number of high-technology startups that achieved 'unicorn status' : in 2016, Israel had 10 such startups. By 2019, the number had risen to 19. Be the end of 2021, 74 tech unicorns had emerged from Israel's tech sector - 33 in 2021 alone. The growth in the number of unicorn startups in Israel, together with tech startups maturing to become public companies rather being acquired earlier in their lifecycle, has led to the suggestion that Israel has transitioned from 'Startup Nation' to 'Scale-up Nation'.
In January 2026, the Israeli governmen