Israel – Model for Resilience, Courage, Innovation & Entrepreneurship

I have been privileged over the course of my career in the international energy sector to have travelled extensively on business to many countries across North and South America, East Asia and throughout Europe. I have had some wonderful experiences and formed some great partnerships.

However, the greatest highlight occurred last week during my five days in Israel. Nowhere have I experienced the energy, resilience, courage, innovation and entrepreneurship that I did during my time in Tel Aviv.

I went with a few meetings scheduled but ended the week having had 16 energising, creative and productive business meetings and having attended an international investment forum and a global economy conference.

I was deeply impressed by the tenacity and resilience of the nation and its people who have endured, on 7th October 2023, the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, and an ensuing war on seven fronts. Yet again, Israel has faced into a barbaric threat to its existence and the annihilation of its people. Yet again, and despite enormous suffering and loss, it has emerged victorious and thriving.

In each meeting, there were accounts of loss and tragedy, courage and heroism (with typical humility and understatement). One cannot, it would seem, have the latter without the former. In the midst of the pain though, there is tremendous tenacity and relentless focus on rising from the ashes and maintaining Israel’s unquestionable position as the world’s leader and pioneer of innovation, technology, start-ups, unicorn companies and wider economic growth.

The most profound experience was when my wonderful host, Oren Helman, took me to visit the communities on the Gaza border and the site of the Nova music festival where the 7th October massacres and kidnappings took place. I was horrified by the sheer scale, brutality and barbarity of the attacks and the bloodlust of the monsters who perpetrated it. The Islamist, death cult mindset, worldview, racism and ideology are difficult for those in the West to comprehend. Only after the domestic terrorist attacks and rape gang atrocities of recent years are the general public in Britain, for example, beginning to wake up. But, on my visit to the Gaza envelope, the evidence is irrefutable. This experience will stay with me for the rest of my life and will serve to strengthen my resolve to stand with, speak up for and support Israel and the Jewish people.

And so I return, confident that Israel is very much open for business and that it remains the global pioneer of innovation, whose ideas, technology and entrepreneurial spirit will continue to lead the world. At the international investment conference I attended, it was said that Israel is not merely the ‘start-up nation’; it is the ‘scale-up nation’, which has the highest concentration in the world of ‘unicorn’ (billion dollar) companies.

I can see why. Am Yisrael Chai.

Dedicated to the memory of Aviv Eliyahu, whose selfless courage saved thousands of lives at the Nova music festival massacre. Aviv paid the ultimate cost.

May his memory be for a blessing.

“Greater love has no one than this, that a person will lay down his life for his friends.”

Philip Wallace is Founding Director & Principal Consultant of Veracity Energy Limited www.veracityenergy.co.uk