Tech life in Israel since 7 October

In the months after 7 October a joke circulated in Israeli tech circles that the country had produced more wartime demo videos than product launches. It was funny in the way that gallows humour always is, and like most good jokes, it wasn’t true. Israeli startups kept shipping code, closing rounds, and hiring through the worst of it. The question isn’t whether the tech sector survived. It did, loudly. The more interesting question is what changed on the way through. 

The war rewired who works where and why. Before 7 October, most of Israel’s tech talent lived in greater Tel Aviv, worked in glass offices, and complained about traffic on the Ayalon. Tens of thousands of those same engineers spent 2024 logging into Slack from hotel rooms in Eilat or Airbnb rentals in Haifa after being evacuated from the north. The offices emptied; the work didn’t stop. The peace process and regional stability that once made Israel an attractive investment destination took a hit, and that reality twisted how founders pitch their companies abroad. 

Military service swallowed people whole. The chief technology officer of a startup I know spent eight months in Gaza, came home, and shipped a major product release within six weeks. That pattern repeated across the industry. Reservists returned to find their teams had held the line, in some cases growing revenue while the founders were in uniform. The reserve duty burden, which pulled roughly 300 000 Israelis into active service, forced companies to decentralise decision-making in ways that turned out to make them run better. 

The technology sector in Israel has long been a pillar of the country’s security architecture, a relationship that deepened rather than frayed under pressure. 

What the headlines missed is the part that matters most to the people living it. The war didn’t break the weekly rhythm. Friday-night dinner still happened, often with chairs filled by strangers who had nowhere else to go. Evacuees from the south found themselves at tables in Jerusalem; displaced families from Kiryat Shmona ate with hosts in Tel Aviv. The tech community organised itself into mutual-aid networks that had nothing to do with venture capital and everything to do with the reason most olim moved here in the first place. 

A friend who runs a cybersecurity firm told me his most productive quarter in 2024 was also the quarter his wife was eight months pregnant and he was doing reserve duty three weeks out of four. He is not exceptional. He is representative. The coexistence of war and ordinary life isn’t a contradiction in Israel. It’s the operating system. 

There’s a reason South Africans understand Israeli resilience in a way that many other audiences don’t. Both countries know what it means to build something under conditions that the rest of the world considers unworkable. Both have communities that send their children to serve in uniform, worry about them, and welcome them home to kitchens that smell the same as they did before they left. That shared experience matters now more than it has in years, because the information environment surrounding the war has made it harder, not easier, for far-flung Jewish communities to know what is actually happening on the ground. 

The coverage reaching overseas audiences often carries more weight than facts. Groups tracking networked disinformation have documented how state-backed campaigns exploit the confusion of wartime to twist narratives in real time, and the same infrastructure that distorts reporting on Israel’s military operations also distorts the picture of daily life here. The tech worker writing code between reserve duty stints, the family hosting strangers for Shabbat, the kibbutz rebuilding its children’s playground: these are the stories the algorithms don’t surface. 

• Mark Ginsberg is a writer covering Israeli technology and society. His work has appeared in the Times of Israel.