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JERUSALEM — It was supposed to be a dazzling affair, a debutante ball to introduce Israel’s innovators to investors looking to make money off solutions to this region’s mounting crises.
Three years after the pandemic halted global gatherings, a top Israeli tech conference was back and ready to wow capitalists venturing to the Jewish state for the first time. The message of the 10th annual OurCrowd summit was clear: Israelis prided themselves on transforming a desert country into a verdant agricultural powerhouse quenched with desalinated seawater, and now their “startup nation,” as homegrown Silicon Valley types are fond of calling the country, was ready to export planet-saving technologies to the rest of the world.
The lineup included companies with novel ways to make green hydrogen fuel, fresh spins on wind turbines, and drones that do everything from planting trees in remote forests to surveying farm fields. Included in OurCrowd’s audience for the first time were investors from rich, Muslim-majority nations such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which only recently normalized relations with Israel.
Standing amid gleaming exhibition booths and the buzzing crowd of angel investors and greentrepreneurs, you could be forgiven for forgetting that the conference’s host country is in the midst of one of the biggest domestic political crises in its history.
The new far-right Israeli government is moving to reduce the power of the country’s Supreme Court, prompting an eruption of impassioned protests from Israeli moderates and liberals who feel that the changes endanger Israeli democracy. Occasionally, the political tensions poked through as members of Israel’s vibrant business community reckoned with the implications of the latest paroxysms for their bottom lines.
Conference attendees who landed in Tel Aviv the Monday before the summit found themselves in the middle of the biggest protests in Israel’s modern history. Cars honking and waving blue-and-white flags zoomed past taxis all afternoon on the one-hour drive east to Jerusalem from the airport. As many as 300,000 demonstrators filled the streets of the ancient city that evening to express outrage over the government’s radical plan to change Israel’s legal system.
Visitors looking for a sense of the new Israeli government’s climate priorities might have traveled 90 minutes south the next day to the desert city of Be’er Sheva, where Ben-Gurion University hosted a day-long climate conference and invited Idit Silman, who became the country’s top environmental regulator in January, to speak. The environment minister hardly uttered a paragraph of her speech before protesters