In Israel today, technology is not just an industry. It is a lens through which the entire country can be understood.
“The whole world runs through tech,” said James Spiro, a former CTech reporter who now runs an independent media platform called The Spiro Circle. Spiro was interviewed on the ILTV Podcast.
Spiro spent five years reporting on Israel’s innovation economy, writing around 1,800 stories, conducting 350 interviews, and moderating seven conferences during his time at the now-defunct tech news site. Today, he argues that technology provides a powerful way to understand how Israel evolves during moments of crisis and change.
Spiro explained that Israel has always been innovative, and he covered much of that innovation during his time as a journalist. But the nature of innovation constantly changes, just as the news cycle does. First came the COVID-19 pandemic, then the battle over judicial reform in Israel, and almost immediately afterward the Iron Swords war.
“It’s a very interesting way to report on the country through the tech lens,” Spiro said.
During the judicial reform protests, he explained, the story centered on the reaction of founders, entrepreneurs, and investors, as well as the global response and shifting credit ratings. Then the war broke out, and the lens changed again. Spiro said he suddenly felt “like a war reporter,” even though he was never on the front line.
“I was reporting on the war's reaction to everything,” Spiro said. “It did impact everything, and tech, of course, was not untouched.”
According to Spiro, “necessity breeds innovation,” and Israel in particular has always required innovation “urgently and essentially.” One example is the country’s cyber security industry, which is second only to that of the United States.
As cyber attacks began to rise globally, Israel quickly became one of the most targeted countries in the world.
“At the start [of the State of Israel] it was physical tanks and rockets and more traditional forms of war,” Spiro explained. “And then war changed, and it became cyber focused, and then it became hacks and viruses and systems being penetrated. And so Israel had to defend itself, not just physically, but it had to defend itself digitally. That's how the cyber security sector came about. And so we're seeing that a bit now with defense tech, because it's this post-war reaction, once again, to necessity.”
Today, he said, defense tech is particularly fascinating because it merges the physical battlefield with the digital one.
Still, the pace of technological change brings new risks.
What keeps Spiro up at night is the rapid rise of artificial intelligence as both a weapon and a defense tool. AI is now being used to launch sophisticated cyber attacks, while governments and companies are racing to build systems to defend against them.
The problem, he said, is that defenders are constantly reacting to attackers.
“You think of it like a shop that has windows, and so it's very easy to see the windows,” Spiro explained. “So a shopkeeper will put bars on the windows, and then they'll extend their security by putting an alarm system in place. So digitally, you're trying to cover those windows. But there's more and more windows appearing every second on an infinite amount of space.”
“So you need to chase the bad guys to fill the gaps in ever-growing vulnerable areas,” he said. “That’s a big concern.”
Watch the full interview: