They curse the Zionists — and then use our innovation.

Haters denounce Israel as immoral and illegitimate, while relying on Israeli technologies that secure their data, power their platforms, and quietly sustain the modern world they refuse to boycott.

photo: Brett Jordan/Unsplash

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Last month, I visited my Israeli cousins who had moved to the Netherlands several years ago. The cab driver picked me up at Amsterdam’s airport, typed my hotel’s address into Waze, and then spent the drive complaining about the Dutch government “buying weapons from the f*cking Zionists.”

Therein lies a peculiar modern ritual performed daily by far too many of Israel’s loudest critics.

They unlock their smartphones. They open apps. They navigate, message, post, encrypt, upload, stream, and livestream their outrage — sometimes from protests denouncing Israel — using GPS to avoid police, encrypted messaging to coordinate, cloud services to store footage, and secure networks to amplify their message.

And then they attack Israel.

This isn’t irony in the casual sense. It’s dependency disguised as moral theater. Because much of the digital infrastructure powering today’s anti-Israel activism (the very tools used to organize, moralize, and mobilize) is built on Israeli innovation. Sometimes directly. Often invisibly. Almost always without acknowledgment.

The Waze app drivers use to avoid traffic? Israeli. The sensors that promote healthy beehives for commercial crop growers? Israeli. The computer vision, machine learning, mapping, and hardware/software solutions for advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous driving technology? Israeli. The non-invasive, needle-free glucose monitoring technology? Israeli.

Israel, it turns out, is good enough to use — just not good enough to exist.

Israel is not a branding slogan or a clever nickname. It is a structural pillar of the modern world’s technological backbone. Israeli engineers helped pioneer mobile security and encryption, firewalls and cybersecurity architecture, cloud optimization, AI-based image recognition, navigation and geolocation systems, and medical imaging and emergency response technologies. These aren’t flashy consumer products with national labels attached. They are deep systems, licensed, acquired, white-labeled, and embedded so thoroughly that their origins are easy (and convenient) to forget.

That forgetting is the point. Israeli innovation is tolerated only when it is anonymized. Jewish ingenuity is welcomed when stripped of Jewish authorship. Once the technology is absorbed into a “global” platform, Israel disappears from the story, even as its work keeps the system running. The moment that success is attached to Jewish sovereignty, the backlash begins.

A Jewish achievement that floats freely, unattached to power, can be celebrated as clever, useful, even admirable. But once that achievement is rooted in a Jewish state — one with borders, an army, political interests, and the ability to say “no” — innovation is no longer seen as contribution; it is reframed as leverage. Competence becomes suspicion. Strength becomes a moral offense.

This is where the tone shifts. The same technology that was praised when it appeared “global” is suddenly scrutinized when its origin is named. The same ingenuity that was welcomed when it was abstracted is condemned when it is exercised by a sovereign Jewish People who refuse to outsource their survival. Jewish success is tolerated as long as it remains dependent or deniable. Jewish success with agency is treated as illegitimate.

Sovereignty is the line that cannot be crossed quietly. It means Jews are no longer guests in someone else’s system. It means they are not merely contributing talent to a world run by others, but shaping outcomes themselves — deciding how technology is built, how it is used, and how their nation will defend the conditions that made that innovation possible in the first place. For many critics, that is the real transgression.

Because sovereignty collapses a comforting fiction: that Jews are acceptable only as a moral abstraction, not as a political reality. A Jewish state forces the world to confront Jews as decision-makers, not just idea-makers; as actors, not symbols. And that demands a kind of moral honesty many would rather avoid.

This is where the outrage turns hollow. The modern anti-Israel movement thrives on consequence-free condemnation. You can denounce Israel without giving up your phone, your apps, your medical care, your workplace security, or your digital life. Try applying that standard elsewhere. A genuine boycott of oil, China, or Silicon Valley would require sacrifice. A boycott of Israel requires only slogans. Israel is small enough to vilify and important enough to exploit, which makes it the perfect target for moral performance without moral cost.

What’s really being punished here is not Israeli policy, but Israeli strength. Israel violates an unspoken expectation: that Jews are supposed to be vulnerable instead of competent, dependent rather than indispensable. A technologically powerful Jewish state disrupts the moral hierarchy that modern grievance politics relies on. It refuses to fit neatly into the role of eternal defendant. And that refusal produces resentment.

This dynamic isn’t new. Jews have long been valued for what they produce and resented for who they are. Welcomed for contribution, vilified for presence. In previous centuries it was finance, medicine, trade, or scholarship. Today it’s code, chips, algorithms, and systems. The medium has changed. The instinct has not. Jewish labor is praised when ownership is erased and legitimacy is denied when identity is asserted.

And so the contradiction deepens. People who argue that Israel is uniquely immoral rely daily on Israeli science to treat disease, protect data, prevent fraud, and enable communication. They want the benefits of Jewish innovation without the reality of Jewish self-determination. That isn’t activism; it’s extraction.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: People don’t get to opt out of Israel. Not if they live in the modern world. Not if they rely on modern medicine, security, or technology. They can chant and hashtag and rage, but unless they are willing to unplug entirely, Israel is already in their pocket, their hospital, their office, and their infrastructure.

And yet, there is a final irony that sits beneath all of this, rarely acknowledged and even more rarely confronted: One of the primary reasons Israelis are so innovative is the very thing their critics condemn most relentlessly — the IDF.

Israel’s culture of innovation does not emerge in a vacuum. It is forged under pressure. Mandatory military service places young Israelis, often barely out of their teens, into environments that demand rapid problem-solving, improvisation, responsibility, and moral judgment under real-world constraints. They are trained to think in systems, to adapt when plans fail, to work across hierarchies, and to make consequential decisions with limited resources and no margin for error. Failure is not theoretical; it has stakes.

That experience leaves a mark. Recently released soldiers don’t emerge as automatons; they emerge as builders. They carry with them a mindset shaped by urgency and accountability: how to move fast without breaking things that matter, how to secure systems that will be attacked, how to innovate not for novelty but for survival. When those same people enter civilian life, they bring that orientation with them — into startups, hospitals, research labs, cybersecurity firms, and global companies.

Consider just a few examples that quietly power everyday life. Check Point Software, founded by veterans of elite IDF intelligence units, effectively invented the modern commercial firewall, shaping how governments, hospitals, banks, and corporations protect their networks. WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption (now taken for granted as a basic expectation of privacy) rests on cryptographic norms and security culture deeply influenced by Israeli cyber expertise forged in military intelligence. Waze, built by founders with IDF tech backgrounds, transformed real-time navigation by fusing live data from millions of users into adaptive routing systems now used by drivers worldwide.

The same pattern appears in big-data fusion systems and telemedicine. Techniques developed in the IDF to integrate vast, disparate streams of intelligence (signals, imagery, human input, and real-time alerts) now underpin civilian data analytics used in finance, logistics, healthcare, and fraud prevention. Telemedicine and remote diagnostics, refined to deliver care in hostile or inaccessible environments, have become lifelines for rural communities and crisis response across the globe.

These technologies were not designed for novelty; they were built under necessity, where failure carried consequences. The irony is hard to miss: The world relies daily on innovations born from Israel’s need to defend itself, while condemning the very sovereignty and security framework that produced them.

So when Israel is condemned for defending itself, while its defense-trained citizens are quietly celebrated for their ingenuity, the hypocrisy becomes complete. The world wants the outcomes of Jewish sovereignty without tolerating the conditions that make those outcomes possible. It wants Israeli innovation divorced from Israeli defense, as if one did not grow directly out of the other.

But innovation born of necessity cannot be separated from the necessity itself. The same society that learns to protect its people learns to build systems that protect others. The same sovereignty that draws outrage is what produces the resilience, creativity, and competence the world so readily consumes.

That is the irony no chant can erase: Israel’s innovation is not an accident. It is the civilian expression of a people who learned — through sovereignty, responsibility, and defense — that survival requires building the future faster than your enemies can destroy it.

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