12 impossible ideas that Israelis turned into reality

An educational culture that encourages questioning and independent thinking, and innovating on the fly, leads Israelis to read the word “impossible” as “I’m possible.” And that leads to innovations that impact the entire world for the better.

“Israel’s impact in tech has become too broad to characterize by one invention or another,” says Saul Singer, coauthor of the 2009 bestseller Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle and the 2023 follow-up, The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World.

“Nearly everything in our digital world, including the AI revolution, runs on Israeli technology. NVIDIA, for example, wouldn’t be where it is today if it hadn’t bought Melanox for $7 billion. The global CTO of NVIDIA is Israeli and is based in Israel. But it’s not just NVIDIA. Apple and Intel’s chips are largely designed in their large development centers here,” Singer tells ISRAEL21c.

“Without Israeli cybersecurity, the world’s largest companies and banks would lose their ‘Iron Dome.’ And this year, Iron Beam will be deployed, bringing the cost of shooting down drones and rockets from $50k to the price of a cup of coffee,” he continues.

“But it’s not just chips, cyber and defense. Today you could list many Israeli breakthroughs in healthcare bigger than PillCam [see below]. For example, AlphaTau uses darts that can dissolve any solid cancer tumor without touching healthy tissue. Healthy.io created the first FDA-approved urine test that you can do with your phone. InsightTec is treating tremors with noninvasive surgery using ultrasound.

Abigail Klein Leichman