Israel at 78: tiny dot, giant pulse

Seventy-eight years old. Not bad for a country that began life under siege, with no room for error, no luxury of delusion and neighbours who didn’t exactly send a “welcome to the neighbourhood” gift box. And yet here we are. Not just alive. Not just standing. Building, inventing, healing, feeding, defending, arguing, laughing, creating and somehow still finding the energy to complain about traffic, which is really the highest form of national normality.  

At the founding of the state in 1948, Israel had about 806,000 residents. Today, on the eve of its 78th birthday, the population stands at 10.244 million. That is not growth. That is a demographic thunderclap. According to the latest figures, 7,790,000 are Jews and other non-Arab citizens, 2,157,000 are Arabs, and 296,000 are foreigners. In CBS terms, Israel’s Arab population includes Muslims, Arab Christians and Druze, while the “others” category includes non-Arab Christians, members of other religions, and people not classified by religion. In other words: from day one to day 28,489-ish, this place has never been a cardboard cut-out. It has always been layered, textured, complicated and gloriously human.  

And this country is not only bigger. It is younger, louder, bolder and absurdly alive. Over the past year alone, around 177,000 babies were born and 21,000 immigrants arrived. Four out of five people in Israel are now Israeli-born. So yes, the state was built by dreamers, survivors and immigrants from every corner of the Jewish world and beyond, but it is now also powered by generations who speak Hebrew like it was always waiting in their bones.  

Then there is the little matter of what Israel has actually given the world. This gloriously stubborn postage stamp of a nation became the Startup Nation, with over 7,000 startups and roughly 1,000 new startups launched each year according to official Israeli sources. Which is objectively unhinged behaviour for a country you can drive across without needing to pack a second sandwich. Apparently, if you take a people with a few thousand years of debate, add urgency, education, immigrant grit and zero interest in being told something is impossible, you get a civilisation-scale habit of problem solving. Or, to put it more simply, forty years in the desert may have been one very aggressive navigation beta test.  

So yes, from this tiny strip of improbable brilliance came Waze, because naturally a people famous for discussing directions with operatic conviction would eventually build an app to do it professionally. Israel also gave the world Mobileye, founded in Jerusalem out of Hebrew University research and now a global leader in driver-assistance technology; PillCam, the swallowable camera that transformed gastrointestinal imaging; and the drip irrigation revolution through Netafim, which began in the Negev and helped turn dry land into productive land. This is what Israel does. It looks at a problem, mutters something halfway between “nu?” and “fine, give it here,” and then builds a solution the whole world ends up using.  

And because Israel refuses to specialise in only one kind of miracle, it did not stop at apps and chips. This is also a country that turned water scarcity into a field of mastery. The Israeli government describes large-scale desalination as a national mission, and official figures show some 585,000,000 cubic meters of water a year are desalinated in Israel. In plain English: a nation planted in a region with every excuse to despair about water instead built one of the world’s great laboratories of water survival. That is not just innovation. That is defiance with plumbing.  

And the story is not only about what Israel creates for itself. It is also about what it shares. Through MASHAV, Israel’s international development agency established in 1958, the country runs about 100 courses a year and trains around 2,000 professionals from more than 100 developing countries. Agriculture, medicine, resilience, water, education, disaster response: Israel has spent decades exporting not empire, not ideology, but know-how. The same national instinct that says, “We have to figure this out,” also says, “Here, take the blueprint.”  

That is the real marvel of Israel at 78. Not that it survived, though that alone would have been extraordinary. It is that it built. It absorbed immigrants by the millions. Revived a language. Grew from 806,000 people into 10,244,000. Created a society that is Jewish, Arab, Druze, Christian, secular, religious, old-rooted, newly arrived, argumentative, inventive and still somehow capable of functioning despite everyone having a better idea than everyone else. Which, frankly, may be the most Jewish engineering achievement of all.  

So on Israel’s 78th birthday, let’s skip the apology tour. Let’s not shrink ourselves to make other people comfortable. Let’s say it plainly.

This tiny little dot on the map has changed agriculture, medicine, mobility, cybersecurity, water technology and global innovation culture. It has turned fragility into resilience and pressure into invention. It has given the world tools, therapies, technologies and ideas far out of proportion to its size.

Seventy-eight years and going strong, Israel is not a footnote. Israel is a force.

So happy 78th birthday to my beautiful, loud, crazy country. Happy birthday Israel! We love you 💙🇮🇱

Am Yisrael chai 🇮🇱