Revealing The Hidden Dependencies That Could Cripple Israel

Israeli independence was not be secured by a flag, a speech, or a line in a Basic Law. What secures sovereign independence?

It is inventory.

It is fuel.

It is port capacity.

It is the boring spare part that keeps an aircraft flying.

It is the cloud account that keeps a hospital, bank, ministry, or emergency service online.

It is the ability to keep building homes when a foreign government decides that cement and steel are now political weapons.

Israel understands this in military language. It has understood it since 1948. What we have not yet done well enough is translate the same instinct into an investment map for the whole economy.

I decided to fix that. So I built the Claw & Talon Dependency Atlas. The atlas is available for the general public and totally free of charge to use.

The Atlas is not some random policy document PDF to sit politely in the back of a rarely seen website. It is a public, data-driven allocation dashboard for Israeli sovereign independence. The first build asks a simple question: What should Israel fund if it wants more freedom of action?

The current version found serious problems in maritime rerouting and trade-continuity infrastructure, sovereign cloud and compute resilience, munitions and defense-industrial depth, and labor substitution in construction, agriculture, and care.

It begins with the actual shape of Israel’s dependence on the outside world. I analyzed thousands of sources to get a complete picture of what Israel imports and what Israel depends on and how seriously it would impact other dependencies if it was removed.

Israel is not a closed economy, and it should not become one. In 2023, Israel imported about $91.9 billion of goods, across 4,159 HS6 product categories, from 187 countries. Its trade in goods and services amounted to nearly 58 percent of GDP. The top goods import sources included China, the United States, Germany, and Turkey. (Reference: World Bank)

No doubt Israel is small, brilliant, plugged into the world, and built to trade. But a small country at war and with diplomatic and geopolitical risk cannot treat every dependency as harmless just because it was available yesterday.

Turkey is the obvious recent example. In 2023, Turkey was one of Israel’s top import partners. In 2024, Turkey restricted exports to Israel and then announced that import and export transactions related to Israel had been stopped. The first restrictions hit products such as cement, steel, aluminum, iron construction materials, and construction equipment. The Times of Israel reported that Israel imported about 70 percent of its iron construction materials and roughly a third of its cement needs from Turkey, according to the Israel Builders Association.

That is housing. That is infrastructure. That is the cost of living. That is the difference between a war economy that bends and one that breaks.

The same is true at sea. The IMF reported that in the first two months of 2024, trade through the Suez Canal dropped by 50 percent from a year earlier, while rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope added 10 days or more on average to delivery times.  For Israel, the Red Sea and Suez are the arteries through which parts of the economy breathe. (Source: IMF)

This is why the Atlas ranks maritime rerouting, ports, customs digitization, freight intelligence, war-risk insurance tools, alternate corridors, and strategic inventories as the first investment theme. Shipping looks invisible until it fails. Then everyone suddenly remembers that a country does not eat, manufacture, fight without logistics.

The same logic applies digitally. Israel’s government cloud strategy has rightly moved into the modern era. Google Cloud announced its selection for Project Nimbus, describing a multi-year cloud framework for Israeli government entities, and AWS has launched key services in its Israel region. These are valuable capabilities. But local servers do not fully equal sovereign control if the control plane, roadmap, pricing power, and switching costs remain abroad.

So the Atlas analyzes sovereign cloud, compute, and software resilience as a second priority. Not because Israel should abandon major cloud vendors. It should not. The answer is not digital autarky. But a country that cannot operate digitally under pressure is not fully sovereign.

Defense-industrial depth ranks third for similar reasons. Israel has an extraordinary defense industry, but staying power in a long war depends on munitions, interceptors, propulsion, batteries, spare parts, depot repair, energetics, and surge manufacturing. Relying on imports for these things is dangerous.

Then there is labor. Imported labor is easy to ignore until it disappears. After October 7, Israel’s construction sector faced a severe labor shortage. Indian recruitment drives followed, with Israeli teams seeking thousands of construction workers. In agriculture, Thailand resumed sending workers to Israel after an eight-month pause, with around 30,000 Thai laborers having worked in Israeli agriculture before the war.  (Source: AP News)

That is perhaps why labor substitution ranks fourth. Construction robotics, prefab, modular building, ag-tech, greenhouse automation, assistive-care technology, remote monitoring, and workflow software are sovereignty tools. They reduce the number of places where a political shock can stop the country from functioning.

This is also why a data-driven approach matters.

Without data, everyone fights over what should be a priority. One analyst worries about oil. Another worries about tomatoes. Another worries about GPUs. Another worries about ammunition. They may all be right, but not equally right, not at the same time, and not at the same level of urgency.

So we scrape, ingest, and normalize public sources and use objective algorithms to do this analysis.

We use public trade data, including Israel Central Bureau of Statistics files that classify imports and exports by country and commodity. We use global trade datasets such as WITS and UN Comtrade. We look at public government announcements, port and shipping data, vendor announcements, procurement signals, credible journalism, agriculture and energy reporting, and sector-specific evidence. The CBS itself publishes monthly import and export files by commodities and countries, with import data by country of origin and export data by country of sale.

But raw import data is not enough.

A customs table can show petroleum, automobiles, electronics, diamonds, and machinery. It may not show that a software stack depends on a foreign cloud roadmap. It may not show that a defense system depends on a small component with a long qualification cycle. It may not show that a labor corridor is really a national-infrastructure dependency. It may not show that “country of origin” can hide re-exports, bottlenecks, chokepoints, or political risk.

So the Atlas connects the dots.

Each dependency is scored not only by import size, but by strategic importance, concentration, wartime resilience, local capability gaps, substitution feasibility, population-growth pressure, and potential export upside. The goal is to be directionally useful enough that investors, founders, philanthropists, ministries, and strategic buyers can stop guessing.

The companies that help Israel withstand pressure will not only sell to Israel. Maritime-risk software built for Israeli importers can sell to every company worried about chokepoints. Sovereign-cloud tools built for Israeli ministries can sell to governments, banks, hospitals, and critical industries around the world. Defense-sustainment capacity built for Israel can serve allied militaries facing the same munitions and repair bottlenecks. Labor-saving construction and agriculture technology built under Israeli pressure can sell into aging, labor-constrained economies everywhere.

That is the point too often missed. The best sovereignty investments do not ask investors to choose between patriotism and return. They sit exactly where national need and market demand overlap. You can get rich investing in this and also help Israel at the same time.

The country that survives in this century will not be the country with no dependencies. No such country exists.

It will be the country that knows its dependencies better than its adversaries do.

That is what we are trying to build with the Dependency Atlas.

Israel’s enemies study its dependencies. Israel should study them better.

Then it should fund the companies that make those dependencies less dangerous.