[walrus01]

Relative to the size of its population, Israel has a highly developed electronics engineering related industry. Part of it related to their state support of domestic defense contractors like IAI and their avionics/radar/C4I equipment. Aside from Cellbrite, companies like Ceragon, Alvarion, Radwin, ECI, Telrad, Elbit.

Second hand knowledge: Within international organizations that have worked extensively in the Israel-Lebanon border area it is well known that Israel has pwned most of the Lebanese telecoms and ISPs quite thoroughly. To the extent that Hezbollah started laying its own fiber optic cables.

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=hez...

[confounded]

Specifically, many Israli tech people (and especially those in defense) seem to be “graduates” of the IDF’s 8200 SIGINT unit, which has close relationships with VCs in both Israel and the US.

[forapurpose]

> Relative to the size of its population, Israel has a highly developed electronics engineering related industry. Part of it related to their state support of domestic defense contractors ...

It's not due only to Israeli resources. Much of Israel's defense budget comes from the U.S., plus there is much more support, including technology transfer, that isn't provided in cash.

[andyjohnson0]

According to Businessweek [1] in 2012, the Israeli defence budget was approx. $15 billion per year and US military aid was $3.07 billion per year.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-america-really...

[Bitcoin_McPonzi]

For some reason, the Powers that Be at YCombinator allow unabated criticism of Israel, even if it's based on completely made-up facts.

[zingmars]

I have enough trust in the HN community that they would be able to call out falsehoods and downvote comments that are factually incorrect.

Why would the moderators get involved anyway? Should they also moderate criticism of Russia whether right or wrong? of North Korea?

[forapurpose]

> unabated criticism of Israel, even if it's based on completely made-up facts.

How is it criticism? Which facts were made up?

[cryoshon]

get over it? it isn't their job to 1. have encyclopedic knowledge of a small and belligerent country and then 2. enforce others to the same standard. no country gets that treatment here.

[dogma1138]

About 10% of the defense budget or 1% of GDP is US military aid that can be spent only on US military hardware.

[QGmLe]

Err, Facts can't be made up.

[dogma1138]

? Israel defense budget is about 20 billion these days the military aid to Israel is about 2.5 billion without special congressional allowances. Israel’s GDP is ~320 or so billion.

And if you wondering about the reason for discrepancies from the article above it's because that one is from 2012 the budget is larger and the US dollar devaluation against the Israeli Shekel by 15% since then, in fact fluctuations of the US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) as portion of the Israeli Defense budget are often due to currency exchange as much of the Israeli budget allocated in local currency is spent locally while the FMF is spent over in the US in dollars.

It's also important to note that the Israeli allocation of the budget does not include FMF or any other aid so when Israel allocates say 18 billion USD equivalent in local currency in the budget that is the amount to which the government will fund the defense ministry, beyond that the defense ministry has it's own internal budget which is funded via the Israeli government budget, FMF as well as any additional revenue streams of defense ministry such as rent, dividends from it's share of now privatized national defense contractors like IWI (form Israeli Military Industries) and IAI etc.

[Bitcoin_McPonzi]

@dang why do you allow and encourage people to spread bald-faced off-topic lies?