There’s an element of the outlaw to traveling to Israel right now. Two weeks before I’m set to fly to Tel Aviv, I barely speak of it – loath to provoke the anti-Zionist aggressions (both micro and major) that now inevitably accompany any mention of visiting the Jewish homeland.
Back in the before time – fall 2023 and earlier – talk of a Tel Aviv trip mostly resulted in indifference at best, the occasional outburst of shakshuka-envy at worst.
No more.
Manufactured criminality
Today, traveling to Israel has taken on an air of criminality. Manufactured criminality, of course – but the stain still stings deeply. And I worry – as much as I know it’s untrue – that I may begin to believe the non-truths that are now so damaging to Israel in the first place. This is why I am going to Israel, to remind myself of our innate Jewish resistance and resilience – naysayers and mind-gamers be damned.
I’ve spent weeks in Israel since the October 7 massacre, and years there in the decades before. Wartime Israel – despite the very real death and disruption – never destroyed the nation’s innate exuberance. Even though there’s been little to celebrate these past two years, Tel Aviv never stopped grooving.
And neither did the rest of Israel, which is all the more reason for me to make that early-winter visit this month.
I’m hardly alone in ascribing outlaw status to Israel and Zionism. Indeed, since the beginning of the tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in October, ending Zionism has become the new mantra for folks who had previously satisfied themselves with merely ending the fighting.
But like Zion itself, Zionism is not going anywhere. In fact, in many ways, the fundamentals of Zionism – of Israel’s sheer formidability – have never been stronger.
Despite the toll exacted by the war in Gaza, Israel’s economy continues to surge from strength to strength. Indeed, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange was the best-performing index in the entire world this past year – rising nearly 52% so far in 2025. Foreign investment into Israel reached an all-time high of $157 billion in the second quarter of 2025. And investment from Abraham Accord members is equally robust, with just the UAE pouring $3.3b. into Israel last year, up from just $50 million in 2020.
What all this means is that despite the calls from wokey Western nations such as Spain and Ireland to decouple from Israel, much of the world is actually recommitting to Israel – at least the nations that truly know what’s good for them.
From war to tariffs, immigration to AI bubbles, the world is enduring a period of deep cultural and economic uncertainty. And one of the most effective antidotes against uncertainty is quality. This is what Israel represents on a material and economic level – and the “flight to quality,” when investors shift from risky assets to more certain ones, is what Israel best offers right now.
Even amid boycott and sanction cries, the canniest investors understand that the world needs Israel – and Israeli know-how – as much as Israel needs the world.
The products and technologies led by Israeli companies cannot merely be replaced by “BDS-compliant” alternatives even if they actually existed. Israeli technologies may not be entirely indispensable, but laboring to “cancel” them for mere political or optics reasons makes little sense to most – and would prove far too costly for many. Despite all that “apartheid” talk, Israel is no South Africa. Nor should it be, or really could it be.
One of the most disheartening elements of South Africa before the shift to Black rule in 1994 was just how effective apartheid was. Despite the stark brutality and inequality, South Africa managed to develop into the continent’s most sophisticated economy. Pretoria met the challenge of isolation with technology and ingenuity, until even its most ambitious efforts proved no match for the inevitable need for regime change.
Israel is far more advanced today than South Africa ever was under white rule. Moreover, while South African innovation was used to prop up its floundering regime, Israeli know-how now powers governments and intelligence services and militaries and medical centers and leading corporations around the world. Not only is there simply no collective will to trade Israeli products for Gaza-approved alternatives, but in many cases, no such alternatives actually exist.
As the world flocks to quality, no nation better represents quality and reliability than Israel. Because in many ways, this is all Israel has ever had. With a tiny population and few natural resources, Israel, much as Jews themselves, has only had brain power to offer the world.
Woke culture thrives when people act in ways that are against their best interests. Because even amid those outlaw cries, the smartest nations – and travelers like myself – understand that engaging with Israel is always in their best interest.
The writer is a former New York Post columnist; he writes the COUNTERINTUITIVE Substack.