Watch the world’s coverage of this conflict, and you will hear that Gaza is the victim. You will rarely hear about the Israeli border communities that have answered over 20 years of fire with invention.
I work on regional innovation diplomacy for the Western Negev Innovation Authority – Hamitbah, and I have come to believe the opposite is true: Sderot is becoming the global classroom for how a society under fire turns trauma into breakthrough. The newly opened Rise Hub, the Resilience and Health Innovation Hub in Sderot, is proof of this.
For too long, “resilience” has been a comfortable platitude. Alon Davidi, mayor of Sderot and chairman of the regional cluster, refuses it outright.
“I cannot stand the word ‘resilience.’ It is worn out,” he told the crowd at the hub’s opening. “Sderot is an anti-fragile city. When a ‘Black Swan’ event hits, you don’t just bend; you stand back up and emerge 10 times stronger.”
That distinction is not rhetoric. Anti-fragility means a system that gains from disorder, and for over two decades, Sderot has been one of the most heavily bombarded civilian populations on earth. The city backed the claim with six million shekels of its own budget, alongside national recovery and development funds.
The clinical case is sobering. Professor Itamar Grotto, chief medical officer for both the municipality and the Rise Hub, laid out the numbers: a stroke rate 56% above the national average, 72% of elderly residents reporting chronic anxiety or depression, and more than 13,000 people, roughly a third of the city, passing through Sderot’s Resilience Center since October 7.
Rather than accept these as a verdict, the municipality turned them into a live dataset, using non-contact sleep tracking and smart dashboards to manage community health in real time.
Hamitbah, the Western Negev Innovation Authority, is the integrated engine driving innovation across the region’s many verticals, from agriculture to defense, and the Rise Hub is its inclusive-innovation arm in resilience and health. The hub runs as a living laboratory in partnership with Sheba Medical Center’s ARC network, validating early-stage technology across research, investment, and training.
Avner Halperin, CEO of Sheba Impact, offered a parallel I keep returning to. Breakthroughs, he said, require missing a lot of penalties first; even Lionel Messi holds records for both goals and misses. “Doing innovation in Silicon Valley is easy. Doing it here, in a community that has lived through 12 military rounds a year, is an inspiring act of leadership.”
Innovation diplomacy will change Israel's image
Three of the companies coming out of the hub already point toward the future of remote care.
DriveTech, led by Haim Franck Amshalom, uses AI diagnostics to track burnout and personal resilience. Neao is rebuilding group psychiatric therapy as an anonymous, immersive platform where patients meet through avatars under licensed therapists, dissolving both distance and stigma. Bpreven models audio and video with AI to sharpen psychological diagnostics.
These are not charity cases. They are exportable solutions born in the hardest possible conditions.
That is exactly why they will travel. Ori Hadomi, a Medtronic executive who spent 19 years building Mazor Robotics into a surgical-robotics leader, reminded the room there are no shortcuts. Surround yourself with people who have the skills you lack, he urged, embrace trial and error, and never compromise professional standards. Israel earned its startup-nation name that way. The Negev is now writing the next chapter under fire.
The roadmap is ambitious. Igal Bracha, the hub’s innovation lead, frames what has been built here.
“We did not choose this reality, but we knew how to leverage it: the knowledge we accumulated, the experience of caring for people and managing communities through 12 rounds of fighting a year and the evacuation of the city right after October 7,” he said.
The next milestone is a simulation center to model crisis operations and rapid-response healthcare under real-time stress, and I am waiting for it to go fully operational, when this stops being a local story.
Here is what the world’s media misses. The Western Negev is not a region defined by its vulnerabilities; it is the definitive case study in technological resilience, and Israel should be saying so loudly.
When the simulator opens, we should bring delegations, policymakers, and mayors from conflict-scarred cities worldwide to Sderot to learn how to build a society that does not merely survive the next crisis but evolves through it. Innovation diplomacy of that kind does more for Israel’s standing than any press release. It replaces the image of a people under siege with the reality of a people who, handed the worst, build something the world will want to buy.
None of this happens on its own. The Rise Hub, the Resilience and Health Innovation Hub, is the engine behind all of it.
That is the story of Sderot worth telling: not survival. Evolution.
The writer is the director of innovation diplomacy and strategic partnerships for the Western Negev Innovation Authority - Hamitbah.