(JNS) She was six months pregnant when the call came. Lital Leshem, co-founder of Protego Ventures, an Israel-based fund investing in early-growth companies driving innovation in critical areas of defense technology, deployed south to the IDF Southern Command’s Central War Room and watched Oct. 7, 2023, unfold in real time.
“We were exposed,” she told JNS. “Not because of a lack of bravery or technology, but because the pipeline between innovation and operational reality was broken.”
That gap between what Israel’s defense establishment could build and what it could actually deploy in a crisis had been widening for years. Israel’s high-tech border fence surrounding Gaza served as both a physical and electronic barrier, standing as the embodiment of Israel’s technology-first security doctrine.
But in reality, the result was merely an illusion of control with a hidden single point of failure. In the early hours of Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists used bulldozers and bombs to breach the barriers in...
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