Moonshots for Israel
12 Big Ideas for a Small Nation
Israel did the impossible once. Here is how it does it again. Judah Taub's moonshot agenda for the country's next chapter, across defense, diaspora, energy, and beyond.
Coming in October 2026
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Israel’s President Herzog remarks on Moonshots for Israel at the IDF Excellence Awards, 2026:
"Drawing his vantage point at the cutting-edge of Start-Up Nation and experience inside Israel's elite technology units, Judah Taub has a unique perspective on how to avoid the major pitfalls that everyone from starting entrepreneurs to big companies find themselves in. How To Move Up... offers a refreshing blueprint for tackling the toughest challenges in business and beyond."
Saul Singer
Author of Start-up Nation
"Brilliant and original. Judah Taub reminds us how we are limited by conventional wisdoms and accepted practices; our own minds can be the biggest enemy of invention.
He invites us to consider a fast-approaching future when artificial intelligence doesn’t replace human thinking, but reinvigorates it. We learn from the way machines think - or, at least, put the pieces of the puzzle together. Optimistic, contrary and hugely readable, a book for everyone interested in what happens next."
James Harding
Editor and Founder, Tortoise Media
"This is a brilliant and original book which manages to be both accessible and profound. It challenges all of us to think carefully about the ways in which we are trapped in our ‘local maximum’, and how we can escape to reach higher ground."
Andrew Feldman
Baron Feldman of Elstree
Member of the House of Lords of the UK and businessman, politician and technology investor
Israel of 2025 is a country with 20th century tools and a 21st century vision. This gap costs us dearly.
The world calls Israel the Startup Nation, and it earned the name. A country built from almost nothing into a global force in technology, defense, and science. Israel itself is the ultimate moonshot.
But every startup hits the moment where what made it succeed stops being enough to carry it forward. Israel is there now. Not short on talent or ambition, but stuck on the things that take long-term vision and creative nerve: telling its story to the world, holding its bond with the diaspora, and daring to reinvent systems that already sort of work. The next chapter won't come from doing more of the same. It will take a new moonshot.
That's what this book maps out. Across twelve chapters, Taub lays out a moonshot agenda for Israel: how it could transform its defense exports, finally make its case to the world, rebuild its bond with world Jewry, and rethink energy, health, education, and governance from the ground up. Drawing on the framework from his first book and rare vantage points across venture capital, military intelligence, and decades alongside the people building the country, he makes an unapologetically optimistic case: Israel has done the impossible before. Here's how it does it again.
A preview of ideas
The Abraham Canal. A sea-to-sea canal from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean has been proposed for 170 years and always hit three walls: geopolitical, economic, and technological. Taub argues all three have collapsed in the last decade, and that the canal could turn Israel from a focal point of conflict into a commercial crossroads.
The Eighth Battlefield. Israel keeps losing the information war for one reason that has nothing to do with message, spokespeople, or budget. Drawing on his years building real-time sentiment systems at a London hedge fund, Taub shows what it would actually take to fight back on the diplomatic front waged on screens.
An Iron Dome for defense exports. When allies halted arms shipments mid-war, Israel learned its closest partners could turn off the tap at the push of a button. Taub lays out a move that would make any future embargo too costly to impose, while channeling tens of billions a year into the economy.
The fund that prevents the next Holocaust. The Jewish world is on course to lose millions of people, not to violence but to arithmetic. Diaspora communities are shrinking generation by generation. Taub makes the case that lowering the cost of Jewish life is the lever to reverse it, and that it costs less than anyone assumes.
Cheap energy, strong hand. Israel's energy problem is not scarcity but complacency: gas reserves, sunshine that outproduces Germany's, and a world-class innovation base, all taken for granted. Taub argues that squandering this advantage could push the country back toward power outages within a decade.
Judah Taub
Judah Taub is co-founder and managing partner at Hetz Ventures, a leading Israeli seed stage venture capital firm ($500M AUM) taking a thematic approach to early stage investing.
Before founding Hetz, Judah was Head of Data at Lansdowne Partners ($20B London-based hedge fund) as well as advising multiple young start-ups.
In his service in the Israel Defense Forces Judah served as an officer in a classified intelligence unit where he engineered a large-scale project to win the IDF 2014 Creativity Award.
He has lectured widely, including throughout the IDF and at Wharton Business School, on time-management and creative thinking, and wrote a book for new soldiers published by Yediot, Israel’s leading publisher. Judah was also elected as one of Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2020.
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