On Oct. 6, 2023, Nisan Zeevi was “living the dream,” helping to lead a tech revolution in Israel’s Galilee region.
As impact investment director of Jerusalem Venture Partners and as vice president of Margalit Startup City Galil, the region’s innovation center. Zeevi’s role was to transform the northern border city of Kiryat Shmona and the surrounding area into a food tech hub, creating dozens of startups and hundreds of high-salary jobs.
Then came Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, followed the next day by relentless rocket attacks by Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon.
With northern Israel evacuated and border towns decimated, the dream was put on pause.
“It’s become the mission of our life right now, not only to bring back the community, but to bring back the value proposition of living in the Galilee,” Zeevi told JNS from last weekend’s Jewish National Fund-USA Global Conference for Israel in Hollywood, Fla.
Several community and business leaders, politicians and everyday residents of the north spoke at the conference, espousing the merits of what could be, with a little faith and vision.
It’s been slow-going so far, said Deb Lust Zaluda, JNF-USA’s national president. When the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah went into effect in late November 2024, evacuees were naturally skeptical that it would hold. Beyond that, many who had relocated had young children in school, and uprooting them again during the school year would have only invited further disruption.
But every time Zaluda has been back to the region, “I felt like there was just a little bit more waking up. People were beginning to come back and gain more confidence,” she said.
Meanwhile, JNF-USA’s work continued throughout the war, including the building of a medical center in Kiryat Shmona, paused only when a rocket flew overhead, as did the construction of a new culinary institute.
“It’s all about utilizing regional resources, employment, tourism, things that will draw people to the north,” Zaluda said.
Emergency response centers have also been added to provide an extra feeling of security.
To Zeevi, the education and economic systems are being revitalized in a “Build Back Better” mode, to steal a slogan from former U.S. President Joe Biden.
“It’s challenging. I’m not going to lie. But I think that we also, in the middle of this crisis, have big opportunities to create big economic projects that will be a catalyst for the entire region, and that will push the government and the municipalities to move much faster than they’re moving right now,” Zeevi said.
Zeevi concedes many who lived in the north before Oct. 7—he estimates 35% to 40%—simply aren’t coming back, having established their lives in the center of the country, and enjoying some of the conveniences that come with it. He doesn’t sound begrudging. Rather, he seems to be excited by the prospect of rejuvenation.
“We see massive interest from young professional families to move to the Galilee. And it’s not like everything is okay here. But people really want to do something with purpose,” Zeevi said. “It’s our duty and our goal is to take this energy and transform it into a measurable impact.”
‘Inviting people to take part’
But it’s a different reality now, and with it, a different outlook.
“Before Oct. 7, we used to market this area as the Tuscany of the Galilee. We’re done with that,” Zeevi said. “We are telling ourselves the truth. It’s not Tuscany, but it’s a strategic and national mission, and we are inviting people to take part in this.”
It was long thought that Hezbollah was hanging on by a thread, but the Lebanese government’s inability or unwillingness to completely disarm the terror group has led to concerns that conflict with Israel will return.
“Our mission as residents is to make sure that we see what’s happening on the other side of the border, and make sure that the IDF understands that we expect them to make sure that they are not coming back,” Zeevi said of the largely flattened areas that Hezbollah has long ruled.
Meanwhile, investors are confident in the region’s future, Zeevi says, with funding pouring into the real estate and tech sectors.
“We really think that the Galilee will be the region that will have the highest growth in Israel in the next decade,” Zeevi said.
Even with that optimism, many of those returning to the region don’t have jobs to come back to.
“People are really defining what they want to do, looking for the next job placement, Michal Shiloah Galnoor, CEO of JNF-USA’s Western Galilee Now small business consortium and operator of the Lauder Employment Centers, told JNS.
“Priorities changed. We’ve gone through trauma on very different levels. Resilience changed. I changed,” Galnoor admits.
Even many businesses that remained have had to cut back on staff due to fewer customers, which leads to fewer purchases of stock from local vendors.
“It’s affecting us on every single level,” Galnoor said, pointing to a relatively successful JNF-inspired plan for Galilee merchants to create gift packages out of their products, which could be sold throughout Israel and to supporters around the world.
It was never meant to be a long-term plan, though, and Ganoor, like Zeevi, sees a light, knowing a reinvention is happening in the region.
“I think as Israelis, we’re entrepreneurs in our blood. I think that we’ve had a wake-up call and maybe we’re more open-eyed, and our choices are going to be slightly different,” she said.
She says those coming to the region are now doing so with very clear eyes. That choice to do so, in spite of the circumstances, will create “an even stronger Galilean Zionism,” Ganoor said.
“That would be the reinvention, choosing from a hard place, from a difficult place, from pain, to make it happen, to make the Galilee flourish.”
While the Israeli government has had a difficult time defining victory against Hamas, Zeevi said it’s quite clear the north has come away a winner.
“The elementary school in Kfar Giladi, which is the northernmost school in Israel, was abandoned for more than a year, and now 100% of the children have come back,” he said. “This is how victory looks—when the school on our side is fully occupied, and the Hezbollah village on the other side is still flattened and empty.”
