Jerusalem
LAST MAY, just two months before Israel found itself embroiled in a war with Hezbollah, the world’s most successful investor, Warren Buffett, purchased an 80 percent share in Iscar Metalworking, an Israeli toolmaker, for some $4 billion. Prior to closing the deal, Buffett had never visited the Iscar headquarters. Nor had he ever visited Israel. But that didn’t deter him. “We are investing $4 billion in an amazing band of people from Israel,” he told an Israeli financial newspaper. “If your readers know a company that resembles Iscar, even a little, have them call me immediately. I want to buy. Let them call me collect.”

Then in late July, as war raged in Lebanon and Hezbollah rained rockets down on northern Israel, the Silicon Valley giant SanDisk, which purports to be “the world’s largest supplier of flash memory data storage products,” announced its purchase of an Israeli company for stock then valued at nearly $1.6 billion. Just a few days earlier, Hewlett-Packard had publicized its agreement to buy out the scandal-plagued firm Mercury Interactive for roughly $4.5 billion. In November HP announced that the former Mercury office in Yehud, Israel, would become its biggest research and development center in the world.