The desert's ripple effect: The Western Negev is quietly reshaping Israel-Africa ties - opinion

Early summer in Israel’s northern Western Negev announces itself through watermelon fields. Long, low rows of deep green stretch across the flatlands where I live, reliable and unhurried as the heat itself.

On a blazing July noon, I was standing a few kilometers from those fields, inside a different kind of green – the labs and corridors of SouthUp, watching a delegation of senior African diplomats move between start-ups whose founders, less than three years ago, had fled this very ground for their lives.

The visit was organized through the bridge-building of Ambassador Leo Vinovezky, Israel’s envoy to Angola, the DRC, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe – and I am grateful to the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry for entrusting a delegation of this caliber to our corner of the Negev. They could not have sent it to a more instructive place.

Vinovezky was quick to point out that the connection is anything but coincidental. The Foreign Ministry’s Economics Division has maintained a long-standing partnership with Israel’s kibbutz industry – a sector that has contributed to Israeli exports from the periphery for decades, long before “start-up nation” entered the vocabulary.

Bringing an African delegation to the Western Negev was, in that sense, a return to Israel’s diplomatic roots.

Shahar Belkin, one of the driving forces behind SouthUp, did not open with a pitch deck. He told Kayikwamba Wagner plainly what happened here. “We had 23 companies,” he said, “and 21 of them came back after we could reopen. Now we have 27.”

None of that came from a government rescue package or an outside investor deciding the region was worth saving. It came from founders choosing to return to the same ground they had fled in the dark, and choosing to build something larger than what they had left behind.

Belkin put it in terms that cut through any polished pitch: “Although they’re called hi-tech, we seem to think they are spoiled kids playing with their computers. But they are the same spirit – second generation of the kibbutz founders.”

He was right. The founders who drained swamps and coaxed crops from sand were not driven by ideal conditions. Neither are the entrepreneurs here. In Israel, a start-up that fails is not a scandal – it is data, a credential rather than a disqualification. Vinovezky put it plainly: success rarely arrives before the fifth or 10th attempt.

Kayikwamba Wagner understood immediately why that distinction matters. “If you have to make it right the first time,” she said, “you are too afraid to take the risk of jumping into the water. You can get something good, but maybe nothing extraordinary. You get improvement – you don’t get breakthroughs.”

She said it over a lunch of hummus and falafel prepared for the delegation – a deliberately Israeli welcome, warm and unassuming. I found myself in a seat I will not forget: directly between Vinovezky and the minister herself.

This was not her first visit to Israel. She mentioned it was her third time in the country – but this time she had arrived as a minister, and the difference showed in how she listened. She was not here to absorb a tourism itinerary. She was taking notes.

That exchange, more than any product demonstration, captured why this visit felt significant. Two nations separated by thousands of kilometers found themselves describing the same problem: the gap between potential and delivery, and what it takes to close it.

The DRC sits on some of the most fertile land on earth. It has abundant water, a generous tropical climate, and the agricultural capacity to feed a significant portion of the African continent. Yet the country currently cultivates less than 1% of that potential, and the reason is brutally logistical.

Without post-harvest storage infrastructure, produce spoils before it reaches Kinshasa’s 12 million residents. In the absence of cold chain solutions, the country resorts to flying fresh food by air cargo – one of the most expensive supply chains imaginable. The problem is not the land. The problem is everything between the land and the plate.

Three start-ups inside SouthUp are working precisely on those gaps. Led by CEO Pninit Gilboa Tal, CTO Yossi Cohen, and CSO Dr. Yulimar Castro Molina, Biotization uses breakthrough 100% biological technology to protect crops from field to storage.

By combating systemic diseases, the company reduces post-harvest waste from over 30% to under 1%, extending shelf life and improving supply chain profitability.

A third company, BioTip, has built smart sensors and digital traceability tools that monitor perishable products in real time across the full cold chain, preventing spoilage before goods ever reach a shelf. None of these are theoretical. All three are operating commercially, and all three address, with surgical precision, the exact infrastructure gaps the minister described.

Before she left, Kayikwamba Wagner turned to Vinovezky with a candor that stopped the room: “This was really excellent, Ambassador. Congratulations. The program was just amazing.”

Then: “Ambassador, I will come here for a whole week immersion. I don’t want to go. This is wonderful.” He smiled and told her a whole week would not be enough – but they would make it work.

What followed was the visit’s most consequential moment. Leaning toward Vinovezky, she said: “It’s giving me a lot of ideas for the president’s visit. We have to think about how we want to organize it.” She intended to call the president’s chief of staff that week to begin planning.

SouthUp will deliver technical portfolios directly to Congolese investment and diplomatic agencies to establish commercial matching tracks. A presidential visit to the Western Negev – eagerly anticipated by both sides, and awaiting official confirmation – is already taking shape on the horizon.