1 New Shekel Nation of Innovation

Issued under Israel's long-running commemorative program, this piece belongs to a series celebrating the country's reputation in high-technology industries — a theme the Bank of Israel has returned to repeatedly since the early 2010s as a deliberate exercise in soft-power coinage. Israel ranks among the highest globally in R&D spending as a percentage of GDP, a statistic the central bank has explicitly cited in documentation accompanying this series.