Shoshanna Solomon is The Times of Israel s Startups and Business reporter
Illustrative: Safety jackets hang at a factory in southern Israel on March 13, 2018. (AP/Ariel Schalit)
Marian Cohen, the chairman of Israel’s Mer Group, has overcome many crises in his 36 years at the tech holding firm, from rocket attacks hampering production and deliveries to a credit crunch in the Great Recession of 2008.
But the strengthening of the Israeli shekel against the US dollar is creating an “existential crisis” that outstrips those other challenges, he says, leaving him and other industrialists struggling for a response.
“In the first Lebanon war we knew we had to grit our teeth and go on, and during Operation Protective Edge there were rockets flying over Ashkelon,” said Cohen, 64, referring to the 1982 war and the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, respectively. “Both were existential crises, one could say. But we knew that it would end one day. During the 2008-2009 financial crisis we