Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that sales of Israel bonds surged during Operation Protective Edge this summer. Bloomberg credited the heightened interest in the bonds in part to an advertising campaign masterminded by the CEO of the Israel Development Corporation, Israel Tapoohi, who used the image of Moshe Dayan to appeal to potential investors. The appeal worked—during July and August, when Israel was fighting Hamas, $270 million worth of Israel bonds were sold, significantly more than the $150 million sold over the same time span during the previous three years. The Israel Development Corporation underwrites the bonds.

But the success of Israel Bonds this summer is only part of the story. Over the past three years, Tapoohi, who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2011, has significantly boosted sales of the bonds. During his tenure, American sales of Israel bonds has increased 74 percent to a record $1.1 billion last year. He also has increased the reinvestment rate from 20 percent in 2010 to 60 percent.

Bloomberg describes how the selling point of Israel bonds has changed over the past sixty-three years:

From its inception three years after Israel was created in 1948, the bond-selling program has sought to strike a balance between charity and investment. For a fledgling nation, struggling to house hundreds of thousands of European refugees, selling bonds was both a necessity and an expression of economic sovereignty. For American Jews, lending money to Israel, a war-torn country on the verge of bankruptcy, was an act of charity and loyalty.

“If you were an investor in 1951 looking for a place to put your money, Israel would not even be at the end of your list,” said Dan Lainer-Vos, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and author of “Sinews of the Nation,” which chronicles the history of Zionist bonds in the U.S. “They quickly realized they had to make it some kind of hybrid, because if you tried to sell it on Wall Street, you’d spend all day and get nothing. Nobody would invest in you.”

The goal now is to sell the strength of the Israeli economy and dispense once and for all with the idea of Israel Bonds as a charity, Tapoohi said.

Israel bonds were not the only investment that did well despite the war. Startup funding in the third quarter of 2014, which included Operation Protective Edge, soared to over $701 million, one of the best quarters ever.

[Photo: Israel Bonds / YouTube ]