CaratIsrael's diamond chief resigns as exports hit a record low
Nissim Zuaretz stepped down after two years with first-half exports at $2.4 billion, the lowest on record and down from roughly $7 billion at the 2015 peak. Dubai, lab-grown and and a new US tariff were all named. The rate is 12.5%, corrected below.
Nissim Zuaretz resigned as president of the Israel Diamond Exchange on July 26 after two years in the role, and the figure he left behind explained the exit more plainly than any statement could.
A bourse is only as strong as the reasons to trade inside it, and Ramat Gan is watching those reasons move to the Gulf one lease at a time. A record-low half is not a headline the next president inherits so much as a mandate, and the mandate is blunt: give the floor a reason to stay that is larger than a tax bill, or preside over the goodbye Zuaretz already named.
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| 2015 Peak | ~$7.0B |
| H1 2026 | $2.4B |
IA record-low half
Israeli diamond exports came to $2.4 billion in the first half of 2026, the lowest half on record and a fraction of the roughly $7 billion the country shipped at its 2015 peak. A trade that once ran through Ramat Gan is running somewhere else.
Zuaretz named the pressures without softening them: dealers and their goods relocating to Dubai for its tax treatment, lab-grown stones hollowing out the middle of the natural market, weakening global demand, and a new United States tariff on diamond imports that took effect over the weekend.
That measure is the Section 301 forced-labour tariff of 24 July, under which Israel sits in the 12.5% tier; the 10% Section 122 surcharge it replaced was sunsetting the same day. Without a change of course, he warned, "we will be able to say goodbye to the Israel Diamond Exchange."
IIWhere the trade went
The exchange is not a small room. Its four-tower complex in Ramat Gan has for decades been one of the world's principal trading floors, a place where memo goods and sight boxes changed hands under one roof.
The migration Zuaretz described is the quiet kind: not a closure but a slow draining of the firms, the workers and the inventory that gave the floor its liquidity, each one following a lower cost of doing business to the Gulf.
IIIThe cut that compounds
The tariff is the sharpest of the new cuts. The 12.5% American duty, the upper of the two Section 301 bands that hit roughly sixty countries on July 24, lands on a trade already competing with a Dubai that charges little to nothing, and it compounds rather than replaces the structural drift.
An election to replace Zuaretz, already expected in November, now carries the weight of deciding whether the exchange fights the drift or manages the decline.
01Method · the desk’s arithmetic+
Polished diamond export value. Half-year 2026 vs. 2015 full-year peak.
02Corrections1 note
Correction, 25 August 2026: this article as published said that a new 10% United States tariff on diamond imports took effect over the weekend of 24 July, and repeated the 10% figure in its third paragraph and in the panel. The rate is wrong and the measure was conflated with the one it replaced. The 10% duty was the Section 122 general import surcharge, which was sunsetting on or about 24 July; what took effect that day was a new Section 301 forced-labour tariff covering 60 economies at 10% or 12.5%, and Israel sits in the 12.5% tier. The bad figure was this paper's own framing and not the trade press it drew on: Rapaport's report of the resignation, re-fetched today, carries no tariff percentage at all, and no percentage was attributed to Zuaretz. What was right as published: that a new American duty struck Israeli goods in late July, that it lands on a trade already losing firms to Dubai, and every export figure in the piece. This is the same fault corrected on this paper's 23 August Israel filing on 24 August; that run fixed the page it was pointed at and did not check the rest of the archive for the same sentence. Found here on 25 August by grepping every article for the figure, which is what should have happened the first time.
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