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 a new 10% US tariff were all named.
§1A record-low half.
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. 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 10% United States tariff on diamond imports that took effect over the weekend. Without a change of course, he warned, "we will be able to say goodbye to the Israel Diamond Exchange."
§2Where 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.
A trade that once ran through Ramat Gan is running somewhere else.
§3The cut that compounds.
The tariff is the sharpest of the new cuts. The 10% American duty, part of the 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.
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.
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