If the solar energy industry were able to survive without government handouts anywhere, you might expect it to thrive in Israel. Yet the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek tells the story of solar operators’ struggle to get government goodies in a land of almost uninterrupted sunshine.

After struggling to grow citrus trees on a stretch of parched desert, Israel’s Kibbutz Ketura instead devoted the land to harvesting the country’s most abundant resource: sunshine. Yet as the kibbutzniks seek to expand their solar installations, the government is proving almost as formidable an obstacle as the scorched soil ever was.

“Israel has the technology and plenty of sunshine, but the government is completely ignoring the renewables industry,” said Yosef Abramowitz, a solar energy advocate who helped found Arava Power Co., the developer of the Ketura field.

With more than 300 days of sunshine per year and a world-class tech sector, Israel should be a hotbed of solar, but it has lagged behind places such as cloudy Germany and the rainy Netherlands. That’s because in recent years, geologists have discovered huge gas fields just off Israel’s coast, making the country a potential energy exporter and allowing its power plants to burn cheaper and cleaner gas instead of coal — and shifting the government’s focus away from renewables.