As an ex-Israeli now working with Americans, various Europeans and Israelis I can say the following:

Yes, we are hard to work with. More than other nations? Depends on how you look at it. I found that sometimes my values didn’t jibe well with immigrants from mainland China, for example. So to me this is more a question of incompatibility in communication styles than one nation being harder to work with.

Here are, though, a few reasons why working with Israelis can be difficult for the typical Valley geek or Corporate America type (or rather, how Israelis might be viewed by others):

• Almost complete lack of respect for authority. Israelis are by and large all Chiefs, not Braves. We “know” what needs to be done and most of the time it translates to “it’s my way or the highway”. There is a constant push to advance in rank in the Israeli society and a sense that staying some time at a certain place grants you rights even if you do not over-perform – probably a relic from Army or Socialist days.
• Aggressive demeanor. The Valley is by-and-large a highly passive-aggressive culture while Israeli culture is aggressive. There is a great lecture by an Israeli Psychologist who lives in California[1] showing the differences by looking at the production of the Israeli and American versions of http://www.hbo.com/in-treatment/index.html. In short: we are confrontational to a level that makes people in the Valley uneasy. A common way to express disagreement in Israel (at least where I lived/worked) would be to say “this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard”. Really. Compare to California’s “I don’t disagree, but let me offer a different point of view”. This even translates to differences in respect for personal space (read: we will get in your face).
• Cynicism. Israelis rarely make leaps of faith and cannot deal well with some of the craziness of daily corporate life. You’ll never hear an Israeli using an equivalent of “it is what it is”. We have a basic lack of belief in leaders and we tend to challenge them frequently. This is not to say Israelis are not capable of developing a cult of personality, it just manifests itself differently. We don’t tend to believe that people are basically good, are very suspicious usually, and lose faith in others rather quickly. This can lead to behavior that seems political and silo-ed, but has different motivations. We are also action-driven to a fault; maybe the title of this bullet should rather be “lack of patience”.
• Entitlement. As my down-voted friend demonstrates here, we are a nation in holocaust-driven post-trauma even at third generation. The holocaust (and to be honest, daily/weekly news of persecution of Jews around the globe) drives us to feel that the whole world is against us, and at the same time that we are entitled for special treatment because of it. It doesn’t help, either, that most of us arrive at the Valley via acquisition. It also doesn’t help that most of the Israelis you meet in the Valley came from top programs in the army and academia (you don’t meet the average Joe) and so come with a built in sense of entitlement.

Are Israelis hard to work with? Depends on who you ask. These behaviors above can be spun in a very positive way (see “Start-up Nation”[2]); we create small elite teams that solve ultra-hard problems for huge corporations, and you usually find Israelis at important decision points in various companies just because we have the guts to decide and lead. After having lived in various places I can easily argue each stance, and frankly, both are true.

[1]

[2]
FraudSciences, a company I helped grow and that was acquired by PayPal, appears in one of the first chapters. Knowing how the story really went I can tell you that, indeed, the book makes us look much less brash than we were.