This Week in Startups - Start-Up Nation Deep Dive with Dan Senor | E1970

Episode Date: June 22, 2024

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You can talk about Nvidia. Invidia is the most interesting one now because Nvidia now has over 4,000 employees in Israel. And the CTO of Nvidia Global is in Israeli. It's sometimes confusing when I tell people about how many multinationals have set up shop in Israel. The reason is confusing is because people think, oh, these multinationals have operations all over the world, right? So why is that so unique that it's in Israel? The only reason they're setting up shop is for the R&D and innovation brain power. This week in startups is brought to you by DevSquod.

Most dev agencies only offer developers. Why? Because product management is hard. Get an entire product team for the cost of one U.S. developer plus 10% off at devsquod.com slash twist. Oracle. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash twist.

And Assembly AI. Get maximum value from voice data with Assembly AI. Build powerful products and features for your end users on the industry's leading speech-to-text models. Get 100 free hours to start building at AssemblyAI.com slash twist. Welcome to This Week in Startups. My guest is Dan Cynor. I will introduce him in a moment, but I want to tell you why I'm so excited to speak to Dan today and why I think you're really going to benefit from listening to this. I lived abroad. I lived 11 years internationally. I'm asked by governments all around the world. I'm asked by many communities in the United States. What is it that makes California so unique for startup culture?

And I talk a lot about risk-taking and acceptance of failure. And then I point to Israel. And I try to show what Israel has done in the past 75 years. And I often quote my guest today, Dan Cynor, who wrote, I think, the seminal book on what's really happened in Israel and why it's been such a great community for startups and what all of you can learn from their success. It's a book published in 2009 called Startup Nation. More recently, he's written a book called Genius of Israel. We'll go into both of those books today. And then finally, a must listen to podcast. I listen to every episode called Call Me Back, which is not just listened to by Americans and Israelis, but really senior leaders all throughout the Middle East in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates. Welcome my guest,

Dan Cynor today. Hey, Mark, thanks for doing this. Great to be with you. Again, last time I was with you was in person in LA at your conference. And greatly appreciated. May we do that again? Absolutely. I want to start with this. idea of Israel as a startup community. I know there are lessons that some people can take from that. I know there's some other lessons that are specific to Israel. Maybe we could start with the story of Israel as a startup economy. How does it compare to other places in the world? You know, share a little bit with us. One of the reasons it's, it's such a sort of dazzling, mystifying, perplexing question to answer is because it's so surprising. So maybe it's best to your point.

I'll just start with some of the data that illustrates where Israel fits in the global innovation ecosystem. So Israel has 500, just some numbers that are important. Israel has 500 venture capital firms, 120 accelerators, 35 incubators, 400 multinationals have operations, major innovation and R&D operations in Israel, and 7,000 startups. So why are these numbers important? One, it means that Israel has the highest density of startups in the world. Two, it attracts, the second most global venture capital on a per capita basis in the world. And it is the number one in the world for R&D as a percentage of GDP. And it is number four in the world for public companies listed on NASDAQ. Now, to put this in context, it is a country that just reached

population size of 10 million people. It's a tiny speck of a land geographically. It's basically the size of the state of New Jersey. It is surrounded by adversaries, and in some cases, outright enemies, as we've seen over the last seven months in full form. It's basically been in some state of war since its founding. And up until very recently, it has had zero access to natural resources. So when you consider these geographic, topographical, and population size constraints, it's extraordinary that it is, like I said, number one in a number of startups per capita, number two in venture capital, number one, in R&D as a percentage of GDP, and it's extraordinary number of multinationals that set up shop in Israel and with Israeli companies

listed on NASDAQ. There's no place like it in the world. Do you have a sense of the dollars that come into Israel from venture capital perspective? So in recent years, it's been over $40 billion of venture capital. Now, Israel has a lot of venture capital funds, as I mentioned, about 80% of the funds, it's sometimes a little confusing because it has all these local venture funds, many of which you may be familiar with, like Patango or Olive or TLV or JVP or our crowd. I got to be careful here once I go down this path, I've certainly listed up. Why didn't you name us? A lot of these people are my friends. So let's just say we talk about a lot of these, but 80% of

the funds, these local funds raise are international. So they are, local funds. They've raised something like 40 plus billion dollars in recent years, but it is, but they, it's mostly international money. And some perspective for people, Israel's about nine million people. Yeah, even more, closer to 10 million now. Closer to 10 million. Yeah. That makes it about the size of the San Francisco Bay Area, just for comparison. So it's about the size of the San Francisco Bay Area. If we were to try and pick apart the reasons for some of the success, and we'll go back to some of the success in a minute. What have you concluded of why Israel punches above its weight class from a dollars, from number of startups, from successes on

public stock market, from international corporations being there? What is the secret? I think it's a few things. I'm going to rattle them off in no particular order. If you're forced me to say, what is the single most important factor? And I'll get to the other factors momentarily because they all together create a flywheel effect. The single most important factors that almost every Israeli at age 18 at a formative period in their lives participates in some form of national service, compulsory national service. In most cases, it's serving in the IDF in the Israeli military. And why is the IDF so important?

There are many units in the IDF, particularly on the intelligence side, that are like many versions of the NSA in the United States. And young 18, 19, 20, 21-year-old, so again, most Israelis who go serve males for three years, females for two years, unless they go on to serve in an officer's program, they go to officer's school, and then they serve longer, or they serve in one of these unit, these elite units that I'm talking about on the intelligence technology side, the intelligence, you know, signal side that require a larger, the longer commitment, sometimes seven, eight, ten years. But the majority of the majority of the technology. of Israelis go into the IDF, many of them serve in these elite tech units, and it's the

equivalent of getting a PhD from any number of, you know, MIT, Cal, Stanford, I mean, pick your university that's a comp. It's the equivalent of getting a PhD from one of those programs combined with, which is something I don't think you get in American elite tech-focused universities is extraordinary leadership experience. So at a very young age, these Israelis are put through a leadership crucible where they are taught not only to get smart at a very technical level on the technology side, but they also have to learn at a young age how to manage people, how to lead people, that develop interdisciplinary skills, how to make literally, tragically, life and death decisions in the face of a lot of ambiguity. And so they come out of these

programs and they are hardwired to basically lead product management teams because that's that's kind of what they're trained to do in these elite tech units in the IDF is they're basically developing product and they are well experienced at managing people, which a lot of people coming out of elite American universities don't have. And that's why they're so well suited to go into tech startups or to go work for big multinational companies. So I think that's the biggest factor. I can get to if you want. So I'm going to jump back in and get the other factors in just second dance. So I just want to pause there. I know we at Up Front Ventures love funding people who are in the U.S. military for the exact same reason. We recognize a certain

leadership quality, people who take charge, people who take things a bit more seriously, people who are used to making really tough decisions, sometimes involving life and death. And really, you compare and contrast that against maybe someone who graduated from an elite University has been a programmer and has been locked down in COVID for the last four years. There's a certain tangibility to it that we really like. We fund all sorts of people. So leadership really matters a lot. The second thing I want you to talk a little bit about is in the military, there are some

existential qualities to it when you are surrounded by relatively hostile neighborhoods throughout history, whether that be cybersecurity, whether that be computer vision, whether that be actual defense or ability to launch rockets or other things. Like, what conclusions do you draw from the technical capabilities of the military? Look, I think Israel is world class in cybersecurity. There's no question because, as you said, being excellent at cybersecurity is not a nice to have for Israel. It is existential for Israel.

Something like in 2023, I think, something like 10% of the global action. acquisitions of cybersecurity companies were of Israeli companies, 10%. Then you just think about that's more like on a relative basis than like acquisitions in all of Europe. Yeah. Hey, startups. I want you to take a second and picture the ultimate all-star team for your business. Okay, you got that image?

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Go to devsquad.com slash TWIST and stag an exclusive 10% off your engagement. That's DevSquad.com slash twist and transform your startup with the all-star team you deserve. So for Israel, these units I'm talking about, like this one unit, which is well known, which I think you're familiar with, called 8200 and Hebrew, it's coach, one of the time, which, you know, the gentleman who led it at one point is a guy named Nadav Zafir. He runs a cyberfocused, although not now only cyberfocused, but initially a basically a cyberfocused platform that launched a whole

bunch of AI companies called Team 8. And when I talked to Nadav, and he won't say this, but I will, as the leader of the 8200 unit, not only was he working on the most cutting edge cyber security products or the state of Israel, but he also was dealing with offensive operations, so not just home games, but shall we say, a way game. This operation a few years ago was very well known where there was a cyber attack launched at Iran's nuclear program, and it's been well reported. David Sanger from the New York Times has wrote extensively about this. It's well known that this was a joint operation of Israel and the U.S. And it was cyber offensive security at its best. Is this Stuxnet? Is that? Stuxnet. That's right. Stuxnet. Yeah. And it was during the Obama

administration. It was these kids we're talking about that were in the middle of it. It was these 18, 19, 20, and 21 year olds. So the kind of experience, you just can't, there's no university program in the world that will give the experience that these young people got working on a program like that. And then that's the program that's been well reported. Obviously, there are many more of those. But IDF, and then people graduate IDF and they go to university, and you give us some sense of the technical universities that exist in Israel. So staying on Nadav for one moment, he made the point when we interviewed him for our last book, for the genius of Israel, he made the point that if you take the top 1% talented technical, technology technical people in the United

States, top 1% IQ, whatever, and you just look from ages 16 to 22, and you look at what that cohort does. They all are on a similar track, more or less. Where they go to these, they go to top universities in the U.S., they get a great education, and then they wind up somewhere in Silicon Valley, or so you take that same cohort in Israel, and they get the same kind of technical education, plus the very practical application like the one we're describing, plus the leadership experience. So they're on a complete different track. We interviewed Eric Schmidt for our first book when he was at Google at the time. He made the point for Startup Nation. He told us that you take the average Israeli 25-year-old and you put him or her up against their peers outside of Israel.

Any day of the week, this was a number of years ago, Google would hire the Israeli over the non-Israeli because you just know where else in the world, you get a 25-year-old that has the technical experience with this very practical application plus leadership experience. So that most of these Israelis finish their service in the IDF. And to your question, they go to the, they go into universities. And Israel has also some of the top technical universities in the world. So there's Tel Aviv University. There's Ben-Gurian University. There's the Technion, which is like Israel's MIT. There's the White Westminster Institute of Science, which is a research, purely science research institution. So there's a range of institutions these Israelis can go to when

they leave the army, but many of them now are also just going, they're just getting recruited immediately. Like, most Israelis coming out of the units we're talking about, Mark, by the time their service is winding down, they usually have five or six offers before they can even think about what they want to do next from the startup community and from the multinationals. I said, there's over 400 of these multinationals. So every major tech company that you deal with. Like, give us a sense of scale, like Google, Intel, like how big are their operations in Israel? Anywhere usually from 1,000 people to could be 2, 3, 4,000 people. So these are just some Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, IBM, InfoSys, Intuit, Salesforce, Meta, Intel.

Then there's all the life sciences companies, Pfizer, Moderner, Metronic, Merck. And so all of them have large operations there, like, you know, anywhere from 1,000 to 3 or 4,000 people. Microsoft, a woman who's a very talented person named, you may know are Mikhail Breverman, Blumenstek, who runs Microsoft Israel. She had worked at a number of startups in Israel and wound up at Microsoft through acquisitions. And she was pinpointed as the person who should head up to be the CTO of Microsoft's cloud and AI security division. And Satchadnella wanted to move her to Redmond to go run this division out of Redmond. And she persuaded him that the best place to run this division would be out of Israel because of the proximity to this incredible cluster in this, this area of cloud security, AI, and cybersecurity more generally. And so he agreed to do it. So she,

not only did, so she went up running this division for Microsoft globally out of Israel, and she runs Microsoft Israel. And so you got over 400 of these companies. We can talk about Nvidia. Invita is the most interesting thing one now, because Nvidia now has over 4,000 employees in Israel. And the CTO of Nvidia global is an Israeli who works out of Israel. So these operations, it's sometimes It's confusing when I tell people about how many multinationals have set up shop in Israel. The reason is confusing is because people think, oh, these multinationals have operations all over the world, right? So why is that so unique that it's in Israel?

The reason it's so unique is because in most parts of the world, multinationals set up shop in a foreign jurisdiction for any number of the following reasons. One, they want to get access to the local market. That's not the case in Israel. We just discussed the population between 9 and 10 million people. It's not an interesting to small market. Israel's tech economy is purely export focused. or two, there's a logistics reason. They want to get access to, you know, they want it to be like a

regional hub, which makes sense in certain places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but it does not make sense in Israel because by and large, Israel has been shut off from the region. That's starting to change a little bit, but historically, Israel's been shut off from the region. So you don't have a local market and you don't get access to markets in the region. So the only reason they're setting up shop in Israel is for the R&D and innovation brainpower. And you have Israelis now working on some of the most instrumental and kind of central functions for that company, some of the most important innovations, Apple. I mean, Israelis are working on the M1 and M2 chips.

Obviously, we can talk about it in video, which is now hosting. Almost all computer vision that Apple uses to gain depth perception from the cameras, came from Israel, came from a company called Prime Sense that they acquired there. And actually, to your point, so we were busy talking about 80s. $2,200 this unit. And by the way, I drop these number, these unit terms, which is, so we talk a lot about these units in both of our books, but as you know, many in the tech community globally know these units as much as they know like MIT or, you know.

So the other unit is 9,900, which is all just a visualization tech unit. So all they do is visualization technology, like the one you're describing or you fast forward to more recently, Mobile Eye. So the cameras, the visualization tools in most of our automobiles are. provided by Moboli, which is an Israeli company in Jerusalem. Most of its employees come out of one of these other units, this visualization tech unit called 9,900. Many of them go to universities. They either get recruited then, sometime as they're wrapping up their studies, but more and more common these days is for them to get recruited right out of the military.

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for arguing with everybody, including themselves and including me. They argue with me all the time. I work with many Israeli companies. I've always had a belief that debate and dissent produces better outcomes, so we could talk a bit about that. But I first want you to address multiculturalism. I know in the United States, people less familiar with Israel, imagine it as this white place and there's all sorts of public arguments about colonialism and stuff. I want to get to the root of that. Israel, what does the population look like, the 10 million people? How many are white Jewish people?

What are the other backgrounds? What is the culture made of? How inclusive are they of these various groups? Yeah. So I'm glad you're zeroing in on that. There are about 70 nationalities represented in Israel. And they literally come from all over the world and every continent. So when you spend time in Israel, you meet Israelis, sure, from Europe, but you also meet as many,

if not more, from North Africa and other parts of the broader Middle East, many from the Arab world, Israeli Jews from the Arab world. We'll talk about Israeli Arabs in a moment. You have Jews from, so you'll meet Jews from Ukraine and from Poland and from Slovakia. You'll meet Jews from the United States and Argentina and Brazil and Morocco and Yemen and Egypt and Iraq and Ethiopia. So they're not all white. Definitely not all white. And I would say in the population now, the quote unquote, as we would call white, is the minority. It's more than half of Israelis are from parts of the world like North Africa, like Iran, like the broader Arab world.

Because keep in mind, in the early 1950s, there was such intense persecution of Jews in many countries in the Arab world. that they were either forced to leave because the persecution was so intense, or they were, or they were literally there were forced migrations. Like they were, they wasn't like, like, hey, we better get out of here. It was the government was making them get out of there. And so you had a massive population from countries like Iraq and Yemen. What I think, Dan, just to jump in for a second, many people may not know is they don't all even, even if it's a shared religion that we Jews share, they don't. They don't all have the same customs or backgrounds, even going back thousands of years.

You have the Ashkenazi Jews, which are typically Eastern European Jews. And then you have the Sephardic Jews, which they all emanated from Israel 3500 years ago, but were spread to the diaspora in various areas. And their cultures have changed. And I imagine inside of Israel, you feel that sense of multicultural. Yeah. I often say this, that a common. prayer book counts for something and now a common language, modern day Hebrew, counts for

something. But beyond that, these are people who've had dramatically different experiences, and in many cases have dramatically different customs and rituals. And so, you know, you talk about Ashkenazi Jews, which are large European Jews that originate from Europe, but there are Mizorahi Jews or Slash-Safarctic Jews, which are Jews from North Africa. So, So if you spend time, like I have friends who are the who would be like take Leor, I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with the television show Fowda. Fowda, it was created by two friends of mine, Leor Ra's and Aviya Sakharov. Leor is a television actor and Avi as a journalist.

And they, so look at their backgrounds. So Leor is the son of an Iraqi immigrant to Israel and a Yemenite, I think, immigrant to Israel. He was speaking Arabic at home as a little boy before he learned Hebrew in Israel. Aviya Sakharov's families are from the Kurdish part of the Middle East. So these are two guys who have zero roots in Europe or what we would think of as the kind of the white Western world. And their experience is more common than the experience, say, of my sister, who lives in Jerusalem, who immigrated or made Alia moved to Israel in 1994 and is part of the more of the sort of Anglo,

what we would call quote unquote white scene in Jerusalem. I mean, her crowd, I mean, she's integrated in many ways, obviously, but it's much more the minority than like, say, the Liora's and the obvious cigar frat. Now, there has been over the last number of decades, so much intermarriage in Israel between these, you know, descendants of these different communities that it's very, it's even impossible now to tell who's, you know, like, for instance, when you see images of Israeli serving in unit, you know, they're together serving in units in the military. You can get a sense, obviously, if one of the soldiers is Ethiopian, one of the Ethiopian migrations, there were two major Ethiopian migrations, a very large Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel.

Obviously, you can see the Ethiopian. You can see those who are descendants of some of the Arab countries in the Middle East versus those who come from families where both parents are from Eastern Europe, but it's getting harder and harder disentangle them just because of the number amount of intermingling of the families, but it is extremely diverse. And most homes in Israel, Hebrew is the first language, but you can quickly hear Russian or you can hear Arabic or you can hear, you know, French or English or, you know, Ukrainian or Spanish. This is like some of the melting pot attributes to the United States that makes the United States It's so great. By the way, it's a huge advantage for it, as much as the military is an important

part of the story, what you're zeroing in right now is an extremely important part of the story. Because, so just think about this. Two out of every three Israelis today are either immigrants, children of immigrants, or grandchildren of immigrants. Which means that they live in Israel and they're living Israeli lives, and yet they have some connection to the outside world. So, as you know, because Israel is an export-oriented tech economy, all these companies are trying to market in some way to the outside world, outside of Israel, to have so many Israelis who feel such a connection to Israel and to other countries. So having an Israeli that works in the tech ecosystem in Tel Aviv have a deep connection because their grandparents are from the United States or still

live in the United States or have, you know, a tech, Israeli working the tech scene in Tel Aviv who has a connection to Argentina or to somewhere in Africa. You go into any Israeli company and you have like a smorgasbord of all these people with deep ties to the outside world to different countries and speak the language. It's an extraordinary advantage. It's an important point that I make when I speak on the topic, Dan, is this. From day one in Israel with 10 million people, knowing that they need to be export led, they often set up Topco as a U.S.-based corporation, oftentimes, it's It's a Delaware Seacorp. From day one, the CEO or some of the top executives will tell venture capitalists,

I will move to the U.S. in a year or two years, or I will move to Europe in a year or two years or Asia if they're focused on those markets. And one of the things, Dan, that I tell people is, you know the old saying, of course, necessity is the mother of all invention. When you're in France, and France is a wonderful country. I live there myself. I think they have amazing academics, scientists, entrepreneurs, innovators, sometimes having, whether it be, I don't know if it's 55, 60 million population, you can go for a period of

three or four years without thinking about how to globalize. So when I speak to French entrepreneurs, I always say, like, could you start with the mindset of building a global company because you're going to be competing with U.S., with Israel, with other countries that are going to think globally from day one if you're in Japan. Again, I also lived in Japan. Wonderful technologists. They build phenomenal technology. But 110, 115 million people do they think about how to globalize from day one?

And I think that's really something that's unique about Israel that leads to a large part of its success. Yeah, I agree. Every time an Israeli entrepreneur is pitching their business plan, pitching their idea to VCs. I'm always struck by this. The question of global is how they globalize, how they go global is like from day one. It's part of the plan. Before they've even really like figured out the product, they're already talking about what their strategy is for the Europe, what's the strategy for the U.S. What's their? I mean, and there's two reasons. One, the local market is so

small. Two, because for most of its history, it's not only been shut off, but, you know, I mean, for most of its history, 21 of the 23 countries in the Arab League have complied with a boycott, an economic boycott of Israel. So Israel was literally shut out from the region. So if you take a region of, you know, in the neighborhood of, say, 600 million people, big market, and Israel has not had access to it. Again, that's starting to change, and we can talk a little about that. But for most of its history, the mindset was not only do we have a small market at home, we don't have access to the market all around us. So we have to completely leapfrog the region and think about how to penetrate these other

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Well, we wouldn't be able to do that without assembly AI crunching all that audio data in the background. And that's what VDIO does. They use assembly AI. And that provides the world's lowest error rate and up to 30% fewer hallucinations. So here's your call to action. build powerful AI experiences for your end users on the industry's leading speech to text models, head to assemblyaI.com slash twist, and get 100 hours free. Hey, that's great. Go play with it. You're a developer. You want to play with this. Check out, assemblyaai.com slash twist today. When we wrote Startup Nation, most of the action for Israeli tech company was Europe and the U.S. That's changing now. You'd be hard pressed to find any region of the world that doesn't in some way,

isn't in some way either targeted from a market standpoint by Israeli tech companies or doesn't have multinationals from those countries that have set up shop in Israel. So I want to pick another issue, Dan, that I often talk about and get your perspective. So I'm here in Los Angeles. I think we've spent, I've spent the better part of the last 17 years trying to build this community. Outside of Los Angeles, people always had a perception of what L.A. was like. And of course, they gravitate towards just a cartoonish version of Hollywood when, in fact, we graduate more engineers in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the United States.

We have more top 10 engineering programs than anywhere else in the United States. We have more top 100 hospital systems than anywhere else in the United States. 43% of every product that enters the United States comes to the port of Long Beach or L.A. So for me, one of the big shifts we saw in the L.A. community, the upfront summit, which you gratefully came to, I appreciate it, and spoke at was an attempt. By the way, Mark, probably the first time in history that someone has spoken on a panel about Israel and the person backstage that was coming out before I came on was Lady Gaga. So that was like, I can tell you, for those of us, I mean, this, this was, yeah, that was, yeah, I crossed that off my bucket list.

Lady Gaga, Dan Cynor, and Katie Perry. Exactly. So, and also. And also. Jokovic. Right. So, but we try to get tech meets culture, and that's a large part of the success of Los Angeles. But what I think Israel has been really smart about is encouraging delegations of people to spend time in Israel, because if you read just the news media, you get a unit dimensional view of what Israel's like. If you spend time on the ground there, as I know, like one of my LPs, Raja Dodala, who's from India, has gone there. And he walks away with a really fine-tuned sense of the Israeli culture, how warm people were to him, how embracing. And he comes away, I think, thinking differently about, well, I don't want to speak for Raja, but people in general come away

feeling differently about Israel. So that's number one. And I want you to comment on that. And number Two, I remember 20, 25 years ago, Yose Vardi used to lead delegations of Israeli startups to the U.S. He would bring him to New York, bring him to Los Angeles, bring him to San Francisco Bay Area. And what I always tell startup communities, let's say you're in St. Louis, you're in Detroit, you're in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is you have to encourage people to spend time in your ecosystem to find out what's unique. You need to find your diaspora who regularly comes back anyway. But you need to take the show on the road. You need to take your business. best people to their markets and make sure they meet you where they are too. Talk about those two

things and how Israel thinks about that. So there has been a concern, a heated debate over the last number of decades. Ironically, October 7th may have changed it, which we can come back to. But for decades, there's been this concern in Israel that while it produces all these very talented people, there was a brain drain risk that many Israelis were leaving it. I mean, in Silicon Valley, in L.A. where you are, there's a massive Israeli population. And many, many in the Israeli ecosystem are saying, are we losing our best and brightest? Are they leaving? What we argued in Startup Nation in our first book was Israel doesn't have a brain drain problem. It has what we call brain circulation, which is, it is very common for Israelis who leave, go work at a tech company

somewhere usually in the U.S., now increasingly in London, and then come back a few years later. and they usually come back because they have kids and then they realize they want to raise their family in Israel. That's the focus of our most recent book, why Israel is such a better place to raise a family and that I think helps explain why so many Israelis want to come back. Genius of Israel. Yeah, and it explains why Israelis want to come back. And so if you look at the maturation of the Israeli tech economy, so if you look at the

1990s, it was mostly Israelis developing technologies that they quickly sold to multinational. So, you know, Instant Messenger to AOL was the famous one. You mentioned Yosei Vardi. They sold it to AOL for $400 million. It was the biggest exit at the time in Israeli history. And Israelis were just like anxious to exit, anxious to sell. They'd develop a cool technology. They wouldn't even build the company yet. They'd barely build the company. They were still in the garage. They had a buyer boom out the door. They would sell it. And then as part of that, they would go often to go work at these companies somewhere else in the world. Then they started coming back. And that experience of having been in the U.S. and worked with American tech companies, they start to develop all sorts of

other skills that they didn't have before. So now Israel today has big standalone companies. I mean, you look at WIS, which is one of the fastest growing tech companies in the world right now, is their entire management team is in Israel. You look at Mobilai. Their management team, more and less, and most of their employees are in Israel. So you have more and more of these stand, and I give you a lot of examples, and more and more stand-alone companies in Israel. Israelis didn't have the outside of just pure kind of R&D and product development. They did not have experience in sales, business development, marketing, HR, I mean, all these other functions. And I think the experience of being abroad, not just doing delegation trips, but actually spending time abroad working in American companies

for a few years, has developed all these other functions that Israel did not have before. That's the first thing. Now, in terms of bringing foreigners to Israel, to me, Mark, that is one of the most important things the Israeli tech ecosystem could do. I feel so strongly about this. I'm the co-founder of an organization called Startup Nation Central, which among other things, lives and breathes to do this. So what Startup Nation Central does, it's an organization in Tel Aviv, close to 100 employees. It's a nonprofit organization, so it doesn't invest in any particular company. But what we realized after we wrote Startup Nation is there were all. all these people around the world saying, wow, I just have a one-dimensional view of Israel.

And I realize it's a lot more complex than I thought. And I get to get on the ground to get to know this ecosystem. And they would show up in Israel with our book and they'd say, like, where do I learn about Startup Nation? Where's the Startup Nation? And the reality is there is no address for the startup nation. There's nowhere to go. So we built this organization.

It does a few things. But one of it was to build almost like a GPS for anyone who, who wants to come to Israel and get plugged into the ecosystem there. And so we have companies, governments, investors, universities, all from around the world, who on any given week, reach out to Startup Nation Central and say, hey, we're interested in food tech. There's something like over 600 food tech companies in Israel, mostly in the Rojovot area today.

We're interested in cybersecurity. We're interested in digital health. We're interested in AI. Whatever it may be, they reach out to Startup Nation Central. and Startup Nation Central helps build a delegation trip for them and hosts them in Israel. And they also have this tool called Startup Nation Finder, which literally chronop tracks every single company investment fund in Israel. So if you want to come to Israel and understand the ecosystem and want to focus in on a few

companies, you can do that. And to your point, when you're on the ground for three or four days, not only do you get plugged into the ecosystem, but you get to experience exactly what you just described. Whereas Israel is a crazy place, like in the best ways. It's so intense. You know, you mentioned earlier that sort of the argumentative nature of Israeli life. It is very argumentative. It is very contentious and noisy and disagreeable.

And that is one of its great strengths. I actually trace part of it to the military because the military is very anti-hierarchical. So young people are very comfortable, challenging senior people. And that carries with it into the startup scene. So we tell the story in our startup nation about when Intel, Intel was one of the first companies to set up a major operation in Israel. The chips, like in many of our computers, were developed there, the Intel chips. And one of the senior executives from Santa Clara goes to Israel, is like in the 90s. And he's, and he's going to, for the first time, he's visiting

the Israeli operation there. And he's walking by a conference room in the Israeli operation. And he hears like yelling and screaming in the conference room. And he's like horrified, like, what is going on? And one of the Israeli executives from Intel walks out. And the American executive says, is everything okay? Like, what's going on? And he says, no, no, we just, we just wrapped up a very productive meeting. And that's, so the people, it's like, it's intense, but it's intense in an adversarial way, meaning people are arguing, they're very direct, and it's war. To anyone who has dealt with Jewish people in the United States or Europe, and consider us argumentative, I guess Israelis are times 10. But it comes from a place of really

wanting to just debate, wanting to figure out the right ideas. And you really have to learn culturally not to be put off by that. I think people describe Israelis as porcupines. Have you ever heard that? It's like prickly on the outside and soft and warm on the inside. But I want to take a harder topic on 10 million people, approximately 2.1 million, I think, are Muslim. If I look back to the origins of Israel, 1948, May 1948, right before the war, the initial war of independence, you had about 1.2 million Arabs in the land. There was some of it came through war. Some of it came through their own migration and Exodus. I know that's disputed, so I don't really want to get in a fight with anybody over that. But there was about 158,000 Arab Muslims at the founder.

of Israel that were made citizens, full citizens. That's now north of two million people. Can you talk about the Muslim population of Israel? Can you talk about its role in society, its role in technology companies? Is that contentious in the same way as it is with God's over the West Bank? Yeah, it's a great question. We could do a whole episode on this. So about two million, as you said, Muslims in Israel. They are full Israeli citizen. Now, to be clear, this is distinct from Palestinians. So Palestinians who live in the West Bank or Gaza and some who live in East Jerusalem are not citizens of Israel. And they want many of them, not all of them, as we know, many of them want their own state that lives side by side with the Jewish state. But there are, there's, and that's,

so that's a separate community distinctive from the two million approximate two million Arab-Arab Israelis or Muslim Israelis that live inside Israel. They are full citizens, which means they have access to the same Israeli health care that Jewish Israelis have. They vote in Israeli elections and have the right to vote just as Jewish Israelis do. They are as vocal and present in Israeli media and in Israeli academia and in the creative arts. So you look at the classes and in government. We'll get the government in a moment, but like you look at the classes in these universities we were talking about, the Technion, Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, look at the graduating class in a year, particularly in the sciences

and in medicine, a large percentage, some years even a majority, are Israeli Arab Muslims. You go to hospitals in Israel, you go to like the Hadassah Hospital or Sharadzadik Hospital in Jerusalem. You're just as likely to find, be treated by an Israeli. Arab and Israeli Muslim doctors you are an Israeli Jew. So they are they are like performing as seriously and as competitively as Israeli Jews. They have all the same rights. They serve in government. So there's a, there are Israeli Arab parties that are represented in the Knesset. In fact, in the last government, not this current Netanyahu government, but the Netanyahu led government, but the government that was in power basically for all of 2022, which was a government co-led by

Neffatali Bennett and Yeir-Lapid. That was a very diverse government that basically comprised seven parties, a coalition of seven parties from right to left. And the kingmaker for that government was the Rham party, which is a Muslim Islamist. I mean, really, not just Muslim, like a pretty as part of the government. Yeah, Islamist, but Islamist very religious party, Mansour Abbas, who's the leader of the party, who we interviewed, who's a character in our, in our most recent book, the government couldn't have been formed without him deciding to join became one of the most powerful people in the government. Now, it's not to say there aren't tensions.

I don't want to sound, you know, polyanish. There have historically been tensions between the Jewish community and the Israeli Arab community in Israel, and they've ebbed and flowed those tensions. I thought they were at their worst point in May of 2021 when there was about an 11-day war, 11 to 14-day war between Israel and Gaza. There is a lot of mixed Jewish-Israeli towns in Israel, like Haifa is a mixed Jewish-Israeli town, Jewish-Arab town. Jaffa is a mixed Arab-Jewish town. And so these communities where Arabs and Jews have lived on top of each other and with each other forever, then sometimes there are tensions. And when there was a war between Gaza and Israel and

for a brief period in 21, those tensions got kind of hot. What happened, though, since October 7, is the Israeli Arab community has so locked arms with the Israeli Jewish community against Hamas in ways that have been, I will say, quite inspiring. And if I couldn't articulate it better than a woman. Why don't these stories get old in the international? It makes me crazy. I'll tell you, too, that'll move you. In Jaffa, which is, which is I said one of the most intermingled is Jewish Arab towns,

just outside of Tel Aviv. In fact, if any of your listeners decide to make a trip to Israel, they will spend most of their time in Tel Aviv because that is like the text hub of Israel and just generally of the kind of the culture. Of course, go to Jerusalem. Yeah. But they'll go to Jaffa, which is right next to Tel Aviv. After October 7th, the Arab community and the Jewish community in Joppa was so concerned because of the Gaza war that there could be a flare up of tensions again between Israelis, Jews and Israeli-Arab. in Jaffa that they created on their own a citizens bottom-up community task force to work on security in Jaffa with each other. So literally days after October 7th, they formed this community,

hundreds of them, and they basically said, we need to stay closely connected. If there's a flare-up in Jaffa that threatens either community, we agree that we will work together to prevent that flare-up. And they then formed this task force, reached the mayor, they reached out the mayor, It wasn't top down. They set up this like Zoom call or something or WhatsApp calls. They had like thousands of people from both communities on the list. If you look at Lucy Arash, Lucy Ahrash, who is a Israeli, Arab, Muslim news anchor. So she's a prominent journalist in Israel.

She's fluent in Arabic. She's fluent in Hebrew. And she's fluent in English. And as I said, she's one of those prominent anchors, news anchors in Israel. and within days of October 7th, she went on air and did something she's never done, which is just did a monologue, basically delivered a monologue, explaining that she and the Arab community stand with their brothers and sisters, their Jewish brothers and sisters, against the threat of Hamas, that they are not Hamas, they're horrified by Hamas.

There are many Israeli Arabs that was- Has that cohesion held as the war has dragged on now? That's one of the amazing untold stories. There are Israel, keep in mind, Mark, there were Israeli Arabs. who were slaughtered by Hamas on October 7th. There were Israeli Arab who in Southern Israel on October 7th tried to communicate with Hamas, to try to, you know, they naively, I don't blame them, they were trying. They were naively tried to like de-escalate the heat that Hamas was bringing to Israel on

October 7th. Of course, Hamas was an interest in de-escalating the heat. So some of these Israeli Arabs were slaughtered. Some of them risked their lives to protect, Jews on October 7th. It is, there are Israeli Arabs that are being held hostage today in Gaza, but as a result of October 7th. So the cohesion has held. And it's, it's one of the most moving, inspiring stories coming out of Israel. I'm sure, as you said, like in any country where you have minority groups, majority groups, you have extremist groups in Israel. We know it's an imperfect

democracy like every democracy and yet a lot more cohesive than people acknowledge. And there's absolutely zero chance that most Israeli Arabs want to be ruled by Hamas because, you know, they understand the treatment of the people under a leadership like that. I want to turn to something positive, Dan, which is the Abraham Accords. Abraham Accords. Can you describe it for people? And mostly what I want people to understand is where the world is heading from. Israel and Saudi Arabia in terms of their own negotiations to recognize the state of Israel, to collaborate, cooperate, and in the future, what many people don't realize is from 1948, it was until 1980, that any country in the region, any Arab country, even recognize

Israel's right to exist. Okay. So from 1948 to 1980, and that agreement, was signed with Egypt, of course, normalizing relations with Israel to a degree. Anwar Sadat, the leader of Egypt who signed that, was himself murdered as a result of signing that agreement by his own people. It was another, I believe, 15 years before Jordan recognized the existence of Israel. And then another 25 years until 2020, when United Arabamorets and Bahrain, probably with Saudi support, recognize the right of Israel to exist. To the extent that we have a Saudi Israel agreement, is it still possible? And what do you think the world looks like after that if we can get cooperation between those two countries? Yeah. So a couple things. One, while there was this

formal boycott of Israel for 21 of these 23 countries in the Arab League, with the exceptions being Egypt and Jordan, you said. Informally, things started to loosen up in the 2010s. Really, around 2015, it began in earnest. There were three reasons why things started to loosen up between Israel and the Gulf states. One was increasing fear of Iran, the threat that Iran posed to the region.

And Iran poses an existential threat to Israel and to the Sunni Arab world. And again, people tend to think of all the tension in the Middle East as boil down to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. And if Israelis and Palestinians could somehow reach some resolution, then it will resolve the Israeli Arab conflict. And if you resolve the Israeli Arab conflict, then you have peace and tranquility in the Middle East. And I can tell you right now, as you know, Mark, that couldn't be farther from the truth. There is more violence and tension in the Middle East between Arabs and Arabs between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims than there are between Muslims and Jews. There's no clearer example than Syria. So in Syria, you have the Assad regime, which is led by the Alawites, which is like an offshoot sect of Shiite Muslims and a large, large population that is Sunni Muslim. And there's been basically a civil war since the early 2010s between Bashar Assad and his Alewite sect and Suiite sect. And Sunni Muslims, to the tune of something like 600,000 Sunni Arabs have been slaughtered by the Assad

regime since that time, sometimes in the most horrifying ways, chemical weapons used. I mean, we can go on and on. And you've had a refugee crisis created as a result. So close to 20 million refugees. It's the biggest refugee crisis in the world, by the way, what's have come out of Syria where all these Syrian Sunni Muslims have either been internally displaced or externally or displaced outside of Syria. Do you know how many Syrian, Sunni Muslims have been forced out of Syria?

I mean, it's over 10 million. I mean, it's a massive. I think it's close. I think it's much more. On the conservative end, you know, I would say over 10 million, but I think it's much higher than that. So the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian, a resolution of the, look at the Yemenite civil war, had nothing to do with Israel.

So the, that's torn that country apart. So the idea that you resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you resolve, you get peace and security in the real. region is absurd. So Iran poses a major threat to Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahra. Many people don't know this. And you've alluded to the religious schism within Islam between Sunnis and Shiites and they're not one cohesive religion like Protestants and Catholics or whatever. There's not any uniform religion. All of religion has its schisms. However, many people don't know, Iran is not Arabic. Right. It's Persian. They're Persian. So you have a Persian

Shiite population. You have a Sunni Arab population. Iran is, I think, north of 85 million people, Saudi Arabia, north of 35 million people. And this is really, I think, the big tension in the region, much more than Arab-Israeli conflict. In a way, Arab-Israeli conflict seems to be a way for governments to deflect from the other more fundamental issues that are going on. And it plays well to a global media ecosystem that loves to kind of, you know, view this lens of the world, but it's not really the real debate. Now, if Israel and Saudi form an alliance... Let me just say one thing. So Iran poses a threat to these Arab countries, for the reason you're saying, and many of these Arab countries decided years ago, they have an interest in cooperating with Israel because Iran poses a threat to Israel, too,

and Israel has capabilities, strategic capabilities that these countries didn't have, so they're their right to align with them. A, B, these governments, particularly the Sunni Gulf monarchies, are worried about extreme Islam in their own countries, like the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a basically sister organization, if you will, of Hamas. So both Israel and these Sunni Gulf countries have an interest in dealing with extreme Islam. And then thirdly, these Sunni Gulf countries want to innovate. They want to advance. They want to modernize. You mentioned Saudi Arabia. Muhammad bin Salman has laid out what he calls his 2030, the year 2030 is 2030 goals. They will tell you they can't reach their 2030 goals for modernization if they don't normalize

and then co-innovate with Israel. They've said, I mean, I've had leaders from Saudi Arabia, very senior leaders. I won't mention their names, but you can connect the dots, have said to me, We have a Silicon Valley in our backyard, Israel. Every time we want to innovate, why are we flying to Silicon Valley? Why do we have to fly 15 or 17 hours and we can fly three to five hours and have access to Israel? And so for these three reasons, these Gulf countries have been on a soft path towards normalizing with Israel. Some of them have done it very explicitly, like the Abraham Accords in 2020, which is Bahrain and the UAE most notably. None of it would have happened without Saudi Arabia blessing it.

And now the big deal is you're getting to, I think, is Saudi Arabia and will it normalize with Israel? And I think the answer is yes, may not be immediate, but the Saudis have made it clear they want it. The Israelis have made it clear they want it. And, you know, now- One thing, Dan, I think some of the viewers may not know. And I spend a lot of time with Saudis. So it's an area of great interest for me because I realize how important it is to global stability. Again, we're all imperfect nations.

I think we need to start with that. We've done our fair share of fucking things up in the United States. But if you look at Saudi, MBS has been very pro-women rights, female rights, has allowed them to drive for the first time. You have, I think, a decrease in the crackdown of women, increase of education of women. So it seems to me, as an outsider, I can't claim to be an expert, that there's a sort of goal to over time start to modernize, liberalize. if Saudi Arabia is going to thrive in the economy 30, 40, 50 years from now as we move away from oil,

it's going to have to, like every great country, tap into the great potential of women leaders and women in the workplace, women in the military as Israel does. And I think they recognize this. And I do think they're on a positive, productive path. And as you said, they probably have way more aligned with tapping Israel. expertise, you know, even if it's just cyber, military, nuclear, whatever, to develop in agriculture, because Israel has one of the most advanced, yeah. Security, healthcare, these are all areas that the Saudis will say existential may be too strong a term, but they basically say

they're key to modernization and survival in the next half century. And keep in mind, MBS, who we're talking about, assuming he takes over as, as the king of, Saudi Arabia, which we expect he will. He's a young man. He will likely be running Saudi Arabia absent health issues of his own for the next 50 years. And he has made clear that Saudi Arabia needs to be cutting, cutting edge innovations in these areas that we're talking about. And to him, Israel's just, it's not a love of Zion. It's just a practical. It's a practical. But also not having this great conflict allows it to become a global financial center, a global innovation center. I have been surprised, Dan, when I meet people from Saudi Arabia in the United States,

I just disclose out, right? I just say, look, I just want to tell you I'm Jewish, because I want to put that on the table and make sure they know and that, you know, wherever the conversation goes from there. And I have just been so shocked by the warm embrace that I've gotten. Of course, I guess it's selection bias because I'm seeing people already identified who come to the United States, and I probably would need to spend more time in Saudi Arabia to know for sure. But I've been really part-warmed and I hope for the best in the future. Yeah, I completely agree. And I would say there was this sense after October 7th that in order to maintain the positive momentum with Saudi Arabia and the trajectory Israel and the Saudis were on, Israel had to be had to

soft pedal, if you will, its response to the threat from Hamas. And I actually argued on my podcast, and this was, you know, not just my own view, this was partly shaped by views talking to Saudis and Emirates in particular. It was the opposite. That while the images out of Gaza, which are horrendous and pose political problems, to be fair, to the Gulf monarchies, seeing those images on TikTok, they wanted those images gone, but not at the expense of Israel defeating Hamas. Like those Gulf monarchies made clear to anyone they spoke to me, but much more importantly to like Secretary of State Blinken, Israel needs to eliminate the threat from Hamas. Because these monarchies wanted to normalize with Israel not because Israel was weak, not out

of charity for Israel, because they saw Israel as a source of strength as a military and intelligence juggernaut yacht, yes, but also as a regional economic superpower and a global cyber and technology superpower. That's what they wanted to partner with Israel because Israel was a source of strength. And so Israel being robust and managing this threat from Hamas, it was important that the Gulf States see that Israel's response was strong, even though they couldn't say that publicly. Of course, and because they themselves need to be strong against Muslim Brotherhood and the other extremist angles, nobody really wants to enable extremists in their own society. I want to come back to tech, if I could, before we wrap up. AI. AI is driving

innovation, as you know, globally in the United States. A lot of the kind of major players are clustered in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, but it really is a national phenomenon. Do you see any of that coming out of Israel? What are you hearing about AI on the ground in Israel? There's a lot. I'd say the most important development, Nenvidia announced that it would build its flagship supercomputer in Israel, which is called Israel 1, which is, I think it's when it's complete, it'll be the six largest supercomputer in the world. And then, The work being done in Israel is from this company I mentioned called Melanox, which NVIDIA bought in 2019.

It's a chipmaker. They bought it at the time for $7 billion. Now has Melanox slash NVIDIA now has 4,000 employees in Israel. It's some large, well over 10% of Nvidia's global workforce is now in Israel, and it's Nvidia's largest development center outside the U.S. And as I mentioned, the CTO of Nvidia Global is this guy, Michael Kagan. and who's based in Israel. So I think the biggest news is invidia, but there's a lot flowing from that. And so I think one of the reasons also these Gulf countries want to normalize with Israel is

because all that's happening with AI in Israel, and you just, as I mentioned, some of the tech companies that are set up, that have set up shop global tech companies in Israel. It wouldn't be interesting to them if Israel were not punching above its weight in AI. I want to play rapid fire exit, if I could. So these are, Every question I asked you could be a one-hour podcast. So I'm going to go for ping pong balls. But I want to set you up for this. Obviously, with broad audiences listening to this show, and I think about my own even friend group from high school and college without a deep sense of history asking me these questions. So let's start with the hard ones. Okay. Many Westerners speak about Israeli as a colonialist power.

Let's hear your response to the charge of colonialism. First of all, Jews have been in Israel since 1,000 BC, since the time of King David. And they were a sovereign in Israel all the way through 70 CE. So when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and dispersed the Jews into exile. Basically, from 1,000 BC to 70 CE, there was Jewish sovereign presence in Israel, except for a very brief time in the Babylonian. were there. So Jewish presence, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. It's all the way to back to the time of King David. Saying the Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel would be like saying American Indians are not indigenous to the United States. And Dan, if I could just add one

point there is think of this more than 3,000 years ago, before Christianity existed, before Islam existed. Yeah. I think everybody knows Christianity 2,000 years old. Of course, most people know Jesus was actually Jewish, was born in the region, in Nazareth, and many people don't know Islam emerged in the 7th century in the 600s, had a lot of commonality and ideology with both Judaism and Christianity. They were monotheistic religions. Jews and Muslims had fantastic, wonderful, warm relations for most of these centuries, I'd say the enormous animosity that's emerged in the last 75 years is a little more atypical than the hundreds and hundreds of years. And I hope in the deep arc of history, when you and I are both long gone, that this is a blip in

history. But colonialism, when people say that, so Jews are indigenous to the land. They were pushed away. What happened in the last 200 years? Well, even, by the way, when the Jews were pushed away, they still had a presence in Israel. They always had a presence. Going back to the time of King David, they were always Jews in the land of Israel. They didn't always have sovereignty, but they were always present. In the late 1800s, mid to late 1800s, when there was a new wave of anti-Semitism around the world, and it just seemed to be a repeat, as I say, but basically every 80 to 100 years, you get a massive rise in anti-Semitism. We could argue that we're seeing something in the works right now, but in the late 1800s, it gave birth to Zionism.

Theodore Herzl, who is a secular Jewish journalist from Vienna, basically authored and architected the modern Zionist movement, which is to say that the Jews needed a sovereign state, a homeland formally, rather than informally. Like I said, they had been in Israel, but their presence needed to be formalized with an actual modern state. And that gave birth to, and we can go through the whole history, depending on how long you want to go, but that gave birth to an effort through the 20th century, through the first half of the 20th century, to found a formal Jewish state, alongside, I might add, an Arab state, an Arab-Palestinian state. There were efforts basically in the in the 1930s. There were efforts when Israel was formally, its independence were formally declared

when the British left in 1947 found a Arab state next to the Jewish state. Those efforts, which, and this is just historical fact, the Jewish leaders, in Israel were willing to accept. Take the land, carve it up. There'll be a Jewish state and an Arab Palestinian state and the Arab leadership in the area repeatedly, consistently, rejected any outcome that would involve the founding of a Jewish state next to an Arab state. And finally, the Jews accepted the state, even though the Arabs in the region didn't accept an Arab state. There was about 750, 800,000 Jews living in the region. when Israel was created by the UN mandate.

Just a couple other quick things for the audience. If this topic interests them, there's a wonderful book. I can't recommend highly enough. I don't know if you've read it, Dan. It's called The World of Yesterday. Have you come across this book before? No. It's a wonderful book about an Austrian,

a very famous Austrian author who wrote about what life was like in the late 1800s. And then how life changed in World War I and World War II. Austria. And what he described was throughout the 1800s, you had Austria, which was the world's power for a long period of time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And you had increasing liberalization, increasing tolerance of minority groups, increasing rights, increasingly pluralistic society. And he talks about how every generation things got better. So the assumption was that things will always get better for the next generation. And then he talks about the societal breakdown prior to World War I, the fact that nobody in Europe thought it was even

conceivable or possible. As Germans were on the border of Belgium, people were in spot towns in Belgium, just in disbelief that they would actually go ahead with the war. So he talks about what life was like then. Of course, then he talks about the life leading up to World War II. And he's, of course, made homeless from Austria, moves to England and settles in England, and then in the run up to World War II, because he has a German accent, he is considered to be hostile, even though he's Jewish and of Austrian descent. So he can't get English citizenship. And he addresses the issue of citizenship and what is citizenship in the world. It's a wonderful book. Anyway, he talks about Theodore Herzl because he was a contemporary. And Theodore Herzl's first idea was

not to move to Israel, according to this book that was a contemporary book written at the time, written over a period of time before he died. But his idea was to convert. His idea, initially, because he was very liberal, was we should just become part of the societies that we were a part of. Why did he want to do that? Because he realized that anti-Semitism was on the rise and that eventually we were heading to a place where Jews were going to be killed. So he didn't argue necessarily for conversion as assimilation. We need to assimilate into this world. And only when he realized that these populations were not going to accept Jews, whether they assimilated or not, did his second thing become, I think we need to return to our origins of Israel. And that was the birth of Zionism. And a lot of the

Jews who chose, by the way, these were people who grew up in high society, in urban areas, and they moved to something that was completely undeveloped with no agriculture, with no big cities that was completely barren. And they gave up everything for this. And most of the land was purchased legally because it was owned by the UK at the time. The Austria, actually, sorry, it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire, the Turks. The Ottoman Empire owned it at the time. And it wasn't a country. And, And so the Jews were moving back to land controlled by the Ottoman Empire. At the end of World War II, or so World War I, when did the Brits take it after World War I?

Yeah. After World War I is when the British, so basically the Ottoman Empire dissolved. Yeah. And you had different empires taking pieces of the region. And the peace that is now Israel was the British mandate. The French had colonial oversight over other parts, like what is Syria and Lebanon, today, for example, was French control. But the British, basically, for to keep this, for simplicity sake, basically between World War I and World War II, the British had a mandate to supervise,

colonialize, whatever you want to call it. The Brits were the colonial power and realized that they couldn't hang on to it. And it returned to its indigenous people. And its indigenous people and the UN Security Council, the UN voted to give, the Brits, when the Brits were leaving, the UN voted to recognize Israel's independence, Israeli statehood. It included both Jews who were native to the land, and we know there are many Arabs who also were native to the land. So the idea was to find a way to share the land. The second ping pong, I'd like to ask you, is the claim of apartheid. Yeah. So let me just say one other thing. Not only were Jews present going back thousands of years. So again, Jews were indigenous to the land. The second point is the Jews that came to

to Israel later on, which relates to this book you're talking about the world of yesterday, which I'll look for. They had nowhere else to go. So you take a Jew from Iraq that was a massive Jewish population in Iraq at the time of the founding of the state. The Jews were driven out. They were brutally persecuted in Iraq and they were driven out. They had nowhere else to go.

The Jews of Eastern Europe, a third of, I mean, a third of the Jewish people globally were wiped out because of the Holocaust. But basically all of Eastern Europe, most of Eastern Europe jury. was wiped out. Those who remained had nowhere else to go. My mother, who lives in Jerusalem today, is a survivor of the Holocaust. Her father was killed in Auschwitz. We, last summer, with our family, with my kids and our extended family, went to her hometown in Slovakia, Kosciets, to go back to her roots where she was chased out of by the Nazis. We went to the home that she lived in. We went to the home where the Nazis took her out of and sent her father to Auschwitz. She escaped. She and her

mother escaped, didn't go to Auschwitz. When you knock on the door of this home, we just said, hey, my mother once lived here, we just want to see it. You know, you can tell, they immediately think, are these people coming back to take, to take back their own home? The answer is, of course not. But when you hear an American college's campuses today, people chanting at Jews, go back to Europe, go back to Poland. What does that actually mean? Go back to where? Yeah, go back to what property that we take our properties. The Jews in Israel, have nowhere else to go. The question of apartheid.

Okay, so first of all, if Israel is guilty of apartheid, they're really bad at apartheid. Because the Arab population inside Israel and the Arab population in the Palestinian communities outside of Israel have grown exponentially, exponentially since the founding of the state of Israel. So Arab, Israeli Arab and Palestinian birth rates are high. They are repopulating as well they should. They are thriving in terms of their own growth. I mean, the sizes of these populations are multiples of what they were at the founding of the state. A. So just numerically, just what does this mean apartheid?

Well, I think the thing important to point out, Dan, is apartheid is a term we all grew to know very closely associated with South Africa. And it was a system in which the historical Dutch population, white Dutch population, didn't allow equal rights to black populations in South Africa. The black populations in South Africa were, of course, endemic for the land. They were native to land that Dutch and the British were not. And that's just obvious. But they weren't allowed to be in government. They weren't allowed, even if you read Trevor Noah's book, I don't know if you ever read

it born and I know of it. Can I just tell you, listen to. to it on Audible because he reads it and it is so informative, so funny, and also so poignant. For example, it was a crime. That's why it's called born a crime. It was a crime for black and white people to have children together, to be married together. Like, that's apartheid. Yeah. And we've already talked about the kind of mingling pot, the co-mingled pot of Israel. Yeah. The government service, et cetera. So I will say that, well, first of all, as we talked about, if Israeli Arabs are discriminated against, it's, as you said earlier, there's always some

inter-ethnic, interracial, whatever you wanted to call it, tension in any multi-ethnic democracy, including the United States. But it is a fact that Israeli Arab Muslims have the same rights as Israeli Jews do in Israel. I mean, that is just effect. I'm sure they don't face zero discrimination. I would say the one area where there is, any minority group does. The one area that there is is Israeli Arabs by and large do not serve in the IDF, do not serve in the Israeli military. By the way, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Calradi Jews also do not serve in the IDF. So both communities get an exemption for different reasons.

But the Israeli Arab leadership would argue that they do not want to serve in the IDF as much as it for the different set of complexities than Israeli Jews don't want Israeli Arabs to serve in the military. That is actually, we've seen since October 7th, more and more Israeli Arabs wanting to serve in the military. Some do. And so how Israel deals with that will be interesting. Are they part of the police force? Yes, yes. They're definitely part of the police force. They're just not part of the IDF.

They basically don't want to put Israeli Arabs in the situation of having conduct military operations against Muslims and, you know, Palestinian Muslims and Gaza creates all sorts of obvious, you know, inherent challenges. But like I said, every other area of Israeli life, in the apartheid South Africa, you didn't have the African National Congress being a kingmaker in the formation of the clerk's government, of apartheid governments. You didn't have them having, you know, having this incredible representation in academia and the sciences, in the tech community, and the creative arts. In the Palestinian areas, the majority of Israelis, if they felt that they had a real partner on the other side, would also be thrilled for there to be the creation of a Palestinian state. The overwhelming majority of Israelis are not ideologically opposed or religiously opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state for those Israeli Arabs that don't live in Israel, that aren't citizens of Israel. Israel has been trying intensely since the founding of the state, since before the founding of the state, to help there be a creation of a Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state. Since the 1990s, the premierships of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Perrits worked intensively.

And then later Ehud Barak and Ayur, yeah, they worked intensely for the creation of a Palestinian state. Most Israelis today think it's unlikely to happen. But if there was a responsible party, like an Anwar Sadat, you mentioned Egypt before, like an Anwar Sadat of the Palestinian people who was willing to work constructively to Israel to create a Palestinian state, you would see support among Israelis flip overnight on making it happen. Of the three charges that are most commonly held at universities by super liberal groups that I think oftentimes don't really understand what they're advocating for, colonialism refuted by the fact that Israel was originally a Jewish state. I mean, it's even before the Jews, obviously,

there were native populations, but for about 3,500 years, I think, are the best estimates I've seen. So Jews have an endemic, historic, native right to the land side by side with other Muslim Arab populations that also do. The second charge that I hear is of apartheid. It's like any system, an imperfect system of incorporating minorities into a government, and yet they are part of government, they're part of hospitals, they're part of the education system. Part of the judiciary. They serve on the Supreme Court. So that's the second.

And then the third often repeated is genocide, that somehow there's a genocide or ethnic cleansing going on. Maybe you could address that. It comes back to my earlier point that the size of the population inside Israel, the Arab Muslim population has, has... What about Gaza? What about in Gaza with the war with the conflict? Okay. So, first of all, before October 7th, population thriving, growing, as I said, also multiples of its size in terms of population since when Israel was founded in 1948.

So Israel has, there's been no effort to ethnically cleanse or kill or genesis, wage genocide against a local... Nothing could be more belied by just the numerical, just the fact of the growth of the population. Like Israel's, you know, if Israel was in the, in the genocide business, it wouldn't be allowing this population to grow exponentially since October 7. Israel faces a challenge that no modern military has ever had to face in history. And you don't have to take my word for it. You can take any objective military expert that has studied, not Jewish, doesn't have a stake in this. Take someone like John Spitzer, who's the head of urban warfare studies at West Point, or you take someone like Andrew Roberts from the UK, who's world-renowned military and war historian.

These are not people tied to Israel. They're not Jewish. They're not, they don't have, shall we say, skin in the game, loosely defined. They basically say Israel has a challenge that no military has ever faced, which is A, in most wars, both sides want to wage war against the other side's military and do everything they can do to protect their own civilian population. What is unique about this war is Israel's facing an enemy that wants to harm Israel's military, that wants to harm Israel's civilian population, and that wants to harm its own civilian population. It wants to harm its own Palestinian civilian population. Why? Because that is one of its weapons in the war against Israel. Their belief that, A, they can use their civilians as cannon fodder, and B, that Hamas can protect itself by basically hiding and launching military operations and launching rockets from underneath or next to, or in some cases, right inside of schools, in some cases

UN schools, mosques, refugee centers, UNRWA, this UN refugee facility, their facilities, this UN refugee organization, hospitals like the El Shifa or the Alhila Hospital we hear about all the time. They deliberately run their military operations out from underneath civilian areas. Under the Geneva Conventions, one. Once one of those areas is used for offensive war capability, they cease to be considered civilian areas. And so Israel is in this impossible situation, which it is fighting a war against an enemy that is willing to use typically untouchable in war, civilian areas and civilian facilities, A, to either

disincentivize the IDF from targeting those areas, or B, when Israel does target those areas, because it doesn't have a choice, you get major civilian casualties, and then Hamas gets to cry victim and stage a PR, you know, a PR claim against Israel globally, sometimes with great effect. This is the kind of enemy Israel is facing, A, B, Hamas over basically the last decade and a half, has built this massive underground tunnel system in Israel, about 350 miles of tunnels. It is like larger than the tube system in the UK, really. And this is the other thing that, that people like John Spencer at West Point argue, there's no example. I mean, really, you can go to like, you know, the, there are a handful of battles like around the World War II where there were underground capabilities that the allies faced in terms of the enemy having an underground capability. But really, there's nothing since that where an enemy has, has this whole underground infrastructure where it hides under the civilian population. It does not allow its civilian population to hide in this underground tunnel. It's warriors and its leadership hide there. And then they just, pop up from time to time to launch offensive operations against Israel and then hide underground.

Israel has to confront this enemy, which poses an existential threat against Israel, and it is doing the best it can to do so without, with minimizing civilian casualty. It goes to extraordinary lengths with leaflets and text messages and all sorts of notifications urging civilians to move out of areas that it's about to target. And when it does so, by the way, the IDF does this as a great disadvantage to itself because it is when it is telegraphing to the civilian communities, hey, move, we're coming. It's also telegraphing to the enemy, which it doesn't want to move, but yet it does this to reduce civilian casualties. Now, if you look at the ratio, Mark, of civilian deaths to Hamas fighter deaths, all right? Right now the estimate, depending on which

number you believe, is somewhere between one to one to one, basically one point four to one in terms of civilians to Hamas casualties. There's no comparison that's lower anywhere in the world when the U.S. was waging its wars against ISIS, when the U.S. was fighting in Fallujah and Mosul, and those were battles I'm familiar with because I worked at one point for the U.S. government in Iraq. There's the number of civilians killed were, again, multiples higher than this relative. It was north of three times. Yeah.

Yeah. And so Israel's going to these great length. Does this mean that civilians are not going to get killed? Of course not. It is war. Every civilian life is tragic. It is war. Hamas, there was a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel on October 6th. It ended on October 7th. Go back and look at the footage of what happened on October 7. And we can talk about how that ceasefire ended. That ceasefire ended because Hamas made the deliberate decision to wage a massacre against Israel.

They launched a war. Israel has to respond to that war. In war, there is violence. In war, there are civilians that get caught the crossfire and killed. In the war between the IDF and Hamas, it's doubly, triply, quadruply challenging because civilians are tool, Palestinian civilians are a tool of Hamas in its war against Israel. So it's inevitable that civilians will tragically get killed. And yet, even with all of that, the ratio, as you said, is so low that, I mean, the only alternative is to ask Israel not to defend itself. Of course, that's not tenable. The things people don't talk about and I'll talk about in a second. First of all, another non-Jew who writes a lot about war in generals, Andrew Foxx. I don't know if you follow Andrew Fox on Twitter. Yeah, he's terrific. He's British and he writes a lot of stuff. Hamas actually understands the difference between the rational brain and the emotional brain and the rational brain knows that there's no alternative, but to go in and demilitarize somebody who's launching rockets at your civilian population. There just is no justifying what Hamas has done, but they know that the emotional response

of showing people who are casualties of war has such a profound impact on humans and societies so people lose the rational ability to make decisions. So what surprises me is how little focus in the media there is against the more than 1,200 people who were slaughtered, murdered, raped. tortured on October 7th. The fact that they took more than 250 hostages, of those 250 hostages, just around 130 as we do this show, are still held hostage. The fact that if my numbers are right, about 45 Americans were killed as part of October 7th. Yeah, and there's still Americans being held hostage. Yeah, 12 Americans were taken hostage. I think there's eight or so.

Five or six now, depending on, yeah. So five or six Americans still held hostage. Now, imagine that this happened to the United States. Imagine a foreign hostile nation, slaughtered 1,200 people, took 250 people hostage, had videoed raping, mutilating, and killing people, and were holding people in the tunnels. Imagine what the response of the United States would be, of what Spain would be, of what Ireland would be. And I see these artificial things put on Twitter by people like Piers Morgan who are trying to argue that the IRA never did that to England when there was a conflict between England and Ireland. But of course, Ireland never raped and filmed and mutilated British women.

Of course, Ireland didn't take 250 British people hostage, wasn't holding them in tunnels and wasn't hiding amongst civilian populations. So the analogies that people use are just so flawed, but it's the emotional brain over the rational brain, because the rational brain understands there is no choice for Israel if it wants to have a secure environment that it can live in peacefully over the long arc of time with its neighbors than to take out the radical extreme Hamas that exists next door. And it's something, Mark, that virtually everyone in the Middle East agrees with. Again, as I said earlier, you talked to the leaders of the Gulf states, they want Hamas gone. They believe Hamas is a cancer in the Arab world that will eat the Arab world. And as it relates to the numbers you mentioned, I was in Israel a few weeks ago over the Passover holiday with my wife and kids. And it's the third time I've been there since October 7. And we visited Kibbutz near Oz, one of the 20-plus communities in southern Israel, that were massacred in the most foolish ways.

You, I mean, you know and you're describing it. It's just, you just can't get your head around it. So that Kibbutz alone, that community, like that agriculture community think of it as, had 400 people in it. Basically, one and four of the people in that community are either dead or taken hostage since October 7th. It's like the equivalent, October 7th for Israel, relative to the size of its population, was the equivalent of relative to the size of the U.S. population, was the equivalent of like 29, 9-11. Look at how we responded. We in America responded to 9-11. Imagine if the impact on our population was 20 times, 29 times the size. And then you look at those taken hostage. Imagine if equivalent to the U.S. population would be like tens of thousands of

Americans taken hostage that day. So imagine if 9-11 didn't just happen, but it happened 29 times numerically in terms of the deaths of Americans. And then you imagine tens of thousands of Americans taken hostage. And then those perpetrating the war are not based 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan, but they're actually, you know, 40 kilometers, 40 miles from Tel Aviv. Yeah, exactly, right there, two kilometers from towns in southern Israel. So you're sitting there saying, wait a minute, that enemy that just tried to wage genocide against the Israeli people is not on the other side of the planet, but is right there. Like I say to people in Manhattan, I say to people in Manhattan, I say these college kids at Columbia University.

Imagine if Al-Qaeda launched 9-11 and was based, not from Afghanistan. Yeah. Or Staten Island. Yeah. And imagine, that's literally what it's like. Imagine if they were in Staten Island. And then they took a bunch of Americans to Staten Island and held them hostage underground in Staten Island. What do you think the U.S. Army would do?

I can tell you, because look at what we did in Mosul. Look, what we did in Fallujah. Or Hiroshima. Yeah. Or Hiroshima, exactly. So the last thing I want to say, Dan, and we should wrap the. show is that also when you talk about displacement, because I think displacement is another thing that comes up all the time that all the people of Gaza are being displaced, which is true and

tragic. And I hope over time there's a rebuilding process to get them back into homes. But if I'm not mistaken, something like 100,000 Israelis have been displaced as well. Is that right? So yeah, it's about, yeah, just under that, it's about 90,000 Israelis from the south. So those communities like the one, like what I was talking about, so all throughout the south of Israel, they're gone. They're out of their homes. They've been living now for over seven months in other parts of the country. And then also in the north, because the fear is that Hezbollah, which is a proxy of Iran's, which is on Israel's northern border in southern Lebanon, has the same genocidal ambitions of Israeli Jews that Hamas does, except they have 10 times the manpower,

Hezbollah in the north, 10 times the weapons capabilities. They have far more sophisticated weapons and they're far more experienced because they've been fighting on behalf of Iran and the Assad regime in Syria against Sunni Arabs in Syria. And so they're battle trained in a way that Hamas wasn't. So Israel lives in fear that another front could open up, particularly in the north. So they've had to move all their communities from the north outside. And you can't get Israelis to move back to their communities in the north or the south until they know those borders are secure. So if you are listening and you are interested in startups, I can't recommend highly enough Startup Nation written in 2009 by Dan Cynor and your co-author is Sol Singer.

Saul Singer. Second book written in 2023. It's called Is it the Genius of Israel? The Genius of Israel, the surprising resilience of a divided nation in a turbulent world. So if you want to understand the community technology, startup, origin, economic success, great reading. If you want to understand geopolitics, I think really told from a dispassionate perspective with senior people talking about what's happening today in the war with Gaza, I can't recommend highly enough Dan's podcast. It's called Call Me Back, and I hope that you will continue doing that for a long period of time. If you want to follow Dan on X, it is at Dan Cynor. So thank you so much for joining us today. Mark, real pleasure.

Thanks for taking the time to do this. Appreciate it.