The Return from October

Our home was not a nest for us, it was not a wall. Through the torn windows blew a wind, a lonely wind from the field where the uncle was murdered. The house was breached. The ceiling did not cover the sky, did not hold back the abyss. Everything was cracked, open to God and to terror (Zelda)

Saturday, October 7, caught my family and me at our home on a kibbutz in the Negev. Geographically, we were only a chilling few kilometers away from terrorists breaking into our home, but close enough that among the 1,476 people murdered there would be far too many beloved names and faces. Faces and names that were part of my daily life and, in an instant, became memories, statistics. Tamir Adar and Itai Svirsky, my classmates. Shlomi Mathias, a fellow participant in the Mandel leadership program and always the first to volunteer to prepare an uplifting musical piece. Ofir Libstein, head of the Sha'ar HaNegev Regional Council, who was killed that day when he went out to defend his home. And also my middle-school homeroom teacher, Rotem Calderon, and Judy Weinstein, my English teacher, who were abducted as well.

For me, the Negev was never just a line on an ID card, but the very fabric of life. This is where I grew up and was raised, and in recent years it is also where I built the center of my professional life in the Negev as a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Ben-Gurion University and as a manager of technology accelerators in industry. My passion has always revolved around developing high-tech in the Negev and the potential for social mobility and equal opportunity in the periphery. From my perspective and expertise in academia and in the tech industry, I have always been fascinated to see how the trends in Israeli high-tech largely reflect the mood of the country, both in times of economic boom and in moments of crisis and downturn.

The October 7 war met Israeli high-tech in the midst of an ongoing crisis that began in 2022 with interest rate hikes, which drove down valuations for investors, and with political instability caused by the regime overhaul. Even before the war, only 2% of all Israeli high-tech was in the Negev, and today the startups that barely managed to weather the regime overhaul and the flight of foreign investors are facing a real existential threat. According to the Israel Innovation Authority's latest report from 2023, in 2022 the Israeli high-tech sector accounted for 48.3% of Israel's total exports, amounting to $71 billion. In December 2023, two months after the outbreak of the war, the figures plunged by 60%, the lowest in Israel in the past decade. You don't need to be an expert economist to understand that there is a real danger to the future of the Israeli economy and to tens of thousands of jobs across the country. The day after the war, rebuilding the start-up nation in Israel, and in the bleeding south in particular, will have to rise to the top of the public agenda and be strategically planned with a long-term view, both at the national level and at the moral level.

About five months after the deluge, in a southern corner of the country that until very recently was anonymous, with the smell of smoke and death still burning the throat, on the ruins of familiar pastoral lawns and shards of red roof tiles, I met myself after the war. Jean Améry wrote in his essay "How Much Home Does a Person Need?" that the essence of the word homeland, once it is cleansed of romantic clichés, is security. And that very security, the most basic contract between citizen and state, was damaged in the deepest sense that day, and it is doubtful whether it can ever be restored to where we were before. The damage was not expressed only in the infiltration of thousands of terrorists into Israeli territory, but in hours upon hours of military and political failure and a deep sense among the residents of the Gaza border communities that they had been abandoned to their fate. On a tour of Kibbutz Be'eri, beloved and familiar from days not long past, instead of children's laughter rolling out of the kindergartens, the bustle of the dining hall and the golf carts on the paths, there was the chilling silence of a ghost town. For me, that grating silence was above all a living reminder not only of what we lost, but of what we will still have to rebuild.

To move toward our future, we will have to learn from the mistakes of the past. And to create true equal opportunity between the center and the periphery, and a self-sustaining local knowledge-intensive industry in the south, we will have to ask, courageously, not only what actions we will take the day after the war, but what was done in the Negev until the war began. We will have to stop and understand how we got, in the first place, to a situation in which there is only 2% knowledge-intensive industry in a region that makes up 60% of the total area of the State of Israel. How do we rebuild not only the startups that collapsed and the homes that were destroyed, but also the souls that were wounded and the trust that was broken? Out of all these questions, it will be essential to set a clear, long-term national goal of strengthening high-tech in the Negev.

In 2008, a severe global economic crisis broke out, beginning with the bursting of the real estate investment bubble in the US, which led to a dramatic drop in housing prices and mortgage defaults. As a direct result of the subprime crisis, all real-estate-related assets, including securities traded on the stock exchange, lost value. The crisis started a snowball that grew into one of the largest financial crises in modern history, a dramatic rise in unemployment rates and a sharp decline in economic activity – a 45% plunge in the S&P 500 index, which reflects the state of 500 of the largest corporations in the world. To deal with the consequences of the crisis and revive the market, the US government gave financial backing to the institutions that had collapsed. As a necessary first step to stop the snowball, the government carried out, tragically late, a series of reforms to correct past mistakes, and these reduced the risk of such a crisis recurring. Today, almost 20 years later, thanks to the policy measures that were taken and the reforms that were enacted, in most places housing prices have risen by tens of percent above their pre-crisis levels and the real estate market has fully recovered. If the US managed to recover, in such a short time, from a crisis that drove 25% of Americans into bankruptcy, we too have a chance to learn and apply the lessons.

When the dust settles and the guns fall silent, the challenge facing the state will be how to help technology founders succeed, when this time what there is to offer is mainly greater uncertainty than ever before. Those brave founders who choose, precisely now, not to give up on the dream and to build a tech startup in Israel will find a tough, thin investor market and valuations completely different from last year's. This time, there is no escaping the fact that the motivations of the new founders will be completely different. I predict that these will be founders driven by an urge stronger than financial gain. Motives rooted in a deep sense of meaning and a personal pain point that simply must be solved. The new founders will be social entrepreneurs whether they like it or not, by virtue of their choice to keep working in post-October 7 Israel.

Beyond all the beloved people I lost, the shattered conception of security and the very real fear for my family's safety as we huddled in the safe room with nothing to defend ourselves but a flimsy kitchen knife, Black Saturday struck me even closer and more painfully. On that cursed morning, the first call I made, at 7 a.m., when I thought it was "just another" rocket attack on the south, was to a soulmate, a beloved and dear person who was a mentor, confidant and adviser to me. I met Avshal 15 years ago, when I was working at El Al: me, a woman far too young in a role far too senior, having to inform the legendary CEO of Takam that I was cutting $100,000 from his turnover. It was the hardest and, in hindsight, the most meaningful business meeting of my life. The connection was instant; I was captivated by his sharp mind, his creative thinking, his smiling eyes and his uncompromising professionalism. By the end of that difficult meeting we were already exchanging book recommendations and talking about Nietzsche and about the Negev that we both loved so much. Even while managing turnovers of millions of dollars, hundreds of people and complex subsidiaries, Avshal was and remained the same rugged kibbutznik, without airs, and a true professional. Our meetings in the Be'eri dining hall on the nostalgic wooden chairs, and at Café Italia in Tel Aviv, stealing a glass of fine wine in the middle of a workday. The lessons he taught me, the generosity of heart and the knowledge he shared with a smile and with joy and love of life will forever be part of me. Avshal was a dreamer and a great believer in the Negev's ability to drive the Israeli economy. He worked tirelessly to establish advanced businesses operating from the Negev, to integrate Arab and Jewish citizens into knowledge-intensive industries, and to create genuine local economic pride from a place of strength, leveraging the advantages of the place and the human capital that exists in the region. Avshal will not come back, but his vision of making the Negev flourish lives on with me and with the thousands he touched in his own special way.

Despite everything, I was and remain an incurable optimist. My passion for technology entrepreneurship and my deep desire to create social mobility through it here in the Negev gave me strength even on the hardest days. At the beginning of the war, when I felt frozen with fear and worry, my experience in mentoring founders and turning ideas into reality in a short time became an important tool in my hands. But this time, it served not only to advance for-profit technology projects, but also to create social ventures that drove change from the ground up. In every action, in every initiative, I sought to turn the feeling of helplessness into a feeling of capability, to show that even in the hardest conditions it is possible to find a way to act and make an impact for the better. The work, even at the cost of hours of sleep and time with my family, was a source of support for me and a point of light in the lowest and most painful place I have ever known.

For all of us to have a real chance of rebuilding the high-tech industry in the Negev, the first step must be to define the engine for supporting and encouraging early-stage entrepreneurship as a clear policy goal and a national interest. If we focus only on future solutions and allocating budgets without attaching serious weight to the state's role in developing high-tech in the Negev from the ground up, from the tracking of residents into traditional industry, through early education in entrepreneurship and spotting opportunities, to tax incentives for development centers, encouraging the employment of Negev residents and increasing institutional investment in the periphery. Without all of these, any attempt to plan the rehabilitation of high-tech in Israel, and in particular in the Negev, which is still licking its wounds, will be doomed from the start. We owe it to ourselves to look at the past with courage and a critical eye, so that we can build a responsible strategic plan for the future, grounded in experience and lessons learned.

Thomas Mann ends his immortal novel "The Magic Mountain" with the sentence: "Will love, too, one day rise out of this worldwide festival of death, out of this malignant fever that has set the rainy evening sky ablaze all around, will love one day rise up and come from here as well?" That will be the true victory, when, the day after the war, we rise from the deep sorrow and write a new story here, in their honor, in their memory. And for the future of our children.