DAY 529 IN CAPTIVITY • DAY 1 BACK TO WAR: Netanyahu Ends Ceasefire and Returns to War – Endangering Hostages, Google Buys Wiz for $32 Billion, The DEI Dilemma

Tel Aviv Diary, March 18, 2025

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For those in the Mamaroneck area: I will be speaking at Westchester Jewish Center

this Thursday, March 20th at 6:30 PM. I’d love to see who ever is able to join us there.

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It is deeply unsettling to find oneself halfway across the globe at Disneyworld—often referred to as "the happiest place on Earth"—only to learn that the Israeli government has decided to resume military action in Gaza instead of moving forward to the already accepted agreement.

When the war began following Hamas’s attack on October 7th, it initially enjoyed broad support from the Israeli public. However, as of now, 70% of Israelis are in favor of concluding the conflict and ensuring the hostages' release—a sentiment that appears utterly irrelevant to Netanyahu. The same can be said for his unpopular decision to dismiss the head of the General Security Services. Nevertheless, launching a military offensive without public support is a profoundly troubling move.

I can hardly fathom the unimaginable anguish of the hostage families, knowing that their own government’s decisions will likely diminish the chances of their loved ones returning home— particularly excruciating for the families of those who are still alive and continue to undergo torture in sub-human conditions. Prime Minister Netanyahu claims that the renewed attacks were necessary because Hamas refused to accept the Witkoff proposal for extending Phase-A of the hostage deal. However, despite the our all consuming enmity towards Hamas, it is important to acknowledge that they adhered to the ceasefire agreement. It was Israel that violated the agreement—a move that could have been driven by concerns over the potential collapse of Netanyahu’s government.

From a military standpoint, the latest strikes were likely a tactical success. The surprise attack caught much of Hamas’s remaining leadership above ground and vulnerable. Unfortunately, they were not the only ones exposed—their families were with them, becoming yet another instance of so-called “acceptable collateral damage.”

At this point, it's very difficult to ascribe purely noble motives to Netanyahu's decision to resume the war. Finance Minister Smotritch has promised to topple the government if the Army did not return to war. Additionally, this morning, the most extreme member of Netanyahu’s coalition, Otzma Yehudit, which had previously left the coalition due to the ceasefire, announced its return to the government. One of Netanyahu’s primary reasons for opposing the establishment of a National Commission of Inquiry into October 7th is his insistence that it can only be formed after the war ends, thereby necessitating that the war continues

Tonight at Habima Square

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NETANYAHU VIDEO

Tonight, Netanyahu released a video stating:

We extended the ceasefire over weeks in which no hostages were returned. We sent delegations to Doha, accepted the envoy Witkoff’s proposal, yet Hamas rejected every offer. I have accepted the recommendation of the IDF and the security establishment to resume fighting in Gaza. From now on, we will act against Hamas with increasing intensity. From now on — negotiations will only take place under fire.

HOUTHIS

Tonight, the Houthis launched a missile targeting southern Israel, which was intercepted well before it could reach its destination. The U.S. continued tonight to attack Houthis targets in Yemen.

GOOGLE ACQUIRES ISRAELI WIZ

Google has agreed to acquire Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz in a landmark deal valued at $32 billion, marking the largest acquisition of an Israeli-founded company to date. This acquisition occurs despite earlier declarations from Wiz's founders, who expressed intentions to maintain the company's independence and establish it as a major standalone cybersecurity entity.

Contrary to these ambitions, Wiz will now be noted as the most significant exit in the history of Israeli technology, far exceeding the previous record held by Intel's acquisition of Mobileye for $15.3 billion in 2017. The deal between Google and Wiz is proceeding this time after a previous round of negotiations between the companies failed. Last July, The Wall Street Journal initially reported that Google was in advanced talks to acquire Wiz for $23 billion, but shortly afterward, the negotiations were abandoned.

THE DEI DILEMMA

A Guest Post by Howard Wach

After October 7, 2023, a consensus response to the Hamas massacre quickly swept across large swaths of American higher education. The consensus demonized Israel and held, roughly, that Zionists get what they deserve. In some quarters the rhetoric reached Hamas-like heights of outright Jew-hatred and spilled into violence. While the storm raged through dozens of campuses, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) administrators and consultants ignored—or failed to see—Jewish trauma and never provided the support other ethnic and racial groups routinely receive. Jewish employees and Jewish students suffered, betrayed and ignored. In a time of crisis and grief, why did “inclusion” not apply to Jews?

The answer is deceptively simple. Decades ago, large chunks of humanities and social science scholarship adopted a world view that reflexively grants moral advantage to the powerless. I know because I was there, reading and talking about Marxist literary theory, anthropology, and history as a young assistant professor in the early ‘90s. That perspective and its politics are thoroughly baked into post-secondary education. Many of today’s faculty and staff—including DEI administrators—inherited that ideological legacy. It dominates faculty lounges and classrooms. Other than ritualized invocations of the Holocaust, Jewish experience prior to 1948 has been erased, replaced by an obsession with Israel as a white settler outpost of Western colonialism and Zionism its theoretical prop. It relies on historical ignorance, either willful or myopic. Other higher education trends exacerbate the problem. Arab oil money finances faculty and research institutes in a dozen or more elite universities that correlate quite closely with reported harassment of Jewish students and the most disruptive of last year’s “encampments.” The problems are deep and structural.

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Fourteen months after 10/7, Hunter College, a “flagship” campus of the City University of New York with a long and distinguished history, posted a new position in “Palestine Studies”. Here’s how Hunter’s post read:

We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender and sexuality. We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. We seek candidates interested in public-facing work and who exhibit a commitment to being part of the life of the college, a diverse and exciting undergraduate minority serving institution.

Let that sink in for a minute. Leave aside the claim that Hunter is “open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches,” a gaslighting smokescreen once you’ve cooked the books with a preference for candidates proficient in apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide, not to mention climate and infrastructure devastation. Having worked in the CUNY system for twenty-seven years in diverse faculty and administrative positions, I know how faculty jobs are created and advertised. Hunter’s job description was drafted and revised, viewed and reviewed, vetted by one or more academic departments, an academic affairs office, a Human Resources department, and a DEI office. Evidently no responsible party found any problem with that language. Or perhaps they did and chose not to object. That’s how deeply the moral rot has settled. Hunter’s job ad garnered enough negative publicity for New York Governor Kathy Hochul to order the college to pull it within two days. An extraordinary step, and not without its own dangers. But we are in dangerous times. Witness the detention of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil.

Khalil, a Palestinian born in Syria, is a green card holder, a legal U.S. resident married to a U.S. citizen. The courts will decide if his presence in the country is sufficiently dangerous—that his activities pose “potential adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”—to abrogate his free speech rights and merit deportation. We’ll see. Donald Trump long ago absorbed the legal philosophy of his mentor, the despicable Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunting whisperer: “don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.” But the Trumpists are playing with fire.

However offensive his statements and actions may have been, grabbing up a graduate student activist and shipping him to a Louisiana detention center, foregoing a warrant or any semblance of due process, illustrates a much bigger problem: the rules-based, egalitarian, constitutional political order, the very foundation of Jewish-American well-being, is tottering. Trump has turned the currently dominant political party into a personality cult controlled by fear and lies, staffed his administration with toadies, masked its authoritarian executive orders as “conservatism,” and regularly plays footsie with conspiracy mongers. The case of Khalil will pit lawless xenophobia against the First Amendment, with the government’s case based on a spurious claim of fighting antisemitism and the ridiculous notion that Khalil’s activities—his speech, in other words—threatens American foreign policy. And if the First Amendment loses, so will American Jews.

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Within hours of taking office, Trump banished DEI offices and programs from the federal government. The corporate world, knowing well where their bread is buttered, is quickly following suit. Universities are scrubbing their websites as they watch federal research funding vanish. In some sense a proxy for the anti-elitism that now controls Washington, DEI is under assault everywhere. Personally, I have seriously mixed Jewish feelings about it all.

In the spring of 2020, I was chief academic officer at Guttman Community College, one of seven community colleges in the City University of New York system. On May 25 that year a Minneapolis cop murdered George Floyd. Shock and anger boiled over as the nine-minute video played and replayed across our screens. Two weeks later I convened a routine zoom staff meeting (we were nearly three months into the pandemic lockdown) and launched into the agenda, a standard list of academic matters. Two of my staff were Black and they stopped me cold. “Hold it,” they said, “we are not okay. We’re not ready for business as usual.” They were right of course. Nothing was okay for them, and I had obliviously plowed ahead without recognizing their emotional state, without checking in.

DEI offices, officers, statements, and policies mushroomed across all kinds of institutions after that tumultuous spring and summer. Our college held meetings, convened student “town halls,” and hired consultants to conduct DEI workshops with staff and faculty. One student meeting in June 2020 was especially painful. Close to 90% of Guttman’s students were (and are) Black or Latino. They lashed out, in grief and fury, at everyone—administrators and faculty alike—for failing to meet that awful moment. They demanded that we look at ourselves, our actions, and our attitudes.

I sincerely engaged with anti-racism trainings and materials then, unearthed parts of my own history, and better understood how a lifetime of exposure to anti-Black racism had wormed into my assimilated Jewish-American brain. I began to grapple with the psychic cost of an entirely white childhood and adolescence and began to perceive the root of my obliviousness on a zoom call that morning.

DEI is now officially canceled. Its excesses were evident years ago, even in the revelatory heat of 2020’s racial reckoning. Back then I couldn’t shake a persistent unease. Yes, I recognized structural racism and its echoes in my life, but a cautionary internal voice warned that permanent racial guilt and frozen identity hierarchies were fallacies that killed individual agency and smothered the possibility of change. The Jewish identity I brought to that historic moment held that no human life is without agency, and that a core DEI premise was deeply flawed: white privilege alone did not define my place in the world. Everything that’s happened on college campuses in the last fourteen months reinforced that truth.

Last spring, when the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments were loudest, I called a Black friend—a good friend, loyal and generous, a Mississippi native old enough to remember the last days of Jim Crow and the bloody struggle to end it. I told her I’d been feeling uneasy and disturbed. “Why,” she asked. “What’s going on?” “Well,” I answered, “the whole situation in Israel and here has got me rattled.” She got it, sort of. “When it’s family,” she said, “the feeling runs deep.” I was not okay, she grasped why, but she could not tap that knowledge until I said it aloud. Not long after that conversation I met with a colleague I've known for years, an Indian woman, the DEI officer in another CUNY college. She described the steps—tentative, circumspect, hesitant—her office was taking to meet the conflicts and tensions plaguing us. It was an honest conversation with a well-intentioned and highly informed person. I could see she was trying. But at that gut-churning level, we did not connect and instead moved on to talk about other things.

I’m semi-retired now. I’m not in the thick of it anymore. Anti-Black racism is still with us. But the critical struggle to combat it is disappearing at the same time the moral idiocy excusing, condoning, or celebrating the murder of Jews in the name of “liberation” is firmly entrenched. Witness Hunter College and “Palestine Studies”. Despite their overwhelmingly progressive allegiances, college faculty are a conservative lot in that nothing changes quickly. But unless higher education summons the will to reform itself instead of furiously fiddling while Rome burns all around them, impressionable young minds, future elected officials and leaders in corporate, foundation, and education C-suites, will continue to absorb this poison for a very long time.

Howard Wach
hwach12@gmail.com

BUSINESS

Bria AI

The Israeli startup Bria AI is riding the wave of artificial intelligence and has announced a $40 million funding round, led by Red Dot Capital Partners, just a year after completing its previous round. The total investment in the company now stands at $65 million.

Bria AI develops a platform that enables organizations to create visual content using generative AI—such as marketing and branding assets, image editing tools, and more. The company now plans to expand its platform into additional areas, including music, video, and text generation. The company focuses primarily on enterprise solutions, emphasizing regulation, ethics, and copyright protection.

Businesses will be able to access licensed content from media corporations and studios and use it to create commercial content with generative AI—while fully complying with legal and regulatory requirements, the company explained.

Bria AI has developed a patented “copyright attribution mechanism”, which links AI-generated visual content to the dataset on which the models were trained, enabling automatic payments to content owners. The company’s clients include businesses in advertising, gaming, media, and retail, and it competes with other firms that have developed visual AI models for image generation, such as Stability AI.

Investors in Bria AI’s new funding round include Entrée Capital, GFT Ventures, Intel Capital, In-Venture, and Maor Investment. Bria AI was founded in 2020 by Yair Adato (CEO), alongside Asa Eldar and Gal Yaakobi, who have since left the company. The company employs 50 people, including 30 in Israel.

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TRAVEL ACROSS ISRAEL

Iyon Stream Nature Reserve (Nahal Iyon)

Our next destination is the Iyon Stream Nature Reserve (Nahal Iyon) is a breathtaking nature reserve in northern Israel, located near our previous stop in Metula, Israel's northernmost town. Renowned for its lush landscapes, spectacular waterfalls, and diverse wildlife, this reserve ranks as one of the most picturesque hiking spots in the Upper Galilee region.

The Iyon Stream originates in Marjayoun, Lebanon, and flows into Israel, continuing southward for approximately 6.5 km through the Iyon Valley before it merges with the Hatzbani River, one of the Jordan River's sources. Unlike other seasonal streams in Israel, the Iyon Stream maintains a year-round water flow, a characteristic attributed to its origins in Lebanon. This stream runs through Israel's Galilee region, providing a continuous source of water.

MAIN ATTRACTIONS

WATERFALLS

The highlight of the reserve is its series of stunning waterfalls that cascade down the rocky cliffs. These include:

1. Tanur Waterfall (HaTanur)

The most magnificent waterfall in the reserve, Tanur Waterfall, plunges 30 meters into a rocky pool below. It is named "Tanur," which means "oven" in Hebrew, due to its narrow, chimney-like shape.

2. Eshed Waterfall

Located upstream from Tanur, a smaller waterfall cascades over rock formations, creating beautiful natural pools in the area.

3. Ayun Waterfall

• A wide, scenic waterfall, often surrounded by lush greenery and wildflowers.

4. Mill Waterfall (Mapal HaRechev)

Named after an old flour mill that once stood nearby, this waterfall features a 20-meter drop and is located near the start of the hiking trail.

HIKING TRAILS:

Iyon Stream Nature Reserve is popular for hiking and offers two main routes:

1. Short Trail (Easy - 1.5 km)

• Starts near the entrance by Metula and leads directly to Tanur Waterfall.

• Suitable for families and casual hikers.

2. Full Trail (Moderate - 2.5 km)

• Covers all four waterfalls, offering breathtaking views of the valley.

• Ends near Metula; requires a car shuttle or return hike.