"Hate cannot drive out hate"

As the tragedy in Israel and Gaza unfolds I've been checking in with friends, and I want to share the words of one friend, former boss and mentor, Shay David. He has lost at least one relative in the weekend of horror, Nir Oz, who was murdered in a Kibbutz yesterday. He knows of many other families touched by evil and death in this war. Yet his words, wishes, and one request are not of hate and revenge but of wisdom and humanity.?

Please read Shay's words to a tech leadership forum with respect and in the spirit of openness to what might be if we work to make peace possible.?

This is a personal story, I don't intend to politicize this chat group, I just felt compelled to share some personal angles amidst the dizzying headlines of the day and to try and add a personal view of the news with some historical context and a request.?

These are trying times, to be sure, and as the hours stretch and more bad news pours in about the magnitude of this calamity and the unfathomable numbers of lives lost it is easy to develop despair, and rage, and resort to the symbolism of the clan where good guys and bad guys are easily discernible; but life in this country is more complicated than this.

I found myself today trying to explain the situation to my kids, Tamara 16, and Yamm, 13, who, incidentally literally yesterday celebrated his Bar-Mitzva by reading from the book of Jonah about the trials of young men, transformation and destiny. Born in NYC, my kids made Aliya when I decided to come back and live in Tel-Aviv a year ago, and life here doesn't really add up for them. As I was trying to help them make sense of the senselessness around us, I found myself going back in time to earlier and earlier rounds of the conflict. I told them about the second Lebanon war, and about Oslo, and about 1982, and 1973, and 1967, and 1956, and 1948, and ended in 1939, when our great grandmother Elsa, mother of seven, was shot dead in the head, by an arab sniper in the riots that followed the publication of the Pill's commission proposal to divide this land to two states. Like my kids, she was also an immigrant here: she came from Germany in 1933, after Hitler's rise to power the family fled overnight. I also told them about their other grandmother, who fled a few years later from Ukraine with nothing more than the clothes on her back, arrested by the British and interned in? Cypress, only to later live in Haifa in an abandoned Palestinian house, whose residents fled in 1948. And as the story stretched, it only became apparent that in this plot there are no winners and there are no good guys. There are humans, trapped in the endless cycles of history repeating itself. Eighty years later, little has changed. And I was questioning myself if it was the most foolish decision in my life to bring these kids from the posh life of New York and London to this inferno.?When will this conflict end, Tamara asked me. It will end when both sides recognize the other side's humanity, I told her, answering my own question with a resounding no. It wasn't foolish at all to bring them here. in fact, I'm very happy we are here because while dangers abound everywhere what we have in Israel is a combination of will and action that one cannot find anywhere else that gives me reason to believe in this humanism. We've seen it recently in the unprecedented pro-democracy movement, and we're seeing it in the last 16 hours with the grassroots mobilization of blood donations, volunteering, and citizens' help. And we're seeing it every day in the tech sector.?

I'm writing all this to you as background for a simple plea. In this group are some of the most successful and powerful figures in the Israeli tech industry and society. collectively we control some of the hottest startups and funds and some of the highest concentration of bright minds this country has ever known. As entrepreneurs, we wake up every day with a feeling that the world is amiss and we can make it better, otherwise, we wouldn't be here. We chose technology as our canvas, and we've been drawing a picture of a better future every day: from food tech to cybersecurity, from the future of work to better therapeutics, from media to banking.?

I'm writing because I think that in the days ahead we have an important role to play, and that role is to remind the communities around us of the better world to come without resorting to excessive violence. It's so easy to fall into the "us vs them", "light vs darkness", and "good guys vs bad guys" rhetoric. we must resist the calls for swift and decisive action that will teach them a lesson once and for all. we must object to the? "wipe Gaza off the map rhetoric". of course, we have the right to self-defense, and of course, the head of the snake must be squashed, and it will. but for every Hamas militant, there are ten mothers, and for every child that will lose a parent, there are a million sleepless nights ahead to plot revenge. This group inspires me every day because we believe that we can make things different. it is this attitude that I had hoped my children would be nurtured on, and why I chose to come back here. it is our duty to remember history and to use our leadership position to remind others that, as Martin Luther King said, darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.?

Hopefully, the nights ahead have a bit of light and love, not only darkness and hate. My prayers tonight are with the families who lost loved ones, and with the dozens of captives now sequestered in tunnels underground. My duty is to show my children that there is a better way and that the holy land can overcome unholy wars. This group can make a difference in driving a message of restraint, humility, and humanity. Let's use our power wisely.