A year later Ibsen opened what’s widely called the first intensive care unit, and the breath squeezed from a bag never really went away. Even today, when someone has stopped breathing or is barely breathing, a medic will often breathe for them with a self-inflating bag, pressed over a face mask or hooked to a breathing tube, one squeeze every few seconds, sometimes all the way to the hospital.

An Israeli company called Inovytec built a machine that can take over much of that job. Its Ventway Sparrow is a full ventilator, able to deliver each breath at a set size or a set pressure. It weighs between 1 and 1.3 kilograms, under 3 pounds, and in the company’s words it “easily fits into a paramedic’s bag.” The FDA cleared it in 2021. It rides with Israel’s national ambulance service and the IDF, and U.S. Special Operations Command has added it to its list of approved ventilators.

What does a Danish truck strike from the 1950s have to do with a ventilator built in Israel? Why would a man who never trained as a doctor or a paramedic build a company around helping people breathe? How do you shrink a ventilator into something a medic can carry up five flights of stairs along with everything else?

To understand all this, let’s start with the bag itself.

A Truck Strike Gave the World the Breathing Bag

In 1954, Danish truck drivers went on strike, and oxygen supplies at the country’s hospitals ran dangerously low. That was a real problem, because the hand-squeezed breathing bags of the day needed a supply of oxygen to work.

Enter Henning Ruben, a Danish anesthetist. During the war he fled to Sweden, where he worked as a dentist and, of all things, a magician. Ruben wanted a device that could push air into a patient’s lungs with no gas supply at all, and his first prototype was a rubber bag held open by four welded bicycle spokes, so it would spring back into shape after every squeeze. Engineer Holger Hesse’s company swapped the spokes for foam rubber and brought it to market in 1956. They called it the Ambu bag. Medics around the world still carry its descendants.

Even Trained Rescuers Struggle With the Bag

Of course, a bag is only as steady as the person squeezing it, and in an emergency that’s harder than it sounds.

In 2004, emergency physician Dr. Tom Aufderheide and his team in Milwaukee measured what professional rescuers actually did during real cardiac arrests, squeezing the bag through a breathing tube. They gave an average of about 30 breaths a minute, roughly double the 12 to 15 the American Heart Association called for at the time. When they tried both rates during CPR on pigs, 6 of 7 survived at 12 breaths a minute and only 1 of 7 at 30. A 2021 study ran 106 EMS teams through a simulated arrest on a training dummy wired to measure every breath. Only three teams hit all the targets the researchers set, and most teams gave breaths that were too few and too shallow. Keeping a steady rhythm for many long minutes on a cramped floor, while your partner pounds on someone’s chest, is just very hard.

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A country that goes through all of that learns to treasure every foot of distance between its soldiers and a bomb, and one Israeli team set out to add a lot more of it. Tracense, a company that grew out of Tel Aviv University, now puts its sniffer on a drone that, the company says, checks a building from outside, without anyone going in, and answers within seconds. Getting there took nearly 20 years, and the story starts at the edge of a crater in Gaza.

The Army Sent the Dogs Down First

On July 30, 2014, three weeks into a war Hamas started with its rockets, a Reuters reporter stood with Col. Tomer of the 188th Armored Brigade beside a hole his bulldozers had dug to expose a tunnel. Tomer had one rule for what came next. “We don’t put men in the tunnels,” he said. His men were too precious to send down a hole, so the dogs went first, with robots sending back video.

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It’s been that way from the very beginning. 1949 was not a calm year to hold an election. The War of Independence was still winding down, and the vote had already blown past the Oct. 1, 1948 deadline the Declaration of Independence had set. When it finally came, on Jan. 25, 1949, the country made a holiday of it. The government closed every factory and business from 8 a.m. to midnight so people could vote, and in Tel Aviv police and ambulances stood around Mograbi Square with nothing to do. I love that detail. About 85% of eligible voters showed up, and three Arab members were elected to that first Knesset. One of them, Tawfik Toubi, kept his seat for 41 years.

I kept thinking about 1949 while I watched Oct. 27 unfold. Another war, another election held anyway, and once again the whole country seemed to show up, the Arab towns included. So how does a country at war pull that off? What does it mean when the people Amnesty International insists are living under apartheid break their own turnout records? What on earth is going on next door, where nobody got to vote at all?

To understand it, let’s start with what an Israeli actually does on election day.

A Slip of Paper and the Number 61

Most Americans are surprised to learn that you never vote for a person here. You walk behind a little cardboard screen, pick up a slip of paper with a party’s letters printed on it, drop it in an envelope and you’re done. (As someone who has lived here since 2007 and still doesn’t speak Hebrew, I’ve always been grateful the ballot asks so little of me.) Each party’s share of the vote becomes its share of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

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I’d bring it back with one small change. Smoking or non-smoking becomes Israeli or non-Israeli, and I know which section I’d choose.

Most of the time, you land without ever learning who you were flying with. Then somebody gets sick, which happens on about one flight in every 604, and when the crew gets on the speaker to ask whether there’s a doctor on board, you find out very quickly. On a night flight from Washington to Vienna on Oct. 23, a man collapsed, and every passenger who stepped in to treat him was Israeli. Was that luck, or is there a reason the Israelis keep turning out to be the ones who get up? To answer that, let’s start on the floor of that plane.

Every Passenger Who Treated Him Was Israeli

Most of the cabin on that Austrian Airlines flight was asleep when Regev Ben-David heard a woman shouting, “Help, help.” He’s an Israeli researcher on a postdoc in Maryland, flying home for a conference, and his only medical training is the basic first aid he picked up in the army. He went anyway, switched on the light and found a man stretched across the seats at her feet. When Ynet’s Roy Elman asked him about it afterward, he was almost apologetic. “Now that I hear myself telling you this, I think maybe it was a little irresponsible,” he said. “But it was something I just instinctively felt I had to do.”

By then the crew was calling for a doctor, and Dr. Dana Gefen Doron, a rehabilitation physician, went to answer it. “Thank God, we need you,” the flight attendant told her, and pulled her forward. Ahead of her, two flight attendants were carrying the unconscious man down the dark aisle with Ben-David helping them, and she remembers wondering, for just a second, why only one passenger had gotten up. There wasn’t time to dwell on it. A psychiatrist joined them. The two doctors introduced themselves in English and joked that the patient would have to make do with a rehab doctor and a psychiatrist, and that it was a shame there wasn’t an emergency medicine specialist on board. The flight attendants, who Ben-David said looked frightened, brought what they had for checking his blood pressure and oxygen, and Gefen Doron asked Ben-David to take a spot at the man’s feet and pass along the emergency kit.

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This is a story about one of those parts, the plasma, and a team in Israel that decided it could do its job better. Plasma is the yellowish liquid your blood cells float in, full of the proteins your body uses to build a clot, which is why a hospital hangs a bag of it on the IV pole when someone is bleeding badly after a car crash, a shooting or a major operation. The strange part, which most people outside medicine have never heard, is that the same bag also carries a protein whose whole job is to break clots apart. In a patient who’s losing blood fast, that’s an ingredient you’d rather leave out.

An Israeli team found a way to leave it out, and the way they did it is wonderfully simple. Their company, Plas-Free, built a small filter called ClearPlasma, designed to catch that one protein as the plasma drips through it on its way to the patient. There’s no machine, no pump and no new drug. In October 2025 it earned its CE mark, the certification a device like this needs before it can be sold anywhere in the European Union.

Every Bag of Plasma Carries a Clot-Breaker

To see why this is so clever, you only need to know how a clot works, and it’s simpler than it sounds. When a blood vessel tears, tiny cell fragments called platelets pile into the hole like a plug. Then a protein in the plasma called fibrinogen turns into sticky strands of fibrin, which weave through the plug like a net, and that net is what makes a clot hold.

Of course, a patch can’t stay forever, or it would block the vessel it was meant to save, so the body keeps a cleanup crew on standby. Its leader is a protein called plasminogen, which drifts through the blood carrying little hooks it uses to grab onto the net. Once it’s switched on, it cuts the net apart. On a normal day the builders and the cleanup crew keep each other in balance. After a severe injury or certain big operations, like heart surgery on a bypass machine or a liver transplant, the balance can tip, and the body keeps building a plug and keeps losing it.

A bag of donated plasma walks right into that fight. It carries the builders, which is the whole point, but it carries the cleanup crew too. It’s a little like sandbagging a riverbank in a flood when the truck that delivers the sandbags also drops off a crew whose job is hauling them away. Dr. Shmuel Banai, a senior Israeli cardiologist with no connection to the company, put it plainly. Once that plasma is inside a bleeding patient, the clot-breaking proteins it carries can help keep the bleeding going, and uncontrolled bleeding is already the leading preventable cause of death after a serious injury.

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That’s the picture behind the word “anti-Zionist” on campus, and the argument over it has made it all the way to The Breakfast Club. Haviv Rettig Gur, the Israeli journalist who hosts the Ask Haviv Anything podcast, sat down there with Charlamagne tha God, DJ Envy and Loren LoRosa, and at one point a host admitted he didn’t even know what Zionism was. He’d grown up seeing Mount Zion Church. Haviv explained what an Israeli hears when someone tells him he’s anti-Zionist:

You’re either saying, I want you all dead, because Zionism is the only way you survive. Or you’re saying, I’m ignorant, don’t know this history. . . . There’s no such thing in the Israeli mind as an anti-Zionist. Like, it’s not a coherent word.

He’s right that most of the students waving that word around on campus don’t know this history. Nobody ever taught it to them, which is a shame, because the real story doesn’t fit that picture at all. Start with the mother country. Every colonizer has one, so which one was it for the Jews? Then there’s the language. Colonizers make the natives learn theirs, so why did these colonizers give up the Yiddish, Russian and Arabic they arrived speaking for a language no child had grown up speaking in some 1,700 years? The answers to all of it begin on the wall of a water tunnel under Jerusalem, where a teenager went wading in 1880.

The Native Language Was Carved Into Jerusalem’s Rock

The teenager was Jacob Eliahu, a 16-year-old pupil of the architect Conrad Schick, and he was poking around the tunnel beneath the City of David when he noticed writing on the wall. It turned out to be Hebrew, carved around 700 B.C. by the men who dug the tunnel. They’d cut through the rock in two crews, starting from opposite ends, and the inscription tells the moment they finally broke through and met “axe against axe.” It’s a fascinating little text, because it’s basically a construction crew bragging about finishing the job, and they bragged in Hebrew.

Those stonecutters called their country Judea, and about 770 years after they finished their tunnel, Rome came for the city above it. Rome wasn’t subtle about it. After the legions burned Jerusalem in A.D. 70, it put the victory on its money, a huge issue of coins called Judaea Capta, “Judea captured,” so every market in the empire would know whom it had beaten.

In 132 the Jews rose again under Bar Kokhba, and when Rome crushed them this time, it erased the name Judea from the map. By 139 a Roman military diploma was already calling the land Syria Palaestina. The historian Werner Eck calls the renaming a deliberate and exceptional act of punishment, and he points out that Germania, Pannonia and Britannia all revolted against Rome and kept their names. Judea alone lost the name of its people.

Of course, Rome couldn’t take the name out of the people. “Jew” simply means Judean. The word comes, by way of the Latin Iudaeus and the Greek Ioudaios, from the Hebrew Yehudi, a person of Judah, the tribe and kingdom that gave Judea its name.

The Jews stayed, too, which is the part that never makes it into the slogans. Rome banned them from Jerusalem, and the Crusaders burned them alive in the city’s synagogues, but they kept coming back. By the third quarter of the 19th century, decades before Herzl wrote a word, Jews were the largest single religious group in Jerusalem.

Hebrew Came Home Before the State Did

Back in 1880, the year that boy found the stonecutters’ words on the tunnel wall, almost nobody in the world was raising a child to speak them. A young Lithuanian Jew named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda decided to change that. He sailed for the Land of Israel in 1881 with his wife, Deborah, and before their first son was born he made her promise to raise the boy as the first all-Hebrew-speaking child in modern history.

The boy was born in Jerusalem in 1882 and grew up to be the writer Itamar Ben-Avi, but for a long time it looked like the whole thing had failed. He heard nothing but Hebrew at home, and by the time he turned three he still hadn’t said a word. Family friends were sure the experiment would leave the boy an imbecile. Then one day, as the linguist Lewis Glinert tells the family story, Ben-Yehuda came home and, “upon finding the boy’s mother singing him a lullaby in Russian, flew into a rage. But then he fell silent, as the child was screaming: ‘Abba, Abba!’ (Daddy, Daddy!)” Those were the first words of the first child in modern times to grow up speaking Hebrew.

Not everyone was convinced, including the founder of political Zionism himself. “Who amongst us has a sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language!” Theodor Herzl wrote in “The Jewish State” in 1896. “Such a thing cannot be done.” I’ve lived here since 2007 and still couldn’t buy that ticket, so I’m on Herzl’s side of the argument and very glad he lost it.

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The Last Empire Left in 1948

By the 1920s the British were running the country, and staying had a price even then. Hebron paid it. On Aug. 23 and 24, 1929, Arab rioters came for the city’s Jewish families with clubs, knives and axes, and by the time it was over, 67 Jews were dead and Hebron was “barren of Jews for the first time in hundreds of years.” That was 19 years before there was a State of Israel for anyone to call an “occupation.”

In July 1947 the Jews were coming home the way the grade-school colonizer did, by ship, except that the empire running the country was doing everything it could to keep them out. An old American steamer left Sète, France, packed with 4,500 Holocaust survivors from the displaced persons camps of Germany, and somewhere along the way it took a new name, Exodus 1947. British forces boarded it off the coast, killing a crew member and two passengers, then shipped the survivors back to a French port. They sat there for three weeks in the sweltering summer heat and refused to get off, so the British took them to Hamburg and put them back in camps in Germany, of all places.

Less than a year later, the empire was gone. On May 14, 1948, the day the British Mandate ended, the natives declared their independence in what their Declaration calls “the birthplace of the Jewish people.” The barrister Natasha Hausdorff explains what that meant in law. Under the principle of uti possidetis juris, a new state “by default inherits that territory’s boundaries,” so Israel inherited the borders of the Mandate. As she puts it, “A state cannot occupy its own sovereign territory.”

On May 15 the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq invaded. The Arab League didn’t even pretend otherwise. It cabled the U.N. that its states had been “compelled to intervene.”

It’s strange, then, to hear the campus tell the refugee story backward. Weeks before the invasion, a British police report from Haifa dated April 26, 1948, recorded that “Arab leaders reiterated their determination to evacuate the entire Arab population,” while the Jews were urging the Arabs “to reopen their shops and businesses.” In 1976, Mahmoud Abbas wrote that the Arab armies entered Palestine “to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny” and then “forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland.” The Arabs started the war, lost it and left their own people to pay for it.

The Mother Country Was the One That Tried to Kill Them

The Jews’ boats and planes came from the countries that had tried to kill them, from the Russia of the Kishinev pogrom to the Iraq of the Farhud, where Jews had lived “hundreds of years before Muslim communities established a presence in Iraq.” People tend to picture Israelis as Europeans, but about half of Israel’s Jews, 48% in Pew’s survey, are Sephardi or Mizrahi, and many of their grandparents came from Baghdad, Cairo and Casablanca.

So where did the students get the word “colonizer”? They got it from Moscow. After 1967 the Soviet Union ran a propaganda campaign, supervised by the KGB, that tied Zionism to “racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism and apartheid,” and the historian Izabella Tabarovsky counts “some fifty books, with nine million copies in circulation.” Interestingly, the loudest accusers today are the countries that actually ran empires. “They still accuse tiny Israel of colonialism,” Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. General Assembly in September 2026, “and who accuses us? Britain, France.”

Most of the students don’t know the geography either. When Ron Hassner of Berkeley surveyed students in late 2023, fewer than half of the ones who backed “From the river to the sea” could name the river or the sea, which makes asking them to find Palestine on a map like asking them to find Narnia.

This is the greatest decolonization in human history, and it already happened. Rome, the Byzantines, the Arab caliphs, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans and the British all ruled this land, all came from somewhere else and all are gone. The caliphs’ armies rode out of Arabia in the 630s, more than 1,300 years after the Siloam tunnel was cut. The Jews were here before every one of them, and we’re still here after every one of them, with about 9 million people speaking Herzl’s impossible language.

The flag over this land doesn’t belong to a king across the sea. It belongs to the people who carved Hebrew into its rock, and we’re not going anywhere. We can even name the river and the sea. It’s the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and from the river to the sea, Israel is all you’ll see.

It’s not up for discussion.

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If you have Type 2 diabetes and take long-acting insulin, the instructions for adjusting it are about as simple as medicine gets. One common version says that if your morning number is above goal, you add 2 units and check again in three days. That’s the whole rule. You could fit it on a sticky note.

I find it fascinating that this little rule really works. When researchers pooled six randomized trials with more than 12,000 people, patients who adjusted their own doses with simple rules like this one did slightly better on A1c (the blood test that reflects about three months of average blood sugar) than patients whose doctors made the changes. They went low a bit more often overall but, thankfully, had no more severe lows.

So you’d expect everyone to be using it. Sadly, outside clinical trials, the dose often barely moves. One study of 427 adults starting long-acting insulin found the average dose crept from 29.6 units to 31 units over six months, less than a unit and a half, while 81% of them still had an A1c of 7% or higher.

Why does it stall? Are patients scared of it? Are their doctors? Does anyone even mention that the dose is supposed to go up?

The honest answer is a little of each.

Patients worry about going low, and so do their doctors. In one large international survey, three out of four physicians said they’d treat more aggressively if not for that fear. I can’t blame them. A bad low is frightening, and no doctor wants to be the reason for one.

The patients, meanwhile, are often in the dark. In another survey, as many as 42% didn’t know the dose was supposed to climb at all, and it’s hard to follow a rule nobody explained. It doesn’t help that most people with diabetes are seen in primary care, and there aren’t nearly enough endocrinologists to go around.

Who was going to give that rule the steady attention it needed? A team in Israel had spent years teaching software to dose insulin, and how they got there is one of my favorite stories in Israeli medicine.

Schneider Children’s Brought Engineers Into the Clinic

It begins in 2007 at Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, where Prof. Moshe Phillip, today DreaMed’s chairman, ran the diabetes institute. In the words of Eran Atlas, the engineer who would go on to co-found DreaMed with him and run it as CEO, “His vision was to bring in technological people to try to develop solutions to help the needs of people with diabetes.”

Atlas was one of those technological people, recruited as a Tel Aviv University biomedical engineering student. He once summed up what followed in a single line: “Seven years of my career was spent in the hospital.” Seven years in a hospital, and he wasn’t even the patient.

Around him, the team was taking shape. Dr. Revital Nimri became the project’s senior investigator, and Ido Mueller worked at Schneider’s diabetes technology center. Both are DreaMed co-founders too, Nimri as chief medical R&D officer and Mueller as algorithm and data director.

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Richet’s choice of word is fascinating, because in a severe allergy the danger comes from the immune system itself, the part of us that’s supposed to protect us. It overreacts to a food, a sting or a medicine, and it moves fast. In 1992, Britain began a register of every fatal allergic reaction it could trace, and when Dr. Richard Pumphrey studied it, he found the median time to the heart or breathing stopping was 30 minutes for food, 15 for an insect sting and 5 for a drug. He also found that among the people who died, epinephrine had been given before that moment in only 14% of cases.

It’s a strange number, because by then the medicine was nearly a century old. Epinephrine, the drug most people know as adrenaline, was first isolated in pure form in 1901, the same year Richet sailed. The hard part has always been getting it into a person in time. For a long time, as Mary Ellen Bowden explains in her lovely history of the pen for the Science History Institute, treatment meant “drawing up and measuring epinephrine from a vial,” which asks a frightened person to find the vial, fill a syringe with the right amount and inject it, all inside the minutes Pumphrey measured.

The Pen Was First Built for Soldiers

During the Cold War, the U.S. military wanted a way for troops to inject themselves quickly with an antidote to nerve gas, and an engineer named Sheldon Kaplan built them a pen that did it. Then, in Bowden’s words, Kaplan “recognized that modifications in the pen could turn it into a lifesaver for civilians.” A soldier under a gas attack and a person whose throat is swelling need the same thing, a full dose measured in advance and delivered in seconds by someone who isn’t a nurse. The FDA approved his EpiPen in 1987, and its maker taught a generation to use it with a rhyme, blue to the sky, orange to the thigh. The National Inventors Hall of Fame credits it with saving countless lives. “Shel was proud to know that his invention had affected tens of millions of people, had kept them alive,” his wife, Sheila, said.

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The IDF was doing it on purpose. It confirmed it was disrupting GPS “in a proactive manner for various operational needs,” and the point was to stop Hamas and Hezbollah from steering drones into Israel by satellite. In some places it drowned the signal out, which is jamming, and in others it faked it, which is how phones in the north ended up at Beirut’s airport. It didn’t end with that winter. In April 2026, with a temporary ceasefire in place, the IDF was still jamming GPS across central Israel to protect against drone attacks.

The trouble is that our soldiers fly drones too, and theirs need the same satellites. In Gaza, small quadcopters gave the IDF’s smaller units aerial reconnaissance, a look at what’s ahead before soldiers get there. Military officials told the Wall Street Journal in December 2023 that in an area that crowded, fortified and booby-trapped, the drones “have played an essential role in minimizing their casualties.” The drone looks first so our sons and daughters don’t have to.

So what happens to that drone when the sky is full of jamming? Hamas was one problem. The man whose company was trying to keep those drones flying says the bigger one came from our side. “The biggest problem we had in Israel was not ‘red’ jamming from the enemy, but it was ‘blue’ by the IDF,” Omer Sharar told Breaking Defense in July 2025.

How do you blind the enemy’s drones without blinding your own? Sharar’s company, infiniDome, had been working on a version of that question long before the war, and it didn’t start with drones at all. It started with clocks.

A $50 Jammer Could Knock Out a $10,000 Clock

Sharar spent more than 10 years as a software systems engineer, and the product that got him into this was a GPS-based time server, the kind of clock a bank or a phone network uses to keep its computers in step. “One of my largest customers back then asked me, ‘How well does your solution cope, or bounce back from being jammed?’” Sharar went and found out. “I realized that I could buy a GPS jammer for $50 that ‘kills’ a $10,000 GPS-based time server from 100m away.”

The anti-jamming gear that existed had been built for something much bigger. Israel’s large defense companies made it, and Sharar has nothing against them. He calls Elbit and IAI “great companies” whose systems are “great for the protection of fighter jets, helicopters, and $30M UAVs.” For anything small, he found them “almost entirely irrelevant” because of their size and weight. Systems like those, he told Breaking Defense, were built “when weight and size and power consumption and price don’t matter.” Even today, IAI’s compact version of its ADA system puts its electronics and four antennas into one unit that weighs under 1.3 kilograms.

So in 2016 Sharar founded the company, then called GPSdome, with two founding partners, Moshe Kaplan, its chief technology officer, and Ehud Sharar. His way of describing the goal is “Come to a knife fight with a knife and not with a bazooka.” The first customers were truckers. In 2018 the company demonstrated a jam-protected tracker for truck fleet managers in Mexico, where, as Sharar puts it, “the cartels’ modus operandi is basically using GPS jammers to make trucks disappear.” By 2019 there was a 150-gram version light enough to fly on a small drone.

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Roguin and Bartal write plainly that these are self-reported cases, that the numbers are small and that a direct link is hard to prove. In the same article they conclude that protecting the head seems logical, although proof is lacking.

Beyond the tumors, the everyday cost of that room is well documented and just as grim. Interventionalists carry six times the general population’s risk of cataracts and three times its risk of malignancy, which is why they work wrapped in lead aprons, and the lead has a cost of its own. In a 2023 survey by the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions, 66% reported musculoskeletal pain from wearing it and 60% reported at least one orthopedic injury.

The newest way out of that room was built in Israel. Microbot Medical, a company founded in Israel in 2010 on technology from a Technion robotics lab, built LIBERTY, a single-use robot that drives the wire while the doctor steers from a remote control, away from the patient’s side. The FDA cleared it in September 2025 as what the company describes as the first FDA-cleared single-use, remotely operated robotic system for peripheral endovascular procedures, and two months later Emory University Hospital in Atlanta became the first hospital in the world to adopt it for patient care.

Robots that let a doctor steer from a distance have existed since 2012. So why were most of these doctors still standing at the table more than a decade later? Why would a robot built to be used once be the one to reach them? To answer both, we have to go back to where this corner of medicine began, and to what happened to the robots that came first.

Threading a Wire Through a Living Person

In 1953, a Swedish radiologist named Sven Ivar Seldinger published a technique that used a flexible wire to guide a catheter into a blood vessel, a safe way in without cutting the vessel open. On January 16, 1964, Dr. Charles Dotter at what is now Oregon Health & Science University treated an 82-year-old woman whose leg was starved of blood, painful and gangrenous, and who refused to have it amputated. Through a puncture in the skin, he widened a tight narrowing in the main artery of her thigh from the inside. The artery stayed open for the rest of her life, about two and a half years, and Dotter is remembered as the father of interventional radiology.

What Dotter started is now routine. A peripheral endovascular procedure begins with a pinhole in an artery, usually at the wrist or the groin. Through it the doctor threads a wire thinner than a strand of spaghetti and steers it through the blood vessels to wherever the problem is. From that little highway they can open a blocked artery in a leg, cut off the blood supply to a tumor, shrink an enlarged prostate or stop internal bleeding, with no scalpel, no open surgery and often no overnight stay. It is a remarkable corner of medicine.

The catch is that nobody can see a blood vessel with their eyes. The whole procedure runs under live X-ray, with the doctor watching a screen and guiding the wire by hand, standing at the patient’s side for the entire case. The patient takes that dose for one procedure, while the doctor takes it case after case over an entire career.

Dentists solved their version of this problem generations ago by simply leaving the room; they drape the lead blanket over the patient, step behind the wall and press the button from there, for one picture lasting a fraction of a second. For nearly half a century after Dotter, the doctor threading a wire through a living person had no such door. Their hands had to be at the table.

The First Robots Came in 2012

The first doors opened in the summer of 2012, and one of them was Israeli. Corindus began in a Technion incubator, co-founded by Prof. Rafael Beyar, a Technion interventional cardiologist who went on to lead Rambam Medical Center, and Technion graduate Tal Wenderow, its first CEO. In July 2012 the FDA cleared its CorPath 200, the first robotic system for coronary stent procedures, with the doctor seated at a lead-lined station out of the X-ray field, and in the company’s PRECISE trial the robot cut the operator’s radiation exposure by 95%. Weeks earlier the FDA had cleared Hansen Medical’s Magellan, a robotic catheter system for the peripheral arteries, with the physician seated at a remote workstation away from the radiation source.

The robots worked, but they were large installed systems, and few hospitals brought them in. Siemens Healthineers bought Corindus in 2019, and in 2023 it stopped selling the robot into cardiology, citing disappointing adoption. Dr. Ripal Gandhi of Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute, quoted on Microbot’s site, says he had done more than 100 robotic cases “using larger bulky capital equipment” before LIBERTY caught his eye. For most interventionalists, the door stayed shut.

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Microbot Made the Robot Small

The second generation also came out of the Technion. Microbot’s founders included Harel Gadot, a marketing executive from Johnson & Johnson’s medical device businesses, and Prof. Moshe Shoham, who ran the robotics laboratory at the Technion. Shoham’s work had already produced Mazor Robotics, whose robot guides spine surgeons, and he later co-founded ForSight Robotics, the cataract-surgery robot readers of this series have already met. Microbot’s first technology, licensed exclusively from the Technion, was fascinating on its own terms: a crawling micro-robot about a millimeter across, built to travel inside the body. For years the company worked on a self-cleaning shunt for hydrocephalus, the condition people call water on the brain. The shunt never became the product. In December 2019 the company announced something simpler, a robot designed, in its own words, to “reduce radiation exposure and physical strain to the physician.”

Microbot’s engineers, Hebrew University graduate Eran Cohen among the inventors, shrank the robot into a single-use unit, so every procedure starts with a new one. A small robotic drive mounts on an arm at the table and grips the guidewire and catheter. The doctor holds a remote control and can sit across the room. The company’s cleared language states LIBERTY is intended for the remote delivery and manipulation of guidewires and catheters, to facilitate navigation to anatomical targets in the peripheral vasculature. That means the robot’s motorized grip moves the wire and catheter on the doctor’s command, doing with motors what gloved fingers used to do, and it works with the wires and catheters the hospital already stocks.

The breakthrough turned out to be unglamorous. Harel Gadot describes it as “creating a whole new surgical robotic category,” and the new category is the disposable robot, built around a mission the company states plainly, to put patient care first and “enable access to advanced care anytime, anywhere.” They didn’t build a smarter machine, they built a smaller one, the kind an ordinary hospital can actually use. Tal Wenderow, Corindus’s first CEO, now sits on Microbot’s board.

Every Wire Reached Its Target

Before the FDA would act, LIBERTY went through a pivotal trial, the study meant to carry a device to the agency. It was called ACCESS-PVI, it enrolled 20 patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Baptist Hospital of Miami and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Dr. Francois Cornelis of Memorial Sloan Kettering presented the results at the Society of Interventional Radiology’s 2025 meeting. The study’s conclusion, as Microbot publishes it, is that steering guidewires and catheters by remote control “using a miniaturized, disposable system was feasible and successful in all cases, minimizing radiation exposure for the operator while maintaining a desirable safety profile.” No adverse device events were reported, and the radiation reaching the operator was 92% lower than the trial’s control measurement.

The 92% is for the person Prof. Roguin was worried about. The FDA granted 510(k) clearance, its green light to market the device in the United States, on September 8, 2025, and the robot went to work in American interventional radiology suites. Emory planned to use it to cut off the blood supply to liver tumors, uterine fibroids and enlarged prostates, and among the cases done with LIBERTY so far is what the company believes was the world’s first robotic prostatic artery embolization, the procedure that shrinks an enlarged prostate by blocking the arteries that feed it.

The Doctor Still Does the Procedure

LIBERTY is a navigation tool. The physician performs the procedure through it and makes every decision, or as the company puts it on its own site, “You are in command, even from across the room.” Its FDA clearance covers the peripheral vasculature, the blood vessels outside the heart and the brain, and the company states plainly that it is not intended for coronary or neurointerventional procedures, so nobody’s heart attack or stroke is being treated through this system today. The 92% is the operator’s exposure measured against a control in 20 patients, not the patient’s dose, which still depends on the imaging each case requires. Twenty patients is a beginning, and the long-term record will be written in hospitals over the coming years. If you or someone you love is headed for a vascular procedure, the robot isn’t the question to bring to the appointment. Ask your doctor what’s right for the case, and let the interventionalist worry about where they get to sit.

Which brings me back to Prof. Roguin’s list. The best advice he and Dr. Bartal could offer their colleagues in 2016 was head protection that seems logical although proof is lacking, an honest sentence and a sad one, because it assumed the room would stay as it was and the people in it would carry more lead. Three years later, Microbot announced a robot built on a different assumption, that the way out had to fit into the rooms doctors already work in. Personally, I find the whole story very Israeli. A cardiologist at Rambam counted what the scatter was costing the healers, Rambam’s own director general had co-founded one of the first robots to pull them out of it, a company born of a Technion lab built the disposable one, and underneath all of it is the conviction Israeli medicine keeps acting on, that every life in the room counts, the one on the table and the one standing beside it.

Since 2012, robotic help in these procedures has mostly stayed in the few hospitals willing to install a large machine. That is starting to change. In May 2026 Israel’s Ministry of Health registered LIBERTY, an Israeli distributor has signed on to bring it to hospitals here, and Microbot expects European approval by early 2027. I think a robot built to be used once is how this kind of care finally reaches the hospitals the big machines never did. When it does, the doctors who heal us will work in a safer room, and more patients will get the care Charles Dotter started with one woman’s leg in 1964. An Israeli team is building that future, and LIBERTY is already on its way home to the doctors in our own cath labs.

To the Israeli engineers who looked at the person standing beside the table and decided they deserved protecting too, thank you.

Built in Israel. For everyone.

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Nothing in this piece is medical advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to seek, avoid or stop any treatment. Talk to your physician about which treatments are appropriate for your situation.

This past Saturday night a Palestinian flag went up in Toulouse, on the statue of Joan of Arc, the 17-year-old who broke the English siege of Orléans in 1429 and was burned for it two years later at Rouen by a French bishop working for the other side. Somebody climbed the statue, pulled a yellow vest over her head and tied the flag to her, and Éric Zemmour posted the picture with a caption: “Jeanne d’Arc voilée au côté d’un drapeau palestinien.” Joan of Arc, veiled, beside a Palestinian flag. Nobody had invaded anything. Nobody had to. The people who put it there had walked over from a French march, and so had the young man who, once the police had pushed the rioters back, climbed up after them, took the vest off her and threw the flag on the ground.

The march that day was about the price of fuel. That’s where the call started, with the yellow vests and the pump price, and it spread to the lycées, where the students’ complaint was buildings falling apart and not enough teachers in them. About 550,000 people walked out across France, 800,000 by the unions’ count, and by Sunday the count was 2,397 people under arrest and 997 police and gendarmes hurt, seven of them seriously. Nobody had marched for Gaza, and the flag was there anyway.

So there are four things to understand. What was that flag doing at a march about the price of fuel? What does the state Emmanuel Macron recognized last September look like when somebody builds it, and has anybody built one? Who taught the people carrying the flag that in France it works? Why does it always end with the Jews, and what did the Jews do about it the last time? To answer them we have to go back to Napoleon, then to a January morning in Paris in 1895, then to Cairo in 1969 and Gaza in 2005, and then forward to a town hall in Saint-Denis last September.

A French Riot Always Ends Up About the Jews

France once asked the Jews, formally and in writing, whether they were French. In 1806 Napoleon put 12 questions to an assembly of Jewish notables, and the fourth was the one he cared about: “Will the French people be esteemed by the Jews as strangers or as brethren?” The rabbis he convened as a Grand Sanhedrin in February 1807 answered as law that a Jew must regard his French countrymen as brothers and “shall love and defend” the country “when called upon.” The Jews of France kept that promise for 200 years. France’s half of it lasted 88.

In the autumn of 1894 a Jewish captain on the French general staff, Alfred Dreyfus, who’d done exactly what the Sanhedrin promised, was arrested for selling secrets to Germany. He hadn’t. On the morning of Jan. 5, 1895, the army stripped him of his rank in the courtyard of the École Militaire, with a crowd packed against the railings outside. A noncommissioned officer tore the epaulettes off his uniform and broke his sword over his knee, and Dreyfus shouted that he was innocent and “Vive la France.” The crowd shouted “Death to the traitor,” and some of it shouted “Death to the Jews.”

Three years later the whole country took up the second chant. On Jan. 13, 1898, Émile Zola published “J’accuse,” and in the weeks after it crowds came out against Jews in Lunéville, Béziers, Nantes, Marseille, Sedan and Rodez, among many other towns, and paraded effigies of Dreyfus and Zola through the streets. The historian Stephen Wilson went through the police and prefecture reports town by town in 1973 and found that the wave broke within days of “J’accuse,” weeks before Zola himself went on trial. In French Algeria, between Jan. 18 and 24, 1898, the mobs in Algiers, Blida and Mostaganem went after the Jews for a week, and more than 700 people were convicted for it afterward. The argument was about the honor of the army, and the shops that got smashed belonged to Jews.

A correspondent for a Vienna newspaper had been at the École Militaire that morning in 1895. He was a playwright by ambition, a journalist by trade and a Jew who’d believed, like most educated Jews in Europe, that the Jews’ problem would be solved by Europe growing up. Four years later, in an essay he wrote for an American magazine, he said the crowd had cried “Death to the Jews,” and that “what made me a Zionist was the Dreyfus trial.” In 1896 he published a short book saying the Jews needed a country of their own. In 1897 he convened the first Zionist Congress. His name was Theodor Herzl, and he stopped asking Europe to be fair to the Jews and went home and wrote a country instead. I’m writing this from it.

The Palestinian State Has Been Built Twice, and Both Times It Looked Like This

Macron recognized a Palestinian state last September as if nobody had ever seen one. Two have been built. The first was built in Lebanon, by invitation, with a signature. On Nov. 2, 1969, in Cairo, the commander of the Lebanese army signed an agreement with Yasser Arafat handing the 16 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and the 300,000 people in them, from the Lebanese army to the PLO, and granting the PLO the right to wage its war against Israel from Lebanese soil. The men who signed were Christians running a Christian-led state. Within a few years the PLO was running a state inside their state. In April 1975 the war between the PLO and the Christians began, it went on for 15 years, and Lebanon’s parliament got around to annulling the Cairo Agreement in May 1987, long after there was anything left to annul it for.

The second was built in Gaza, by Israel, with a bulldozer. In 2005 Israel pulled every soldier and all 21 of its communities out of the Gaza Strip and handed the Palestinians the only thing they’d ever asked the world for, land with no Jews on it and nobody telling them what to do. They voted for Hamas in January 2006, Hamas shot its way to sole control of the Strip in June 2007, and for 16 years Gaza was a Palestinian state in everything but the UN seat, with its own government, its own army, its own border with Egypt and its own foreign policy. On Oct. 7, 2023, that state came across the fence and murdered about 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. That’s the second prototype. Macron recognized the product 23 months after the demonstration.

The two Arab states that threw the prototype out are the ones still standing. Jordan tried it for three years. By September 1970 the PLO’s people had blown up three hijacked airliners in the Jordanian desert and shot at the king’s motorcade twice, and King Hussein sent the army in and pushed them out, to Lebanon, where the Cairo Agreement was waiting. Kuwait hosted 357,000 Palestinians until Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein in 1990, and after the liberation in 1991 it expelled most of them, hundreds of thousands of people, the bulk of them in a matter of weeks that spring. A country does three things or it isn’t a country. It decides who comes in. It decides under which flag. It applies its own law to the people who arrive, and when they break it and aren’t citizens, it sends them home. Jordan and Kuwait did all three. Lebanon did none of them, and in the end it took the Israeli army, in 1982, to put the PLO on ships to Tunis. Israel did all three in Gaza until 2005 and has been paying since the day it stopped.

Europe Ordered One Anyway, and France Put It on Its Town Halls

Now the other date. On Sept. 22 of last year, at the UN, Macron said: “I declare that France today recognizes the State of Palestine.” The speech was a set of instructions to Israel. “The time has come to stop the war, the bombardment of Gaza, the massacres and the flight of civilians.” “Nothing, nothing justifies continuing the war in Gaza any longer.” France would set its cooperation with Israel “based on the measures Israel takes to end the war.” “We know that the law must always prevail over force.” Hamas was still holding Israeli hostages that day. He said so himself, as the reason France wouldn’t open an embassy yet. He was recognizing the state that had done Oct. 7 while it still held the people it took on Oct. 7.

He wasn’t alone, which is the point. Ireland, Spain and Norway had recognized the state on May 28, 2024, seven months after the massacre. Britain, Canada and Australia did it the day before Macron, and Keir Starmer counted “over 150 countries” that had done the same. Ireland went on to pass a law on July 23 of this year banning goods from Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Netanyahu answered them in one sentence: “there will be no Palestinian state west of the Jordan,” and they were “giving a huge reward to terrorism.” They recognized it anyway. Europe had watched the Lebanon prototype and the Gaza prototype and placed an order for a third, and nobody in Europe gave the flag a camp or a gun. They gave it something Lebanon never did. They made it respectable.

Here’s the part of Sept. 22 that got a paragraph outside France. That same Monday, 52 French communes flew the Palestinian flag from their town halls. The interior minister at the time, Bruno Retailleau, had told the prefects to stop them, on the grounds that public buildings are neutral, that foreign policy belongs to the state and that the flag risked serious disorder, “troubles graves,” in the streets. The mayors ignored him. Saint-Denis hung it beside the French and European flags. Malakoff kept it up after a first court order and on the Monday was told to take it down or pay 150 euros a day. The mayor of Corbeil-Essonnes announced he’d hand out 1,000 of them. The Socialist leader, Olivier Faure, whose idea it was, complained that the minister was going after mayors “qui font leur devoir de solidarité,” who are doing their duty of solidarity. Not one of them lost his office over it.

That’s what the French state taught last September, and it answers the third question. In France this is the one flag you can’t be punished for. Fly it on a public building against the law and you’re doing your duty. Carry it to a school blockade and you can climb the barricade, go for a woman holding an Israeli flag, tear it out of her hands and call her a Nazi, which is what happened at the Sciences Po blockade on boulevard Saint-Germain on this year’s Oct. 7, and it took a France Unbowed deputy, Thomas Portes, to pull him off her. The day before, Israel’s diaspora minister had warned Paris that some of the anniversary protests “openly celebrate the massacre.” Ten days later the flag was in Marseille’s city hall.

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This Weekend France Got the Working Model

In Marseille the crowd forced its way into the Hôtel de Ville shouting “C’est la Révolution, on prend la Bastille,” it’s the Revolution, we’re taking the Bastille, some of them carrying Palestinian flags, and threw a bust of Marianne to the floor. In Paris they went at the monument to the Republic itself, the bronze Marianne on Place de la République, and on Sunday Parisians were photographing what was left of its base. In Limoges a crowd broke into the city hall with the staff and the public still inside, the prefect says, and the building, which dates from 1883, burned until the roof came down. He says the fire was set. In Lyon the tourist office was torched. Shops were looted in Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Bordeaux. One man collapsed and died on boulevard Magenta. A 17-year-old in Saint-Étienne lost most of a hand. On Sunday afternoon about 1,000 people were back at République on a social-media call to “continue the movement,” burning bicycles on rue Beaurepaire until the CRS 8 came in. The same week students in Brussels and Liège, and in Turin and Milan, fought police with stones, bottles and fireworks, in a continent that’s abolished the borders between them.

If you’re not Jewish and you’ve decided this is somebody else’s problem, here’s what the men who run France, and the ones who want to, said about their own country this weekend. Retailleau, on Sunday: “Ce que la France vit depuis samedi n’est plus un débordement. C’est l’autorité de l’État qui est défiée, partout, en même temps.” What France has been living through since Saturday is no longer a protest getting out of hand. It’s the authority of the state being defied, everywhere, at once. Jordan Bardella, who may be the next president: “La France a été humiliée hier soir,” France was humiliated last night, and “l’ordre n’existe plus en France,” order no longer exists in France. Macron himself, Sunday night, promised to hold accountable those who “sought to bring down the Republic.” That’s the French state describing a siege of itself, in its own vocabulary, and it’s also a description of Beirut in 1975 and Gaza in 2007. The product works the same everywhere it’s installed.

Where it came from isn’t a mystery to anyone in France. The protests that became Saturday turned violent at the start of October in Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers and Pantin, in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the French statistics office counts a third of the population as immigrants and another third as their children. The flags in the crowds were “algériens et palestiniens,” Algerian and Palestinian, in the words of the researcher Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, and they wore keffiyehs. Sarah Knafo put the answer in two sentences on Sunday, “Les étrangers, on les expulse. Les casseurs, on les enferme,” the foreigners we expel, the rioters we lock up, which is what Jordan and Kuwait did, and Donald Trump told France to close its borders, which is what Lebanon never managed. The French know where the riots started and whose flags were in the crowd. The only people in France pretending not to know are the ones who recognized the flag, and none of them can argue with Lebanon or Gaza. The flag now shows up at French fires that have nothing to do with it, because France taught the people holding it that it works, and a country where that’s true is under siege whether or not its president uses the word.

Then France answered, the way a state answers when the city hall is its own. The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said “the price will be steep, all across the country,” and by Sunday, “Il est temps de choisir son camp,” it’s time to choose your side. The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, wrote that the right to protest is fundamental and that “deliberately and collectively sowing disorder through violence is not.” In Paris the prosecutor had 517 people in custody by morning, 171 of them minors, which in Macron’s vocabulary for Gaza would be children. France was right to do all of it. A country whose city hall is stormed arrests the people who stormed it, and when a thousand of them come back the next afternoon it sends in the CRS 8. That’s what “the law must always prevail over force” means, and it means the same thing in Marseille and in Khan Yunis. France knew the rule the whole time and applied it to one country, which wasn’t France. Israel’s only suggestion, borrowed from the recognition speech, would be to recognize the rioters’ state, set France’s cooperation with the Élysée by the measures the Élysée takes to end the violence, and accept two states between Lille and Marseille, with Limoges as the capital of whichever one wants a city hall with no roof.

At 8 on Sunday night Macron went on television, and his first word for the weekend was the one he’d used on TF1 in May of last year for Netanyahu, “What he does is a shame. It’s shameful.” This time it was for France. “Nous ressentons tous ce soir de la colère, de la honte,” we all feel anger tonight, and shame. He named who did it, “factieux issus de groupuscule d’ultra gauche, rejoints par de nombreux délinquants,” seditionists from a far-left cell, joined by plenty of ordinary criminals. He said “ceux qui ont détruit doivent payer, ceux qui ont pillé doivent rembourser,” those who destroyed must pay and those who looted must pay it back, and that “le pays a besoin d’ordre, et pas d’escalade,” the country needs order, not escalation. He said “rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’excuse,” nothing justifies it, nothing excuses it, which is the sentence he built his UN speech on, with Gaza as the object. “Nothing, nothing justifies continuing the war in Gaza any longer.” He named the ultragauche, the delinquents, the police, the shopkeepers, the students and the presidential election in six months. He didn’t name the flag, because he can’t. He recognized it as a state 13 months ago, and there’s no sentence a man can say about his own recognized state hanging off Joan of Arc, so he left it out and talked about prices. A president who can’t say the name of the flag on his own saint has told you who he’s afraid of.

Which brings us back to Joan of Arc.

What was the flag doing at a march about the price of fuel? What it does in France now. It goes where the fire is. What does the state Macron recognized look like when somebody builds it? Like Beirut after 1969, like Gaza after 2005, and this weekend like Limoges, Marseille and Toulouse, with a president saying shame about Gaza and shame about Limoges and nothing about the flag that was tied to Joan of Arc the same night. Who taught the people carrying it that in France it works? The French state, on the day it recognized the flag with the hostages still in the tunnels and let 52 town halls break the law to fly it. The rest of Europe signed the same order and is a few years behind on delivery.

France Has Never Protected Its Jews, and the Jews Have Somewhere to Go

Why does it always end with the Jews? Because it always has, and the record isn’t complicated. In 1895 a Paris crowd shouted “Death to the Jews” at a man being stripped of his rank for a crime he didn’t commit. In 1898 the crowds came out against Jews in dozens of towns over the honor of the army. On July 16 and 17, 1942, 9,000 French policemen arrested 13,152 Jews in Paris, more than 4,000 of them children, and held 7,500 of them for days in a cycling stadium with one working tap on the way to Drancy and Auschwitz, and it took France until 1995 for a president, Jacques Chirac, to say out loud that the occupier had been “assisted by the French, by the French state.” On Jan. 9, 2015, a Friday, a gunman walked into the Hypercacher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes and murdered four Jews doing their Shabbat shopping. This weekend the flag of the cause in whose name Oct. 7 was carried out was tied to Joan of Arc and carried into Marseille’s city hall, and the president of the Republic couldn’t bring himself to mention it. France doesn’t protect its Jews when the crowd comes. It never has.

What the Jews did about it the last time isn’t a mystery either. Herzl stopped asking. After the Hypercacher murders Netanyahu told the Jews of France that “Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home,” and he was right, and it was true in 1895 and it’s true tonight. The Jews of France don’t need a better Macron. They need a plane ticket, and there’s a country at the other end of it that doesn’t recognize that flag as a state and whose parliament voted 68 to 9 that there won’t be one. The rest of Europe doesn’t have a plane ticket. It’s got a border, and about as long as Lebanon had to remember what one is for.

Saturday night the flag was on Joan of Arc in Toulouse, and the only person who did anything about it was the young man who climbed up once the police had pushed the crowd back and took it down. The last time a young man stood in a French crowd and understood what he was hearing, he didn’t climb anything. He went home and wrote, and there’s a country because he did.

Well, Macron. For 13 months you’ve told Israel what a Palestinian state would look like and why we have to accept one on our border. We’ve seen two already, and this weekend you showed us the third. A city hall in Limoges with no roof, Marianne on the floor in Marseille, close to a thousand of your police hurt, Joan of Arc in a yellow vest under a flag you can’t bring yourself to name, and a president who found the word shame for Gaza and for Limoges and spent the rest of the speech on prices and the election. If France is the proof of concept for a Palestinian state, you can have it.

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In March 2026, that door opened a good deal wider. Shamai, working with Prof. Ron Kimmel and Prof. Dvir Aran, published a study in The Lancet Oncology showing that an AI model built at the Technion could read the ordinary stained slide from a breast tumor, along with a few details from the patient’s chart, and estimate where a widely used gene test would place that tumor’s risk of coming back. They tested it on slides from one of the largest breast cancer trials ever run. I’ll say plainly that this one makes me proud. A team at Israel’s oldest university took an idea pathologists had called impossible, built on it for a decade until it reached one of the world’s top cancer journals, and is now trying to bring it to women in countries where that gene test is out of reach

The team is careful about what it built. The paper calls it “a decision-support tool,” and Kimmel says the score is there to support “shared decision making between oncologist and patient.” Shamai wants it to complement the gene tests where they exist and to offer “a practical and scalable alternative where they are not.”

That raises some real questions. If a gene test already exists, why does anyone need another way? How could a slide possibly know what a tumor’s genes know? Most important to patients, can it help a woman and her oncologist decide whether chemotherapy is worth it? To understand all of this, we have to start with the decision itself.

The Hardest Question Comes After the Surgery

Here is the basic picture. The most common kind of early breast cancer is hormone receptor-positive and HER2-negative, meaning it feeds on the body’s own hormones and doesn’t overproduce HER2, a growth signal some targeted drugs attack. It makes up about 70% of breast cancers in American women. After surgery, nearly all of these women go on hormone therapy, and the question that follows is whether to add chemo. For some women it lowers the chance of the cancer coming back. For others it adds side effects, some of them lasting, like nerve damage, early menopause and infertility, and nothing else. Kimmel put it simply: “You don’t want to overtreat or undertreat.”

Gene tests changed that decision. One of them, Oncotype DX, measures 21 genes in the tumor and turns them into a score from 0 to 100. In TAILORx, a National Cancer Institute trial of 10,273 women whose cancer hadn’t reached the lymph nodes, women with middle-range scores were randomly assigned to hormone therapy with or without chemo, and the institute summed up the 2018 results as no chemo benefit for about 70% of women with this type of breast cancer. A later trial, RxPONDER, found that women past menopause with one to three affected lymph nodes and lower scores didn’t benefit either, though younger women did.

So far, so good. Then things get complicated. The tissue has to be sent to the company’s lab, and the results take about two weeks. On Breastcancer.org’s community board, in a thread called “Oncotype wait,” one member wrote, “The waiting for results is torture.” In much of the world the wait isn’t the problem. In low- and middle-income countries, genomic testing reaches fewer than one in 20 patients. Oncologists there work from what they can measure, like tumor size, grade, the lymph nodes and a lab marker of how fast the cells divide, a marker the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s guidelines say, combined with other measures, “may be used” for women past menopause who can’t get a gene test.

That answers the first question. A second way matters because, for most of the world, the first way isn’t there.

The Pathologists Were Wrong About the Door

Shamai didn’t come to this as a doctor. He earned all three of his degrees at the Technion, in electrical engineering and computer science, and his early research ran from geometry to computer models of the human face. Scanning slides at the hospital wasn’t practical, so the team wrote scripts, gathered images from a public tissue library online and built a dataset of more than 5,000 patients. In 2019, JAMA Network Open published what came of it. For at least half the patients, the model read the estrogen receptor about as well as the standard stain. The door could be read from the outside, at least partway.

How? Kimmel likes to explain it with eye color. Nobody needs a DNA test to find out that a person has blue eyes, because the genes show up in the face. “Instead of testing genes,” he says, “we look directly at the tissue.” What exactly the computer sees in that tissue is harder to say, and Shamai is honest about it. By 2023 he was telling the American Technion Society that “the ultimate goal would be to predict the treatment from the H&E images,” using the pathologist’s name for the ordinary stained slide, and in the same article he admitted something I find fascinating: “We and the pathologists do not know how the computer does that.” That’s the answer to the second question, and I respect him for giving it.

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A Landmark Trial Held the Slides

The real test came from TAILORx itself. The trial had already done the hard part, assigning women at random and following them for years, and the Technion team got access to its tissue samples and records, access Shamai calls rare. Slides from 8,284 women were usable. The team trained the model on most of them and set aside 2,407 women it had never seen. On those women it performed comparably to the gene tests in wide use. It doesn’t match the gene test woman by woman, and the paper scores its ability to pick out the women the gene test called high risk at 0.898, on a scale where 1 is perfect and 0.5 is chance. Still, I find it remarkable that a slide the hospital already had can get that close.

That leaves the third question, the one patients care about most, and here the answer is more careful. TAILORx randomized only women in the middle range of the genetic score, so the team worked from that group, with a statistical adjustment for the few the model scored differently. Among women before menopause whom the model rated high risk, the paper reports a clear benefit from chemo. Among women past menopause whom it rated low risk, the benefit was absent. These are looks back at subgroups of a trial that assigned treatment by the genetic score, not the AI’s, so they show where new studies should look and don’t settle anything. I’d also keep in mind a question the NCI raised about TAILORx’s younger women, whether part of chemo’s benefit for them comes from chemo bringing on menopause. Nobody can answer that from these numbers.

The team then ran the model on 5,497 more patients from Israel, the United States and Australia, including slides from Carmel, Sheba and HaEmek here at home, and reports that it held up. I like knowing that slides from Israeli hospitals helped check a tool meant for women in India.

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No Oncologist Can Order It Yet

The strongest objections deserve real room, and the authors raise most of them themselves. The model has no name in the paper and isn’t in any treatment guideline, and the team is still taking steps toward clinical use. The study looked back at existing data, so prospective studies, which follow women forward, come next. Women whose cancer reached the lymph nodes still need randomized validation. Most important for the team’s own goal, patients from poorer countries are underrepresented, and the tool depends on accurate receptor testing, which those hospitals don’t always have. A hospital also needs a slide scanner and an internet connection, and in the study each outside site calibrated the model on 100 of its own patients first. An oncologist in Mumbai, Dr. Amol Akhade of Fortis Hospital, put the caution plainly when The Week asked him about AI tools for this decision in May 2026. In India, he said, “we are still not yet in that zone where we can use AI to treat.”

The Technion team isn’t alone, either. The Technion says no AI model like it had been validated in a large randomized trial before. The American company Artera has since won FDA clearance for a breast tool that estimates the risk of the cancer spreading and says it has chemo data from randomized trials, and Ataraxis has announced its own TAILORx analysis. The sharpest outside comment so far comes from that rival camp. A September 2026 preprint from NYU Langone and Ataraxis researchers, whose authors include Dr. Joseph Sparano, TAILORx’s lead investigator and also a co-author of the Technion paper, describes the Technion model as one trained “to predict RS scores rather than independent chemotherapy benefit,” meaning the gene test’s score. Twelve of its authors hold equity in Ataraxis, and it hasn’t been peer reviewed. It’s still a fair point, and it matches what the Technion paper itself shows. Which of these tools reaches clinics first, and which works best where, nobody knows yet.

If you or someone you love is deciding about chemo now, this tool isn’t available, and the gene tests in use today are proven. That conversation belongs with the oncologist.

The Technion Was Building Israel Before There Was an Israel

None of this came out of nowhere. The Technion’s cornerstone was laid in 1912, 36 years before the state, and its graduates went on to design Israel’s railroads, build its water carrier and electrical grid, and develop Iron Dome. Cancer patients already carry part of its story. In 2004, two of its professors, Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Irwin Rose for discovering how cells tag damaged proteins for destruction, work that led to the drug Velcade for multiple myeloma.

Protecting human life is what Israel is all about, and the Technion shows it plainly. A school that spent a century building the country is now sending its work outward. The team is preparing trials in Brazil and India, where access to the gene test is limited. Shamai says large hospitals in India have invited him to run year-long trials, and he wants the tool used in Israel and in developing countries alike. The researchers plan to start a company, which Shamai is calling Phenotix, to carry it into everyday care.

So back to the closed door. A pathologist looked at an ordinary slide and saw no way in, and a Technion engineer spent about 10 years showing that some of what’s behind it can be read from the outside. Whether it can be read well enough to guide chemo, for women around the world, is what the next trials will tell us. Kimmel has been clear about where the doctor stands in all this. In 2022 he called AI a powerful tool in doctors’ hands and added, “I do not think it can, or should, replace the human doctor.”

Personally, I hope they get it into clinics. If they do, an oncologist in India or Brazil, or here in Israel, may one day have one more honest piece of information to bring to that conversation with her patient, and it will have been built in Israel.

To every woman who has sat through that two-week wait, or is sitting through it now, we wish you a full recovery.

Built in Israel. For everyone.

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Nothing in this piece is medical advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to seek, avoid or stop any treatment. Talk to your physician about which treatments are appropriate for your situation.

Which is why friendly fire is so painful for an army to talk about. It takes both of those values and turns them inside out. An Israeli startup called InTact was founded to stop it, and in its company profile it sums up its goal in one sentence: to “increase the soldiers’ confidence and save lives.”

Save lives, of course. But confidence?

It’s an odd word to find in a mission statement about friendly fire. What does a soldier’s confidence have to do with a bullet from his own side? Why, with all the technology armies carry today, is the soldier on foot still mostly on his own when it comes to knowing who’s in front of him? Why would anyone build a soldier’s radio on frequencies that barely make it a kilometer? To understand any of this, we need to go back to a January night in the Judean Desert.

Two Patrols Went Looking for the Same Thieves

On the night of Jan. 12, 2022, at the Nabi Musa training base in the eastern Judean Desert, two company commanders from Egoz, one of the IDF’s elite commando units, went out on patrol. Someone had stolen night-vision goggles from the base’s tents the night before, and they were looking for whoever took them. They were Maj. Ofek Aharon, 28, and Maj. Itamar Elharar, 26. Another officer from the same unit went out on a patrol of his own, for the same reason. Neither patrol knew about the other.

Around 11 p.m., Aharon and Elharar spotted a figure, called for him to halt and fired into the air, which is exactly what the procedure tells you to do. The officer patrolling alone heard the noise, turned around and saw armed men in the dark. He took them for terrorists and felt threatened. He fired, and both men were killed.

At Ofek’s grave, his father, Eli, cried out, “You got Ofek healthy and sound and I got him in a coffin.” Itamar had been married to Orr for less than two years. “The last three years with you have been the happiest of my life,” she said at his funeral.

This is where confidence comes in, at least as I read it. InTact’s website lists what happens to a force that can’t tell friend from foe. Soldiers hesitate, because “operators delay engagement when identity is uncertain.” Units slow down to avoid mistakes. Or someone gets it wrong, which the company calls “the most preventable combat loss.” The officer at Nabi Musa didn’t hesitate. A soldier who knows the man in his sights is one of his own doesn’t have to guess in either direction, and that’s how the first half of InTact’s sentence becomes the second.

Nabi Musa was a training base, not a war. In war it’s worse. The IDF, which calls a unit a family whose soldiers get through the hard times “by looking out for one another,” also publishes the hardest numbers it has. By its count for the first year of the war, 28 soldiers were killed by friendly fire. In Gaza, soldiers were mistaken for the enemy in airstrikes, tank shelling and gunfire, and the army’s own assessment pointed to how many forces were packed into Gaza and how hard it was for them to communicate.

For Meir Rapaport, InTact’s CEO, all of this is personal. He founded the company with Tomer Nissimyan in 2022, and in a podcast interview he talked about the friends he lost to friendly fire and the roughly decade-long road that led to InTact. He hasn’t said publicly who they were. The company’s own page puts its founding plainly. It was built on “a single conviction: the warfighter deserves a reliable way to identify friendly forces in the chaos of modern combat.”

The U.S. Army Tried This on a Rifle and Shelved It

Israel was hardly the first army to face this. After the 1991 Gulf War, the Pentagon found that 35 of the 148 Americans killed in action had been hit by American fire. That’s nearly 1 in 4, and the U.S. Army went to work.

Its first answer was for tanks, the Battlefield Combat Identification System (the military has never been known for its names). When a gunner fired his laser rangefinder at a target, a radio on his sight sent a coded question down the same line of sight, and a friendly vehicle answered. It was a good idea. Ask the question at the exact moment, and in the exact direction, that someone is about to pull the trigger. The Army fielded 1,200 of them in 1999, at an estimated $100,000 per installation, and production ended in 2003 because of the cost.

Less well known is that the Army also tried it on a rifle. In 1997 it hired Motorola, Hughes and Lockheed Martin to build a version for the foot soldier. Motorola’s put an 11-ounce box on the rifle that fired an invisible laser at the target, and a unit on a friendly soldier’s helmet answered by radio, at about the power of a low-power cellphone. A later Army version of the same idea, a laser on the weapon and a radio transponder on the helmet, was canceled in the 2002 budget to pay for other Army priorities. American engineers who patented their own versions worried that anything a soldier broadcasts can give him away, and that the enemy could turn a captured device against him.

So the soldier on foot mostly got infrared patches, which glow in night-vision goggles, the enemy’s included. In 2020 the Army was still asking industry for help, after its own soldiers said in surveys that they needed “an enhanced Individual Friend or Foe (IFF) capability for dismounted soldiers.” Israelis tried too. In 2016 a company called SafeShoot, headed by Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Nadan, presented a box for any weapon that used GPS, radio and motion sensors to warn a shooter that friendly troops were in his line of fire. GPS, however, can be jammed. Rapaport has described his own team walking that same road, from GPS to infrared and finally to millimeter-wave radio.

Oxygen Turned Out to Be the Lock

This is the part I find fascinating.

Millimeter waves sit far above the radio your car plays, and up there the air starts to get in the way. Around 60 gigahertz, the oxygen in the air absorbs the signal, about 15 decibels every kilometer, which means roughly 97% of it is gone after 1 kilometer from the air alone. That’s why wireless networks use the band only for short hops, and it’s also why engineers have long prized it for secrets. The FCC’s own paper on the band notes its use by the intelligence community for high-security communications. A signal that fades out that fast can’t be overheard from the next hill. InTact’s chip partner, Peraso, a California company listed on Nasdaq, makes 60-gigahertz chips, and it announced in March 2026 that InTact had chosen them for its drone identification system after more than two years of working together.

What InTact did was put that kind of signal on a soldier’s rifle. Its website lays out the handshake in three steps. The interrogator on the weapon sends a coded signal toward the target, “directional, low-power, and with stealthy features.” The responder the friendly soldier wears sends back an encrypted answer, in effect a password. The shooter has the result “within milliseconds,” and on the counter-drone version the company describes it as haptic feedback, a buzz the operator feels. The rifle unit weighs 6.7 ounces, a little more than half of Motorola’s box. It needs no GPS, no network and “no centralized platform,” and the company says it has several independent ways to make sure “a captured device can’t be used by the enemy,” the same worry the American engineers wrote about. It calls the signal “extremely difficult to intercept or jam.”

What the soldier gets is a friend signal. When nothing answers, the company’s own diagram labels the target “unknown,” not “enemy,” just as the American tanks did, and he’s left with the same judgment and rules he had before.

The same family of devices covers tanks and drones. A responder for a drone weighs 37 grams, and a soldier on the ground can check whether the drone overhead is one of ours before anyone shoots it down. The version I keep coming back to is the one for attack drones. Before a strike, the drone scans the target area, and if a friendly soldier’s responder answers from inside it, the operator gets a warning to hold fire. In Gaza, at least one IDF soldier was killed when an attack helicopter fired on a building where soldiers were located.

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An Army Will Ask About Rain, Cost and Dead Batteries

Of course, none of this is proven in public. InTact’s website lists the IDF and the Defense Ministry’s research directorate, known in Israel as MAFAT, under “Trusted By,” and Rapaport said in April 2026 that the system was in IDF field testing. However, neither the IDF nor the ministry has announced it, no test results have been published, and every specification is the company’s own.

The company says its signal works through fog, dust and brush, while independent technical references note that heavy rain adds its own loss at 60 gigahertz. A narrow beam only works when it’s pointed at the right person. A friend whose device has a dead battery, or who isn’t carrying one, gets no protection. The company also hasn’t said what a unit costs, and cost and budgets are what ended both American programs.

Would a device like this have changed that night at Nabi Musa? We can’t know. The general who led the army’s inquiry found serious failures of discipline and coordination in the unit, and two senior officers were barred from command posts. No piece of hardware replaces commanders who know where every one of their patrols is.

A Soldier Who Can Hold His Fire

Which brings us back to InTact’s sentence, to increase the soldiers’ confidence and save lives. A small Israeli team that lost friends to friendly fire picked the problem back up and built a way for one soldier to ask another “are you one of mine?” without anyone else hearing. A soldier who gets that answer can hold his fire with confidence, and his friend gets to go home.

InTact isn’t alone. The Defense Ministry’s director general, Amir Baram, has said Israel went from being known as a cyber nation to a defense-tech nation, with more than 300 startups working with MAFAT and more than 130 of them pulled into operations during this war. In the first half of 2026, the ministry’s orders to defense startups came to about $330 million, double the year before.

Personally, I think InTact will get there. When it does, it won’t stay in Israel. American chips are already inside its drone system, and every army in the world has families waiting up at night for their kids to come home.

May the memory of Maj. Itamar Elharar and Maj. Ofek Aharon be a blessing.

Built in Israel. For everyone.

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I thought about those eagles on Oct. 12, 2026, when Israel Aerospace Industries walked into the American army's annual exposition in Washington and unveiled a system called HawkGuard. At its center is a small, fast drone whose entire job is to fly into hostile drones and knock them out of the sky, with no warhead and no explosives anywhere in the system. The crash is the weapon. Nine years after the Dutch gave up on their eagles, the company that builds the Arrow started manufacturing one.

Three questions follow from that. Why would the house behind the Arrow, a missile that swats ballistic threats out of near-space, bother with a propeller-driven interceptor that works out to a single kilometer? Why would anyone design a weapon and deliberately leave the explosive out of it? Most of all, what happened to the sky over the past three years that made a mechanical bird of prey worth building at all? To understand it, we have to start with what the small drone did to modern war.

A Toy From a Hobby Shop Became the War’s Deadliest Weapon

The weapon that changed everything is called an FPV drone, for first-person view, and it began life as a toy. It’s a racing quadcopter, four rotors and a camera on its nose. The pilot wears goggles and sees what the drone sees. Strap an explosive charge to the frame and you have a guided weapon that costs a few hundred dollars, fits in a backpack and follows a man around a corner. Ukraine’s factories alone can turn out thousands of them a month, and the two armies fly hundreds at each other every day, in numbers nobody imagined four years ago.

The results read like a different century of warfare. The United Nations’ own human rights monitors found that in January 2025, short-range drones killed and wounded more civilians in Ukraine than any other weapon, more than the missiles, more than the artillery that ruled the war’s first year. Volodymyr Zelenskyy says drones now carry out 80% of Ukraine’s battlefield strikes.

This stopped being somebody else’s problem a long time ago. In September 2025, drones closed the airports of Copenhagen and Oslo for a night and grounded more than 50 aircraft. Here at home we learned the lesson in the worst way there is. On Oct. 13, 2024, Hezbollah launched two drones at Israel. Our defenses intercepted one. The other flew on, undetected, past the radars of a country whose skies are watched by Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow, and found the dining hall of a Golani Brigade training base near Binyamina at dinnertime. It killed four soldiers, all of them 19 years old, boys in the middle of infantry training, and wounded about 60 more. No siren sounded. Afterward Hezbollah put out a statement, and its words are worth reading exactly as written: “These drones broke through the Israel defense radars without detection and reached its target at the training camp of the elite Golani Brigade in Binyamina.”

Hezbollah Put Its Drones on a Leash

Until recently, the defender’s playbook against a small drone had three pages. You can shoot it, but hitting a small drone dodging at highway speed with a rifle is mostly luck. You can fire a missile at it, which works and bankrupts you, because the missile costs many times what the drone does, and the attacker’s whole plan is to make you keep paying that price until you can’t. I wrote in July 2026 about Hypnosis, IAI’s system for breaking that arithmetic a smarter way, by lying to an entire swarm’s satellite navigation at once. The third page, jamming, is the one that carried most of this war. A standard FPV drone lives on a radio link to its pilot, so you shout electronic noise over the link, the drone goes blind and it drops. Jammers have downed thousands of drones in Ukraine. For a while, electronic warfare looked like the answer.

Then the enemy did something almost insultingly simple and put the drone on a leash. A fiber-optic drone carries a spool of glass thread about the width of dental floss that unspools behind it for miles, and the pilot’s video and commands travel down the thread, so there is no radio link to jam and no satellite signal to spoof. Russia fielded them first, in 2024, and its elite Rubicon units have used them to hunt HIMARS launchers, the prized American rocket artillery in Ukraine’s arsenal. By now whole stretches of the front are forests webbed over with glass thread, and the standing infantry answer to a drone nothing can jam is a man with a shotgun. One of them reached the city of Kharkiv for the first time on Feb. 25, 2026.

On April 13, 2026, the same weapon turned up in the backyard of Zevik Glidai’s home in Kiryat Shmona, surrounded by its own cables, brought over the border from Lebanon. Hezbollah had been watching Ukraine too. That spring, Iran’s militia in Lebanon announced it was flying fiber-optic drones at Israeli soldiers, and it wasn’t a one-off. The IDF counts more than 100 explosive drones launched at our troops in a matter of weeks, flown by an estimated 100 trained operators spread across southern Lebanon, and those drones have killed Israeli soldiers and a civilian contractor. Ran Kochav, a former commander of Israel’s air defense array, said out loud that Israel is failing in its attempts to defend against them, and Israeli military officials acknowledge the army still lacks an effective counter to the fiber-optic drone. Those aren’t quotes I enjoy passing along, and they’re the honest state of the problem. Jakub Janovsky, an independent analyst who has tracked these drones since they first appeared over Ukraine, told the Times of Israel that barring luck or a blunder by the enemy pilot, “the only reliable counter is to shoot them down.” A drone on a wire can’t be deafened and can’t be deceived, so the argument left is physical.

Nobody in Israel is sitting on his hands about that. While Hezbollah was learning the leash, an air defense battalion in the north was doing what no other military anywhere had done, downing drones with light. Some 35 Hezbollah drones went down to that interim laser during the war, and on Dec. 29, 2025, Rafael, another of Israel’s defense houses, handed the Air Force the full Iron Beam, the first operational high-power interception laser in the world, which burns a drone down for a few shekels a shot. Its Hebrew name is Or Eitan, for Capt. Eitan Oster, who fell in battle in southern Lebanon. The rest of the industry smelled the same problem. When the Defense Ministry held a trial day in the south in 2025, nine Israeli companies turned up with some 20 different ways to stop a drone, Elbit and Robotican and Xtend brought interceptor drones of their own, and the army has ordered computerized rifle sights for the soldiers in Lebanon, built to put a bullet into a moving quadcopter before it reaches the man it’s hunting.

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America’s Tanks Already Carry an Israeli Radar

This is the game HawkGuard walked into, and the company arrived with an old family trick. Israel’s engineers have solved a problem shaped like this before, just closer to the ground. For years our tanks have carried an invisible shield called Trophy, built by Rafael, which spots an incoming rocket in flight and destroys it in midair automatically, faster than a crew could react. The radar doing the spotting is WindGuard, made by ELTA, the electronics house inside IAI, and it has been operational since 2009 with combat intercepts to its name. The U.S. Army liked the shield enough to put it on its Abrams tanks, and IAI delivered almost 400 of those radars for the job. The industry’s name for this kind of machine is an Active Protection System, something that watches, decides and physically stops the incoming threat on its own.

Open HawkGuard’s spec sheet and the first three words describing it are Active Protection System. HawkGuard is the tank’s shield pointed at the sky, and the sheet reads like a list of bad days the engineers planned for. They gave the hunter its own eyes, a compact radar called StormGuard, WindGuard’s catalog sibling, with a camera beside it, so the system borrows nobody’s picture of the sky. They taught it to work from a moving vehicle, because a convoy that needs guarding doesn’t stop moving, and from a fixed site or an offshore platform, because a port can’t step out of the way. They even planned for the day the satellites go quiet. The sheet says it operates effectively where GPS has been denied, so in a sky where everyone is jamming everything, the hunter itself doesn’t go blind. When the radar and camera find something, the computer does the geometry and the launcher fires what the company calls agile attack drones, which close the distance and neutralize the target through kinetic impact, in plain words they hit it, anywhere in a full circle around the system and out to 1,000 meters, with a person in the loop or fully on its own. None of that depends on how the target navigates, because a collision works the same whether the drone it hits was flying by satellite, by radio or by a thread of glass.

The missing explosive turns out to be the fascinating part. When a conventional interceptor detonates over the thing you’re guarding, your own defense rains fragments down on the very people it was meant to keep safe, and IAI positions the inert interceptor as a way to avoid the blast and secondary effects that come with explosive ones. I’ve read the brochure three times now, and the phrase I keep coming back to is “safe storage.” A rack of these interceptors has nothing in it that can detonate, so you can warehouse them, truck them and park them beside the building they’re protecting. Guy Bar Lev, IAI’s president and CEO, presented it as the next step in a layered defense, “adding a kinetic interception capability to counter the growing challenge posed by drones.” Every defense minister on earth has had the same thought since 2022, that it should not cost a missile to kill a toy, and Dror Bar, who runs ELTA, said it the way an engineer says it: HawkGuard gives operators “a flexible and cost-effective way to address drones and other localized aerial threats.”

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Nobody Has Bought One Yet

IAI says HawkGuard recently completed a series of successful tests in which it detected, tracked and neutralized a range of drone threats. That is the company describing its own test range. The company has published no performance figures, no hit rates, no price, and it has named no customer and no fielding army. IAI also didn’t invent the ramming interceptor. In America, Anduril’s Anvil has been ramming small drones for the U.S. military for years, and the Marine Corps signed a $200 million counter-drone deal built around it in November 2024. Between the American interceptors and the race at home, the field is crowded, and crowds like this only form around real problems. What the Israeli team did differently, on paper so far, is put the whole hunt into one box, radar, camera, launcher and all.

Scope matters just as much, because no single machine owns this sky. HawkGuard was built for the small end of the threat, what IAI’s own page calls drones, unmanned aerial systems and loitering munitions, the last being the industry’s word for a drone that circles overhead and waits before diving on whatever it was sent to kill. That is exactly the class this whole piece has been describing, the quadcopter with a charge strapped to it, the FPV hunting a vehicle or a man, the small, slow thing that got through at Binyamina, and HawkGuard engages it out to 1,000 meters from wherever the system happens to be standing. The big one-way attack drones, the Shahed class crossing borders at cruising altitude, are a different animal for a different hunter, and they stay the business of Iron Dome, Arrow, the lasers and swarm-breakers like Hypnosis. A kilometer of reach means point defense, the base or airport the system sits on and nothing past the fence, and that is the job, the layer for whatever slipped past every other layer and is now a thousand meters from the people it came for. Whether the little interceptor connects as reliably over a real base, on a moonless night, against a target flown by somebody who wants your soldiers dead, is exactly what a first customer’s trials exist to establish, and nobody knows that answer yet.

Shields Are the Family Business

That brings me back to the eagles, retired because they were expensive, scarce and didn’t always do what they were told. The drones eventually came back to the Netherlands, and the birds weren’t there. Sightings shut down air traffic at Eindhoven’s airport, Dutch soldiers opened fire on drones over the Volkel air base, and the government is now putting 3 billion euros into anti-drone systems. Every one of the eagles’ failings was a manufacturing problem, and manufacturing under pressure is this company’s whole biography. IAI builds fighter jets because France, then Israel’s main arms supplier, embargoed Israel in 1967 and a country 19 years old decided it would never again wait on anyone’s permission to defend itself. It named that first fighter Nesher, after a bird of prey. The lesson never expired. In June 2026, 59 years after France, Netanyahu said it to the country again in plain words: “I greatly appreciate the support we have received from our American friends, but we must free ourselves from dependence.”

The instinct is older than the technology, and you can hear it in the names. The machines in this story that came out of Israeli workshops go by Dome, Sling, Beam, Trophy and Guard, an entire industry speaking the vocabulary of shields. Hezbollah sent a cheap drone after a dining hall full of teenagers, and the engineers at ELTA answered with an interceptor so completely built around protecting life that it doesn’t even carry an explosive. For years this country has fired expensive interceptors at cheap rockets, and nobody here ever called it a bad trade, because Iron Dome is cheaper than the things it protects, and the things it protects are people. It’s the same pattern in everything I write about. A threat lands at Israel’s door before it lands anywhere else, an Israeli team refuses to live with it and goes to work, and the shield that comes off the bench ends up over other people’s heads too. The radar born guarding Israel’s Merkava tanks rides on America’s Abrams today, and HawkGuard wasn’t unveiled in Tel Aviv at all, IAI carried it straight to the American army’s own show. I think they’ll get there. When they do, this little hunter will stand watch over bases and airports far beyond ours, taking down drones that listen to nothing, because it never needed them to listen, only to be in the sky.

What I pray for is simple, a day when all of these machines rust in their warehouses because nobody is sending anything over anyone’s border. Until then the enemy keeps choosing assault, so the workshops will keep answering, because our sages taught that whoever saves a single life saves an entire world. Israel will never allow anyone, from anywhere, to harm her citizens.

Built in Israel. For everyone.

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She also wrote that she wore her bag with pride, and that without having her cancer out she might not be here today. Both of those are true at once. The surgery saves lives, and what it asks of the patient is enormous, from the operation under general anesthesia at the start to the second operation, almost a year later in her case, that reversed it.

A company in Israel called Phantom GI believes the two operations that bracket the bag are the part that can go. It’s developing a device meant to create an ostomy through a single needle hole, under local anesthetic, in about 20 minutes. The device is called PercStoma, and the company’s founding belief, in the words of its CEO, is that “creating an ostomy should not necessitate major surgery.”

The company was founded in Israel in 2025 by Ido Sadan, a CEO who has built minimally invasive devices before, Dr. Eliahu Bekhor, its chief scientific officer, and Dr. Eran Shlomovitz, a surgeon whose unusual training is really where this story begins.

The Operation That Saves You the Hard Way

An ostomy solves a brutal problem. The bowel is blocked, or ruptured, or so diseased it needs to be taken out of service, and the body still has to get waste out. So a surgeon opens the abdomen, brings a healthy loop of bowel through the wall of the belly and stitches it open at the skin, and the output goes into a sealed bag the patient wears. You probably know the whole arrangement by the name of its most common version, the colostomy bag; ostomy is the medical word for the family, and Jasmine’s was an ileostomy, from a higher stretch of bowel. By the UOAA’s own estimate, somewhere between 725,000 and 1 million Americans are living with one, and about 100,000 more have the surgery every year. Many of them are alive because of it.

Getting one, however, is a major medical event in its own right. It means an operating room, general anesthesia, an incision, days in the hospital and weeks of recovery, and the aftermath is hard even when everything goes well. A study of nearly 28,000 American ostomy patients found that 42% were back in the hospital within 120 days. For patients whose ostomy was meant to be temporary, undoing it requires a second operation, and the company says complications keep up to half of eligible patients from ever having that reversal done.

Then there are the patients for whom even the first surgery isn’t available. Bowel obstruction from advanced cancer, the condition doctors call malignant bowel obstruction, develops in 3% to 15% of cancer patients, and many of them are judged too frail for an operation. The medical literature on what happens to them next is hard to read. Mean survival runs about four weeks, and the options come down to a tube through the nose for drainage, which one palliative-care team called “not a long-term solution,” a venting tube into the stomach when the anatomy allows for it and medications that ease the nausea without fixing anything. These are people who cannot eat, and the company puts the number of Americans in that situation at tens of thousands a year.

The Patient Who Started the Company

Eran Shlomovitz trained in two fields that almost nobody combines. He is a general surgeon and also an interventional radiologist, a specialist who treats patients through needles and wires guided by live imaging, and his own hospital network describes him as the only physician in Canada maintaining a full practice in both. The way he describes the job is that he gets to “explore the boundaries of surgery and interventional radiology.”

In 2023, as the company tells it, he met a woman with a malignant bowel obstruction who had been judged inoperable. The standard playbook had nothing left to offer her. With her consent, he took ordinary interventional devices that were designed for other jobs and, under X-ray guidance, decompressed her blocked bowel. She returned to a normal diet, went back to work and resumed her cancer treatment, and Phantom GI was founded to turn that one improvised rescue into a device other doctors can use.

The detail I love in this whole story is that she went back to work.

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The Feeding Tube Solved Half of This in 1980

Medicine has actually solved half of this problem before, and the story is worth telling. In 1979, at University Hospitals of Cleveland, a pediatric surgeon named Michael Gauderer needed a way to place feeding tubes in children, and he considered open surgery too risky for them. Together with Jeffrey Ponsky, an endoscopist at the same hospital, he worked out how to place the tube directly into the stomach through the skin. An early review of 150 cases reported no deaths, and the complications that did occur were minor. The technique became known as the PEG tube, Ponsky adapted it for adults, and it spread everywhere. It’s held in place, as it happens, by a soft flange that opens inside the stomach and snugs the stomach wall up against the wall of the belly, half of what a hardware store would call a grommet, the ring-and-flange eyelet in the corner of a tarp that turns a small hole into a permanent working passage.

So medicine has known since 1980 that you can make a doorway into the gut without opening the abdomen. Why did the doorway out remain a full operation? The honest answer is that out is harder, because a feeding tube only has to let liquid trickle in, while an ostomy has to divert a moving stream, stay sealed against it and hold a loop of bowel fastened to the abdominal wall day after day. Thin venting tubes exist, and they relieve pressure, but a tube is not a stoma, so the real thing stayed in the operating room.

Phantom GI’s description of PercStoma is fascinating to me because of how mechanical it is. One needle puncture through the wall of the belly into the bowel, under local anesthetic, guided by live X-ray. A fixation device secures the bowel. A short stent then deploys two skirts, one opening inside the bowel and one at the skin. It’s a grommet, the whole thing this time. The output drains into the same standard bag every ostomy patient already uses. The company’s target is a procedure of about 20 minutes, recovery it describes as measured in days rather than weeks, and a reversal designed to be a quick office procedure instead of a second operation.

They’re Starting With the Patients Surgery Already Turned Away

The company isn’t starting by challenging the surgical standard. It’s starting with the people who have no standard at all, the inoperable bowel-obstruction patients for whom, as Sadan put it, surgery is “simply too invasive, and in some cases, not an option at all.” If the device proves itself there, the company believes the same approach could eventually stand in for diverting ostomies more broadly, and it estimates more than 100,000 American bowel-obstruction patients a year could benefit. Pitango, RAD Biomed, RUNI Ventures and the Israel Innovation Authority have put backing behind the work. Toronto’s University Health Network is listed among its supporters, and the medical advisory board is anchored by Dr. Lee Swanstrom, a pioneer of minimally invasive surgery and a past president of SAGES, the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons.

No Patient Has Worn One Yet

PercStoma is still in development. It isn’t cleared or approved by the FDA or any other regulator, there’s no published human data and, per everything the company had released as of its launch announcement on October 8, 2026, no patient has yet received one. The first U.S. clinical studies are still being prepared, so the 20 minutes, the days rather than weeks and the office-visit reversal are all design targets that have never been measured in a patient. The 2023 case that started everything was done with existing devices, not with this one, and we know its outcome from the company’s own account. Whether a startup can turn one improvised rescue into a device that works reliably in many hands is exactly the question clinical trials exist to answer, and nobody knows the answer yet. If bowel obstruction has touched your family, your doctor, not a Substack, is the person to ask about today’s options.

The problem sat overlooked for 45 years, mostly because it belongs to patients medicine had already filed under nothing more to be done. A team in Israel looked at it anyway and decided it could be done better. I think they’ll get there. When they do, the people who benefit will be in hospital beds all over the world, most of them in places that will never think to ask where the idea came from. It has already happened once, for one woman, with borrowed tools. The next one could be anywhere, and this company was founded for her.

If you know someone who works in GI, in oncology or in palliative care, send them this one.

Built in Israel. For everyone.

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Nothing in this piece is medical advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to seek, avoid or stop any treatment. Talk to your physician about which treatments are appropriate for your situation.

When a friend ran toward him to pull him out, Aviv shouted at him to get back so he wouldn’t walk into the ambush. It saved the friend’s life. Then, with the last of his strength, he took out his phone and typed three words to his family’s WhatsApp group.

“He loves everyone.”

Three words, about himself, in the third person. His wife Heli says he wrote as if he were no longer quite in his body, a people person summing himself up for the people he loved while his life ran out.

Over the two years that followed, dozens of Israeli soldiers did a thing almost nobody does. Before Gaza, before Lebanon, before driving toward the rockets without being called up, they looked their own death in the eye and wrote. They wrote love letters. To their parents, to their partners, to the people of Israel they were about to defend.

Two people collected 49 of them into a book called If You’re Reading These Words. What these soldiers wrote will tell you more about Israel than anything else you’ll read today.

They Knew the Odds and Wrote Home Anyway

One of those soldiers was Yoav Malayev. He was 19. On October 7th, he led a fierce battle against Hamas terrorists trying to overrun his outpost. After about an hour of fighting he was mortally wounded. In the few minutes between his injury and his death, he reached for his notepad rather than his phone.

In his pocket he kept a small note he had written to himself. “Take a look when it gets tough. Head held high. Set an example. Be the best.”

He wrote his last words in weak, blurred handwriting: “The best twenty minutes of my life. We crawled up to here, I got injured, and there’s a barrage now. I’m thinking of you and will be thinking of you the whole journey, I love you.”

He didn’t say who he was writing to. His parents say he wrote to everyone who loved him. He died not knowing if anyone would ever read it.

Adi Leon wrote his last letter the night before he went into Gaza, to his parents, to his sisters, to the people of Israel. About what he had seen on October 7th. About the dangerous battle ahead. At the bottom of the page he drew a small heart and a Star of David. The small blue star on the book’s cover is that star, copied from his page.

He ended the letter with five words: “I hope you’ll remember me.”

He was killed in Gaza. President Isaac Herzog read the closing lines of his letter from the Knesset podium and said: “In my name and in the name of all citizens of the State of Israel, I promise Adi that we’ll never forget.” Parents who never knew Adi have named their children for him. His letter has been set to music, translated into five languages, and studied in Israeli schools and Jewish communities around the world. “A modest guy who made a modest request,” his mother says. A great many people have answered him.

Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi writes that what Adi did, what all of them did, connects to something ancient. Every soldier who put pen to paper was writing in a secret code, a code secret even to themselves. They were describing a reality they had never experienced. A reality in which they are no more.

She finds them in the tradition of Moses himself, who wrote the final verses of the Torah not with ink but with tears. These fighters, she says, are the only people in the whole world who yearn for what they wrote with their own blood to never be read. In their last words, she writes, they seek not to be heroes in death. They seek to be heroes of life.

Eden Provisor understood that. He was 21, commanding his brigade’s lead tank from the first day of the ground campaign in Gaza. He didn’t have time to write during the fighting, so he called his father from inside Gaza on a borrowed phone.

“Dad, now I’m dictating my last words to you.”

His father wrote them down and held onto them. “Dad, we’re here in the inferno and the situation is terrible. I can’t tell you what will happen, but there’s a chance that I won’t be coming back home, but will be staying here. I’m asking you to listen to me: I want you to continue living as if I’m with you. Don’t collapse and don’t live in sadness.”

The day after that call, his father phoned him back and begged him to find someone to take his place. It was the first time Eden had ever shouted at him. “That’s not an option. You raised me for this, for leadership, for responsibility. This is the role that they gave me. If someone takes my place and gets hurt instead of me, I won’t be able to live with it, not for a single day.”

Three days after dictating those words, Eden fell in battle.

Elchanan Kalmanson was 42 and had worked for the Mossad for years. Long before the war, he began rewriting his last letter, updating it each time, saving it in a file called "If I Die." His grave is the only one in Israel engraved with both the insignia of the IDF and the insignia of the Mossad. He last updated it after Yom HaZikaron 2023. He told no one it existed.

On October 7th he rushed out of his home before receiving any orders and drove to the Gaza Envelope. He led a group made up of his brother and nephew, going house to house in Kibbutz Be’eri, rescuing about a hundred residents. After sixteen straight hours of fighting, Elchanan fell in combat.

His wife Shlomit found the file afterward. It had been sitting on his computer, not even password protected, for years.

He wrote: “I believed in the small deed that makes a great difference. A little detail that can save lives.” Between rescues in Be’eri, when his brother said there was no time to stop for an elderly woman’s medication and hearing aids, Elchanan took the few minutes anyway. “We must not let these people escape from their homes like refugees. We have to pay attention not just to getting them out, but also to how we get them out. They have to exit their homes like people, heads held high.”

Ben Zussman made the same choice. He didn’t wait to be called up, getting on a bus on October 7th on his own initiative, already tracking the Arabic news on Telegram and understanding exactly what he was walking into before the rest of the country did.

He wrote his letter on the bus and asked two friends to share it only if the worst happened. He told his family that if it came to that, they should turn the shiva into “a week of friends, family, and joy,” with food, definitely meat, “and of course, Mom’s cookies.”

He was 22. He was killed in northern Gaza in December 2023. He had been about to join the Shin Bet. That was his dream. He gave it up to get on the bus.

Some of Them Refused to Write It Straight

Not all of them were solemn about it. Alon Sacagiu wrote what he wanted: a brewery in his memory, with seven specific kinds of beer, a yearly event with good meat and a coffee cart, “nothing too crowded, modest with a lot of happy people.” He told his family not to do too many posts or interviews. “I don’t relate to all the fancy words they publish about every soldier who dies, writing as if they’re Alterman, at the very least. I believe in deeds and putting things into action and I believe that I did everything I could to protect the people and the place that I love the most. Be doers, not talkers.”

He was killed while evacuating wounded soldiers under fire. His body absorbed most of the blast, and the roughly 20 soldiers around him were saved. His family received his last letter through the shattered screen of his phone, broken by the explosion that killed him.

Since his death, his friends have been building the brewery.

Yaron Chitiz had that same spirit. He wrote to his family with the dark humor of someone who understood exactly what kind of letter he was supposed to write, and refused to take it too seriously. “Who’s supposed to teach twenty-three-year-old kids how to write a letter like this? What a special, surreal country.”

He signed off with “Am Yisrael Chai” and added a postscript: “Don’t embarrass me and send this to Hanoch Daum.”

His brother Dovie sent it to Hanoch Daum anyway, explaining that if he was wrong about what Yaron really wanted, “he’s not here to correct me.”

Eitan Koplovich took that refusal even further. He sat down, looked at the blank page, and decided to dismantle the entire form. “If somehow I don’t come back,” he wrote. “I know, this is the opening for all the pathos and drama that a dead man can suffuse into the world of the living, I don’t intend to take advantage of it. First of all, I’m dead, so it isn’t supposed to interest me. Secondly, if this is going to be a message from another world, let it be authentic.”

He didn’t want a scenic lookout or a promenade in his name. He wrote to his wife Yael about jumping on colored rocks as children and pretending the unpainted ones were lava. He wrote that he felt he had sometimes held her back. He ran out of words mid-sentence and left the document unsaved. She found it on his open laptop three weeks after he fell.

Then there was Yonatan Dean Haim, born Jonathan in New York to a Christian family, who converted to Judaism, immigrated to Israel as a lone soldier, and wrote to his partner Najma in both English and Hebrew. “Look for me in the early rain and the late rain,” he wrote. “When you see lemons and oranges, you can remember my dreams. I loved you more than the world. Our story isn’t over; the story is just beginning.”

After he fell in combat, three separate funerals were held for him. A military funeral in Israel. A Jewish funeral in New York. A Christian service in the church where he was born. Najma planted an orange tree in their favorite spot in Ramat Gan and hung a sign beside it: “The orange tree is in memory of Yonatan Dean Haim, a lone soldier and city resident who fell in the Swords of Iron War.”

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The People Reading Them Now Ask Forgiveness

Avi Issacharoff co-created Fauda. He read these letters and found himself asking the fallen for forgiveness. “We’re sorry that we thought that you were a bit spoiled, less principled than previous generations,” he writes to them. “We’re sorry that we sometimes called you the ‘TikTok generation.’” He ends: “I’m sorry that we didn’t see who you truly were. That we didn’t know what you were made of until the moment you stood the test, leaving us speechless. Forgive us, and may we learn to be worthy of the sacrifice you made.”

Lieutenant Colonel Aviran Alfasi commanded the Givati Brigade’s Tzabar Battalion through half a year of nonstop fighting. In April 2024, at an evening marking the end of that phase of combat, with the families of the battalion’s 15 fallen soldiers sitting across from him, he broke with custom. Commanders on such occasions quote Trumpeldor, Yigal Allon, Ben-Gurion. Alfasi quoted the last letters of his own fallen soldiers instead, the heroes of the present rather than the past, and gave this generation the only name he says fits it: the Generation of Courage.

Reef Harush was one of them. He was 20, and he wrote his letter before his first time going into Gaza, folded it, and tucked it into his uniform pocket. His father found it while doing the laundry. He peeked inside and held onto it.

A month later, Reef fell in combat. About an hour after receiving the news, his father read the whole letter for the first time. Reef had written: “Why am I risking my life? They’ve done it before me and they’ll do it after me. And for that old woman who thanks me and cries I’m willing to sacrifice my life.”

He admitted to his parents that he was afraid of death. The letter, his father believes, was something Reef wrote to encourage himself in the moments before going out to battle. He was afraid. He went anyway.

Not everyone left words. Roee Negri never wrote a last letter. On the morning of October 7th, before orders came, he called up his anti-terror reserves team on his own initiative. As he and his friend Oron geared up for Be’eri, they sat on a curb behind the armory. Oron asked him if he had written anything.

Roee said: “I don’t really know what to write. What am I supposed to say here? Do I sum up my life? Do I give instructions for what’s next? Do I tell the ones I love that I love them? That’s all clear from before... I want my name to bring up a smile and joy and not tears and sadness... I want memories of me to be happy things that are fun to talk about, that when they talk about Roee Negri in the past tense it’ll be at a get-together with beers and laughter, and not tissues and ice cream.”

He had gotten married less than two months before. Oron asked if he was scared. Roee said no. But hours earlier, when his wife Shai had asked him the same question, Roee was quiet for a moment. Then he said yes.

Mere hours later, Roee fell in combat in Be’eri, the first to break into a house to save the people held hostage inside. When he was shot by a terrorist, he pushed his team back and saved them with his body. At his funeral, his father asked: if God had whispered in Roee’s ear, “Roee, if you go inside, you’re dead,” would he go in? Without being asked, Roee’s entire team standing around the grave roared together: “He’d go in.”

Three weeks after he fell, his sister went into labor. In terrible pain, she asked her mother to put Roee’s dog tag around her neck. She gripped it and gave birth safely to her daughter. She named her Ori.

Emily Damari was held hostage in Gaza while soldiers like Roee, like Eden, like Ben, like Reef were dying to bring her home. She came back. She knows what their sacrifice cost in a way few others do.

“And here I am now, free,” she writes. “Thanks to the bereaved families. Thanks to the heroes of this book.” She carries, she says, the responsibility to live a life of meaning, for her sake and for theirs. “We will remember them not just in our grief, but in our actions, in our joys, and in continuing to make life.”

Miriam Peretz buried two sons who fell in Israel’s wars and has spent decades teaching this country how to grieve. She read these letters and gave her reflection a two-word title.

“No words.”

Nobody Appointed the Two People Who Saved Them

These last letters were almost lost.

Two Israelis, Racheli Palant-Rozen and Shlomo Kavas, a journalist and a copywriter, understood that these words were being swallowed by the daily flood of news and grief. Nobody appointed them. Nobody commissioned them. They were just two people who felt they couldn’t look away. When they wavered, they thought of a six-year-old girl named Romi Suissa, who was hiding in the back seat of a car in Sderot while terrorists murdered her parents. When rescuers came, she asked: “Are you with Israel?”

Racheli and Shlomo had their answer. “We are with Israel. That’s what we’re a part of.”

They contacted every bereaved family they could find, sat with them, and read each letter together word by word, asking each family’s consent for every word they added about their son. One mother stopped them mid-reading and asked through tears: “Wait, you read all of the letters like this, interpreting each and every word as if it were a sacred text?”

They answered: “What do you mean, ‘as if’?”

I’ve read a lot of books to come out of this war. This is the one I kept having to put down, and the only one I finished the same day I started it.

The letters themselves are transcribed exactly as written, not a word corrected, not a spelling fixed. At the end of each one, the soldier’s final words appear in a typeface built from that soldier’s own handwriting, recreated by volunteer designers working with the bereaved families. When you reach the last line of Adi Leon’s letter, it’s in Adi Leon’s own hand. Because of a soldier named Ori Ashkenazi, who included instructions for his own funeral in his last letter, the IDF changed its policy on delivering phones to bereaved families. A fallen soldier’s phone now gets to his family as fast as possible, even before the rest of his belongings, so his last words can reach them in time. It’s called the Ori Protocol. One letter changed the system for every family that came after.

The result is If You’re Reading These Words: Last Letters from Heroes of the October 7th War, published by the Toby Press, an imprint of Koren Publishers Jerusalem, in Sara Daniel’s English translation in 2026. It holds 49 letters from 49 lives, written by soldiers who hoped no one would ever need to read them.

These soldiers didn’t ask for ceremonies. They asked to be remembered as the specific, irreplaceable, funny, frightened, loving human beings they were. Racheli and Shlomo put it simply in their introduction: “We are people of words, so we have gathered this bouquet of words for our people. We lay it here before you. Now it is yours.”

Adi Leon asked for one thing. I hope you’ll remember me.

Read the book. That’s how you answer him.

They asked for one thing. Every single one of them.

Remember me.

We do. We will.

That is what they died for. Not mourning. Life.

Yizkor. May their memories be a blessing.

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An Israeli company called ForSight Robotics built a steadier pair of hands for that zoom. On April 7, 2026, ForSight announced that a surgeon at the Asian Eye Institute in Manila had used its robot to carry a patient’s cataract surgery from the first step to the last, without putting the patient under, the way cataract surgery is normally done. The company calls it the world’s first fully robot-assisted cataract surgery in a human. Co-founder Dr. Joseph Nathan was standing in that operating room, and he wrote afterward that the surgeons finished entire procedures without touching a single surgical instrument. I love that detail more than anything else in this story.

Two of the three people who started ForSight in 2020 had already put robots into operating rooms. The third had held the instruments. Prof. Moshe Shoham founded Mazor Robotics, the Israeli spine-surgery robot that Medtronic bought for more than $1.6 billion. Dr. Daniel Glozman had spent two decades building medical robots and invented the system behind XACT Robotics. Nathan studied engineering and then medicine at the Technion, Israel’s MIT, and did three years of residency in eye surgery, which is where he first saw the problem this robot was built to solve.

Most of Us Will Get One by 80

Before the robot, the thing it’s for. There’s a clear lens inside your eye that focuses light, a lot like the lens on a camera. A cataract is a cloudy patch on that lens. The National Eye Institute says that around age 40 the proteins in the lens start breaking down and clumping together, and over the years the clumps cloud it over like a window slowly frosting up. Colors fade, headlights start to glare and night driving gets harder. By 80, most people either have cataracts or have already had surgery for them.

Surgery is the only way to get rid of one, and it’s a very good surgery. The doctor numbs your eye with drops, makes a tiny cut, breaks up the cloudy lens, takes it out and puts in a clear artificial one, a bit like swapping out a fogged-up camera lens. You’re usually awake for it. About 9 out of 10 people see better afterward.

So the problem isn’t the operation. It’s the line for it. The World Health Organization says 1 in 2 people around the world who need cataract surgery can’t get it, and the eye doctors are thinnest where the need is greatest. A study in the British Journal of Ophthalmology counted about 3.7 eye doctors per million people in low-income countries, against roughly 76 per million in wealthy ones. You can’t fix that gap quickly, because it takes years to make an eye surgeon, and Nathan told Pulse 2.0 that surgeons need at least 15 years on average to reach their peak.

Some of that training is about as hands-on as it gets. Dr. Eydie Miller, who ran the glaucoma service at the University of Pennsylvania’s Scheie Eye Institute, told EyeWorld in 2012 that when a resident’s hand shook during a hard step, she’d sometimes hold it and guide the instrument through, then let go once she felt the resident relax. She called it “surgical training wheels.” It’s a beautiful way to teach, and a teacher’s hand only fits on one resident at a time.

The surgeons pay with their bodies too. ForSight says on its platform page that most eye surgeons end up with musculoskeletal problems from years of operating in awkward positions, and that many are forced to retire early because of it.

The Surgeon Never Touched an Instrument

ForSight calls the robot JASPER, short for Joint Aligned System for Precise Eye Robotics, which is an engineer’s name if I’ve ever heard one. The surgeon sits at the controls and moves. The robot’s two arms hold the instruments inside the eye and move the same way. ForSight’s word for this is telemanipulation, which is a fancy way of saying remote control.

In the company’s own description, JASPER combines motion scaling, tremor elimination, real-time eye tracking and high-definition 3D vision. Motion scaling works like turning down the sensitivity on your computer mouse, so a big, comfortable movement of the surgeon’s hand becomes a tiny, careful movement inside the eye. Tremor elimination is the same idea as the stabilization in your phone camera, smoothing out the shake from that zoom I started with. The robot also keeps watching where the eye is, moment to moment, and it works inside what ForSight calls no-fly zones, boundaries meant to keep the instruments within set areas of the eye. If you’ve ever bowled with the bumpers up at a kid’s birthday party, you’ve got the idea. None of it takes the surgeon out of the chair, either. ForSight says the surgeon stays in control through every step of the procedure.

Robots had been in human eyes before. In October 2025, a team out of UCLA used a robot in 10 cataract patients, and according to UCLA its arms made the small cuts and removed the cloudy lens, and then the surgeon put in the new one. That was a real milestone. What happened in Manila went further, because the robot carried the whole surgery, start to finish, inside a normal cataract day. Dr. Alexey Rapoport did the first one, with Dr. Robert Ang of the Asian Eye Institute leading the study, and Rapoport called it “the highlight of my career.”

Still, they weren’t done. On Aug. 6, 2026, ForSight reported 14 more surgeries, bringing the study to 26 patients. Every one of the 26 was finished by the robot without the surgeon having to switch over and do it by hand. The patients got numbing drops or mild sedation, the same as any routine cataract surgery, and all of them went home the same day. Ang said the robot “complemented, rather than disrupted” the way his team normally works, which from a surgeon is about as high as praise for new equipment gets.

If you know someone who’s had cataract surgery, or is waiting on one, a gift subscription is an easy way to send them stories like this.

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In Residency, He Saw the Math Didn’t Work

Nathan has told this part more than once. In residency he saw how much precision eye surgery demands and how hard it is on the people doing it, and he watched the number of patients climb while the number of surgeons didn’t. He told Pulse 2.0 there was “no human way to close the gap.” So he went to Shoham, the man who’d already put a robot into spine surgery, and to Glozman, who’d built more surgical robots than most people have seen. They picked cataract surgery first because it’s the most common operation in medicine and because the steps are so standardized and repetitive, which is the kind of work a robot is good at.

Then came years of quiet grinding. Before JASPER went anywhere near a person, more than 25 surgeons used it in over 300 cataract procedures on animal eyes, Nathan said. Along the way Dr. Fred Moll, co-founder of Intuitive Surgical, the company behind the da Vinci surgical robot, joined ForSight’s board.

Read down ForSight’s team page and you’ll keep running into the same company. The CFO, Sharon Levita, was Mazor’s CFO for more than a decade and led it through the Medtronic sale. The head of R&D, Yonatan Ushpizin, worked at Mazor and ran advanced robotics research at Medtronic. The VP of regulatory affairs, Shiran Conforti, came out of Mazor too.

The trip to Manila wasn’t easy, either. Nathan wrote that it came while Israel was at war again, and that his team ran into delays just getting back home to their families. Days before he flew to the Philippines, he and his wife had their third child. He wrote about going from one room filled with new life to another where sight was coming back, and coming away sure that the robots make the work possible but the people are the reason for it.

Twenty-Six Patients Is a Beginning

JASPER is still in development. It hasn’t been cleared by the FDA, it isn’t for sale in the United States, and ForSight says it hasn’t been approved for commercial use anywhere yet. The 26 patients were all part of one early study at one eye institute in Manila, and that study is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov as a small feasibility trial, the kind meant to show something can be done before the bigger trials, expected to run into 2027. The results so far come from the company’s own announcements, and I couldn’t find the patients’ vision results published in a medical journal yet. ForSight says its next steps are more clinical studies and regulatory submissions.

Cataract surgery already works for most people who get it. What ForSight is going after is reach and consistency, and the bodies of the surgeons doing the work. If you or a parent need cataract surgery, don’t hold off waiting for a robot. Talk to your eye doctor about what’s right for you.

Before It Was JASPER

Moshe Shoham built one surgical robot, saw it sold and went right back to work on a harder one, and half of Mazor’s leadership came with him. That’s my favorite kind of Israeli, the kind who finishes something huge and goes looking for the next thing nobody’s done.

There’s a small line on the National Eye Institute’s surgery page that I keep coming back to. Some people notice colors look brighter after cataract surgery, because the new lens doesn’t carry the yellow-brown tint the old one picked up. When ForSight was starting out, it gave the robot a Hebrew name, ORYOM. It means daylight.

If you know someone who’s stopped driving at night because the headlights have started to glare, send them this. Then send them to an eye doctor.

Built in Israel. For everyone.

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Nothing in this piece is medical advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to seek, avoid or stop any treatment. Talk to your physician about which treatments are appropriate for your situation.

An Israeli company called EcoPhage has been building something since 2018 that hunts that germ, and on Sept. 16, 2026, the U.S. government approved it for American tomato and pepper farms. What’s in the bottle is alive. It’s a virus that goes after the germ, and the germ has beaten everything the farms have thrown at it.

The man behind it didn’t go looking for a better chemical. He spent 20 years on the opposite question, how bacteria fight off that virus, and he found whole defense systems nobody knew were down there. Then he took everything he had learned about how the germ saves itself and handed it to the side trying to kill it.

Growers sprayed a real antibiotic at this germ in the 1950s, the kind doctors give people, and the germ won. They switched to copper, and inside a decade it was beating copper too. Hospitals know this story. The tomato farms just got there first.

Everything alive has something hunting it, and that includes the germs that make us sick. Their hunter is a virus, though not the kind you catch. Scientists call it a phage, from the Greek for eating, because that’s what it does to bacteria and only to bacteria. It has been doing it for billions of years, and bacteria have spent those same billions of years learning to fight it off.

When Rotem Sorek started out, science knew of exactly two ways bacteria defend themselves. He was a young Israeli researcher just past his doctorate then, working at a U.S. government lab in Berkeley, and the timing nagged him. One of those two defenses is the one that became CRISPR, the gene-editing tool. It had been sitting there unnoticed for 90 years after the viruses themselves. “What puzzled me about CRISPR,” he said, “is that this was a system that was very profound, and yet it was discovered 90 years after the discovery of phages.” His hunch was that everybody missed it because it barely works in the handful of bacteria scientists keep in the lab. If something that big could hide that long, the rest of it was still out there. So he went looking.

He went home to Israel to do it. The Weizmann Institute lets a young scientist chase a hunch for a decade, and that’s how a country of 10 million ends up with a world leader in an obscure corner of biology. Sorek read the genomes, the complete genetic code, of tens of thousands of bacteria, and he found immune systems nobody had ever seen, dozens of them, a whole arsenal that had been there the entire time.

Then came the finding that won him the 2025 Gruber Genetics Prize and half a million dollars. Parts of your immune system are descended from those bacterial defenses. That ancient war is still going on inside you.

Every time bacteria find a way to shut out a virus, the viruses find a way back in. No chemical can do that. Sorek has spent 20 years mapping that arms race, and a spray for tomato and pepper farms is the first thing off his map to reach a farmer.

Seventy Years of Spraying at a Germ

Growers spray for this disease all season long, and in 2023 University of Florida scientists published three field trials showing it barely matters. They put the question in the title of the paper, “Do Chemical Controls Pay Off?” The answer was no. Spray programs made no difference the statistics could find to how much fruit came off the plants fit to sell, and the treated plots earned what the untreated ones did. The authors called the industry’s faith in those sprays a misperception. Growers keep spraying anyway, because the alternative is spraying nothing.

The disease is bacterial spot, the germ behind it is called Xanthomonas, and in the wrong weather it takes half a tomato crop. Half. You have probably never seen it. A green tomato breaks out in small raised blisters that go brown and scabby, the leaves spot and tear until the plant goes ragged, and peppers drop their leaves and then their blossoms. Fruit like that drops a grade or more, because the U.S. standard counts anything that materially hurts its looks or eating quality as damage, and the grower absorbs the loss. Gardeners know this germ well, and the university offices that advise them say not to eat the spotted ones, not because this germ can make you sick, but because the spots let in ones that can. Florida and California grow about two-thirds of America’s fresh tomatoes, and Florida is the one that carries the winter. It hits peppers the same way, and it travels, because tomato seed is grown all over the world and shipped everywhere and the germ rides along on it.

Growers threw everything they had at it. The antibiotic was streptomycin, and after that failed the industry moved to copper, and versions of the germ that could stand copper showed up within a decade. Then Florida scientists went back in 2017 and collected 585 samples of the bacterium from 70 fields. Copper still worked on roughly one of them. One, out of 585.

Breeding hasn’t rescued anyone either. There are no commercial tomato varieties resistant to bacterial spot, because the bacteria change faster than breeders can work. Even the scientist holding the biggest grant to fight this thing talks like a man short on weapons. Prof. Gary Vallad, who won a $5.8 million federal grant in 2022 to attack this disease and co-authored that 2023 paper, says bacterial spot “threatens long-term sustainability of tomatoes, because we lack sufficient control measures.”

The first phage pesticide the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ever approved came from a company in Salt Lake City called OmniLytics, back in 2005, for this same disease on these same crops. Its maker has sold it ever since and now sells phage products for several other crop diseases, fire blight among them, and 20 years on nobody has beaten bacterial spot. OmniLytics got there first. What EcoPhage adds is Sorek.

The Lab That Maps the War

EcoPhage was founded in 2018 around technology co-developed with the Weizmann Institute, with Sorek as scientific founder, and the premise on its own site is that “an estimated 10% of the world’s food production is lost due to plant diseases.” It hunts wild phages in the environment, reads their genes, sorts them by how each one breaks into the cell, then mixes the best of them into cocktails. The sorting is the part that needs Sorek. The company says his understanding of the bacterial immune system “contributed to our ability to overcome the bacteria’s ability to acquire resistance to bactericides over time,” which is the whole question against a germ that already retired an antibiotic and a metal. Bayer, whose crop-science arm sells chemicals to farmers, helped launch it through the Bayer-Trendlines Ag Innovation Fund, alongside the Israel Innovation Authority, and in 2022 the company hired Guy Elitzur to take it to market.

The approval took two years. In August 2024 the EPA published EcoPhage’s application in the Federal Register, the daily bulletin where the federal government posts what it’s about to allow, and opened it for public comment. Exactly one comment came in, and the agency noted it had nothing to do with phages. In July 2026 the EPA ruled that the product’s two active ingredients, one aimed at the bacteria behind bacterial spot and one at the bacteria behind speck, a second tomato disease, needed no residue limit on food at all, meaning no cap on how much is allowed to be left on what you eat. The reason is that people have been eating phages in food and water their whole lives, infants and children included, with no known harm, and the things don’t last long without the bacteria they hunt. When the company announced the approval, its own words for what growers have been relying on were “chemical and metal-based treatments,” and its words for what it’s selling instead were “natural, non-GMO and zero-residue.”

The spray goes on the leaves, and each phage finds the germ it was picked for, attaches to it, gets inside and multiplies until the cell is finished. Nothing else on the plant is a door it can open. Do that through the season and, if it holds up in growers’ fields the way it held in the company’s trials, the plant keeps its leaves and the fruit comes off clean enough to sell.

The company’s directions are about as plain as a spray program gets. You spray weekly from early growth through first fruit, four times at least. Your crew can go back in after two hours and pick the next day. It goes in the same tank as most fungicides and insecticides, the mold and bug sprays, and keeps two years on the shelf. If I farmed tomatoes in Immokalee, the shelf life is the line I’d have circled.

This is the first one through. EcoFire is at the EPA for fire blight in apples and pears, EcoBrass for the black rot that takes cabbage, broccoli and kale, and EcoStraw for strawberries. Line those up and you’re looking at a produce aisle, and Dole has signed an evaluation deal to try its phages against the disease wrecking banana farms across Central and Latin America.

Somebody in your life buys the vegetables and pays the bill? A gift subscription is how they find out what’s coming to the field their food grows in.

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The Metal That Never Leaves the Dirt

You don’t farm. You buy vegetables on a Thursday and put them on a table on Friday, and what a grower in Florida has to spray to get them there ends up being your business.

Copper is a metal, and metal doesn’t break down. It stays in the dirt, builds up season after season, and at high enough concentrations it hurts the earthworms and microbes that make dirt into soil. The European Union put copper compounds on its list of substances to be replaced. Organic growers lean on copper too, which surprises people. Every week a grower sprays phages instead is a week of metal that stays out of the ground your food comes from.

The other half of it is the bill. A farmer’s losses get paid for at the register, so fewer losses would mean steadier prices, if the trial results hold up on working farms.

This won’t touch the recalls. The ones that keep hitting American produce, the sprouts, the jalapeños, the frozen blueberries, come from salmonella and E. coli, which sicken people while leaving the plant healthy. GoldenEco fights what attacks the plant. Phages already work that other front, though, cleared since 2006 for spraying straight onto fresh produce against salmonella.

The biggest thing you can’t see is resistance itself. Every antibiotic and every metal we throw at bacteria teaches them something. The tomato fields lost streptomycin and the hospitals lost penicillin to staph in the very same decade, and it runs now at more than a million deaths a year with 39 million forecast by 2050. Bacteria evolve against phages too. The difference is the one Sorek spent his career on. A chemical that stops working is stuck that way, and a phage, being alive, can adapt back.

Medicine is reaching for this weapon now that its drugs are failing, and the strange part is that doctors had it first and threw it away. Félix d’Herelle described these viruses in 1917 and treated infections with them, then antibiotics arrived and were easier, and by 1945 the West had abandoned phage therapy almost completely. It survived in Soviet Georgia, at an institute that never stopped. Hadassah Medical Center and the Hebrew University went and got it back in 2018, when they opened the Israeli Phage Therapy Center. Its doctors have fielded 159 requests from Israel, the United States, Finland and Germany, and in the center’s first five years they treated 18 patients whose infections had beaten every antibiotic available. Fourteen of them got better. That is 18 people, not a trial, and the doctors who published it say so themselves.

Two Diseases, Two Crops, One State at a Time

GoldenEco is approved for two diseases on two crops, and it isn’t on sale everywhere, because the launch is subject to state registrations that come one state at a time. The product page says it “controls equal or better than copper,” and the evidence is the company’s own trials, a contract lab in Florida in late 2022 that reported less disease than the copper plots and more marketable fruit, and three seasons in Mexico. None of it has been through a journal, and against Florida’s copper-proof bacteria, beating copper is a low bar anyway. I couldn’t find a published test against the Utah product, staying ahead of resistance is something to watch in real fields over real seasons, and the others are applications, not approvals.

The tomatoes in your kitchen are fine. Copper is legal, regulated and measured, and its problem is that it quit working and piles up in soil.

One enemy has kept up with bacteria for 4 billion years. An Israeli spent his career learning exactly how they try to escape it, and then his lab pointed that knowledge at a tomato. The bacteria have a predator, and an Israeli company put it in a bottle.

If you know somebody who reads the label and wonders what got sprayed on it, this is the one to send them.

Built in Israel. For everyone.

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I’m putting all of that in the first paragraph because the Dutch will, and because none of it is the story. What Dutch Customs itself confirmed is the story. Its officers are authorized to inspect luggage for the banned goods and to ask a traveler where a product came from, the ban covers things you bought before it existed, and a poster at Schiphol now warns arriving passengers that new restrictions apply to goods from Israeli settlements, personal luggage included. Customs says it selects bags on objective information and risk, and that a traveler’s origin, nationality, religion or appearance are not grounds for a check. The goods it is looking for are wine from the Golan, dates from the Jordan Valley and tahini from Mount Gerizim, and the people who carry them home in a suitcase are Israelis and the people who visit them, Jews and Christians both.

The Netherlands is coming for the Jews again, the way it came for them the last time, with decent men in uniform and a printed list, and the Dutch will spend the next month saying otherwise. The law those men are enforcing takes paychecks from Palestinians, tahini from Samaritans and apples from Druze, the people its authors say it protects, and what it does for the Dutch themselves is simpler than that. It lets them stop hiding. A criminal law that reaches into a suitcase for a bottle of wine because a Jew made it in Judea is bigotry. Write the same law for tomatoes from Turkish-held Cyprus and every newspaper in Amsterdam would have the word for it by lunchtime, and the word doesn’t change when the tomatoes are Jewish.

The list at Schiphol has an ancestor, and it’s Dutch. Jews of Amsterdam reported at the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater on the Plantage Middenlaan, and Jews of Rotterdam at a warehouse called Loods 24, and trains took them to Westerbork in Drenthe. On arrival they were registered, allowed to change 250 guilders a family into camp money and made to hand the rest of their money and valuables to the Lippmann Rosenthal desk inside the camp. Before each transport they were registered again, searched and stripped of whatever they had left. The Dutch government built Westerbork in 1939 to lock up Jewish refugees who had crossed the border, and from 1942 it was guarded by SS men together with a rotating detail of Dutch civilian and military police. A train left every Tuesday from July 1942 to September 1944, 97,776 people in all, most of them on 68 transports to Auschwitz and 19 to Sobibor. A journalist in that camp, Philip Mechanicus, wrote in his diary that most of the Dutch guards were “benevolent and mild“ toward the inmates. So are the officers at Schiphol, I’m sure. That was never the question.

Six years for the wine, one for denying the Holocaust

The decree that took effect Sept. 22 makes bringing that bottle into the country an economic crime with a ceiling of six years in prison or a 103,000-euro fine for a deliberate violation, and a year for an accidental one. The cabinet chose the Sanctions Act of 1977 as its vehicle knowing that’s the number that comes with it, the same ceiling the Netherlands uses for breaking sanctions on Russia, so Efrat wine now sits on the shelf with Russian oil. Six years is the maximum the Dutch penal code keeps for a short list of people. Under Article 300, it’s what a man faces for beating another man until he dies. Burglary is six years, theft by breaking in or by two men working together. Possessing cocaine in more than a user’s amount is six years, and fencing stolen goods for a living is six years. Plain theft, the shoplifter’s charge, is four. Fraud is four. Embezzlement is three. A bottle of Gush Etzion wine in a carry-on is now filed with the killers and the burglars, and that’s the lighter half of the comparison. Insulting Jews as a group, under Article 137c, is one year, two if you make a habit or a trade of it or do it with others. Denying the Holocaust, which the Netherlands made an explicit crime on Oct. 1, 2024, five weeks before the Jew hunt, is one year. Public violence, the charge for that Jew hunt on Nov. 7, carries up to six years when someone gets hurt, the same ceiling as the wine. Prosecutors asked for two years for Sefa O., the one filmed kicking a man on the ground and chasing others, and on Dec. 24, 2024, the court gave him six months, and the four others it convicted got 2 1/2 months, a month, a month and 100 hours of community service. “The violence was influenced by the situation in Gaza, not by anti-Semitism,” the prosecutor said. So the law had the tools. The court gave the man who kicked a Jew on the ground six months, a man who says Westerbork never happened faces a year at most, and the ceiling for a Jew who lands at Schiphol with the wrong bottle is six. A cabinet that can tell a burglar from a shoplifter can tell a bottle of wine from a kilo of cocaine, and it gave the wine the cocaine number, in a country whose prime minister apologized six years ago for the last set of rules about Jews.

The rules themselves are a Royal Decree of July 13, 2026, the Temporary Sanctions Decree concerning Unlawful Settlements in the Territories Occupied by Israel, in force from Sept. 22 and set to expire in September 2029 unless parliament renews it. It bans importing, buying, selling and brokering anything wholly or partly obtained or produced in the places on the EU’s postcode list of Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Judea is where the word Jew comes from, and it’s on the list. The ban reaches into a traveler’s suitcase, souvenirs and gifts included, the purchase date doesn’t matter, and the government’s own guidance tells travelers to keep the packaging, labels or documents that show where a product came from. The government’s own explanation of the decree rests it “in particular” on the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of July 19, 2024, which is advisory, so it binds nobody, and which, as the barrister Natasha Hausdorff wrote in the Spectator this September, never looked at the borders Israel inherited in 1948, just assumed whose land it was and built everything on the assumption.

The Dutch answer will be that the decree exempts everything made inside the 1949 armistice lines, and it does, so wine from the Golan is a crime and wine from the Galilee is lunch. Foreign Minister Tom Berendsen said on Sept. 28 that the measure is not directed against Israel. The poster his customs service hung at Schiphol says “Israeli settlements.” One of them is telling the truth. The Netherlands has no sanctions decree for Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, which the EU calls an internal issue, and none for Moroccan-run Western Sahara, where the most the EU’s own court has ever required is a label on the tomatoes, not a prison term for the man carrying them. A measure that fires at Israel and leaves Turkey’s occupation and Morocco’s untouched is directed at exactly one thing, and the minister knows what it is.

The law for Palestinians fires Palestinians

The decree says its purpose is to keep Dutch money out of the towns it calls unlawful. The Palestinians who work in those towns didn’t get a vote. Before Oct. 7, about 40,000 of them worked in Israeli towns and industrial zones in Judea and Samaria, the factories, packing houses and date farms on the Dutch postcode list, and the Palestinian Authority itself banned that work in 2010 and put up a $50 million fund to help them quit. They didn’t quit, because the pay is roughly double what a job under the PA pays. Thousands lost their permits after Hamas started a war on Oct. 7, and many thousands still come to work. A boycott written in The Hague changes nothing about the math in Jericho except who gets paid.

You probably don’t remember SodaStream. I do. In 2014 its plant at Mishor Adumim, 10 minutes from Jerusalem, had 1,300 people on the line, 350 Israeli Jews, 450 Israeli Arabs and 500 Palestinians from Judea and Samaria, and the Palestinians drew the same pay and the same benefits as anyone doing the same job. Then the boycott campaign went after the company and its spokeswoman, the retailers dropped the machines and the plant moved to the Negev. Daniel Birnbaum, the CEO, said the move was about floor space, but he begged for permits to bring about 350 of his Palestinian workers into Israel and got 74. When the plant in Judea and Samaria shut in 2015, roughly 500 Palestinians were out of work. The 74 who followed the jobs into Israel lost their permits in 2016 and got them back the next year. The 500 left behind were the boycott’s price, and the Palestinians paid it.

Israel’s ambassador in The Hague, Zvi Vapni, posted on Sept. 22 that the ban is harming Samaritans, Palestinians and other local communities, and he named the tahini. Har Bracha Tahini is a small Samaritan family business on Mount Gerizim, the Cohen family’s, and the community’s high priest, Aabed-El, was one of its founders. The Samaritans are a few hundred people who’ve kept Passover on that mountain since before there was a Netherlands, and some serve in the Palestinian Authority’s government and some serve in the Israeli army. The Dutch order catches their tahini, and the postcode list it runs on takes in the Druze towns on the Golan too, so the law against Jews living on the Golan bans Druze apples.

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Mark Rutte already apologized for this

On Jan. 26, 2020, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Prime Minister Mark Rutte stood at the Auschwitz monument in Amsterdam and gave the first Dutch state apology for what the wartime authorities did. “Too little protection. Too little help. Too little recognition,” he said. He said the government had failed as guardian of justice and security, that too many civil servants carried out the occupier’s orders, and that the bitter consequences of drawing up the registers had never been properly recognized. That May, on the Dam, King Willem-Alexander said Jews had felt abandoned by his great-grandmother’s government, insufficiently supported even with words.

Four and a half years later, on the night of Nov. 7, 2024, men in Amsterdam who’d organized themselves on messaging apps for what they called a Jew hunt went after Israeli soccer fans in the streets. The next morning the king told President Isaac Herzog by phone that the Netherlands had failed its Jewish community during World War II, and “last night we failed again.” Prime Minister Dick Schoof said he was deeply ashamed it could happen in the Netherlands in 2024. Mayor Femke Halsema called the attackers antisemitic hit-and-run squads. The 1940s line isn’t mine. The king drew it 22 months before his customs service hung the poster at Schiphol.

The numbers since are the government’s own. Dutch authorities registered 867 antisemitic incidents in 2025, almost unchanged from 880 the year before, and with Jews under 0.3 percent of the population, antisemitism was 26 percent of all the discrimination offenses the prosecution service registered. In May 2026 CIDI asked the government to criminalize discrimination based on nationality to protect Israelis, among others. Four months later the poster went up at Schiphol.

The Dutch have always been good with lists

When the survivors came home in 1945, Amsterdam billed them for the ground rent on the years they’d spent in the camps, plus fines for paying late, and it took until 2016 for the city to agree to give back about $11 million of it. That’s the country. The registers Rutte apologized for were Dutch work: in January 1941 the occupier ordered every Jew to register and the Dutch registries recorded 159,806 names. In May 1941 the city of Amsterdam itself handed the Germans a map of Jewish homes, one dot for every 10 Jews. The Anne Frank House calls it unambiguous official collaboration. The national railway, NS, ran the trains from Westerbork to the German border on its own timetables and sent the occupier an invoice, 2.2 million pounds in today’s money for 102,000 Jews. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s one-sentence verdict on why three-quarters of Dutch Jews died, a share far above Belgium’s or France’s, is the efficiency of the German administration together with the willing cooperation of Dutch administrators and policemen. Of about 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands in 1940, 107,000 were deported and 5,000 came back.

Keep your papers

On Sept. 27, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told the Dutch diplomats in Ramallah to hand back their Israeli credentials within seven days, a month after he’d removed the Dutch from the Gaza coordination center in Kiryat Gat. That’s the right answer, and it won’t be the last one needed, because Prime Minister Rob Jetten’s government took office in February 2026 on a coalition agreement that keeps sanctions on members of Netanyahu’s government and their associates and renews Dutch cooperation with UNRWA, the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency, and in March the government restored its full 19 million euros. In August, Finland said it would leave UNRWA when its current agreement runs out at year’s end. Its development minister had said back in 2024 that not a single euro of Finnish money should go to Hamas. The Hague went the other way.

In November 2015, nine years before the Jew hunt and four days after the Paris attacks, Germany called off a soccer match against the Netherlands in Hanover with the chancellor already in town to watch it. The German magazine Stern reported that the warning came from Israeli intelligence. In July 2025 the Netherlands’ threat assessment of foreign states put Israel on its list, next to Russia, China and Iran, as a country trying to sway Dutch opinion. Among the reasons it gave was a report from Israel’s Diaspora Ministry on the Amsterdam violence, sent to Dutch politicians and journalists without going through the Dutch government.

The decree runs to 2029, the poster is up at Schiphol, and Dutch Customs is authorized to open any suitcase it decides is a risk, ask where the wine came from and tell the traveler to keep his papers. The Dutch state has asked Jews for their papers before.

This time we answer. Customs has put in writing, on its own page for travelers, that a traveler’s origin, nationality, religion and appearance are not grounds for a check, so hold it to that. If you’re pulled aside at Schiphol, write down the flight, the time and every question, and report it to Meld Antisemitisme, CIDI’s reporting center, whose count fell last year partly because Dutch Jews, in its own words, got tired of reporting. If you’re Dutch, tell your member of parliament that the decree dies in 2029 unless parliament votes to keep it. They kept the register last time, and this time we keep the record.

As for me, I’ve got no plans to visit the Netherlands. I’ll be home in Israel with a glass of wine from the Gush and a square of chocolate from the Hebron Hills, no papers required.

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For the first time in more than 20 years, somebody tried to hijack a plane bound for Israel. Let me tell you what he had. The co-pilot of flydubai FZ1073, Dubai to Tel Aviv, is Omani. He had a locked cockpit door. He had the controls. He had a knife. He had 174 people behind him, 27 of them children, almost all of them Israelis. An hour from Ben Gurion he turned to the captain next to him and stabbed him. Again. Again. Then he pointed the plane at the ground. Fourteen thousand feet in under 30 seconds. Thirty-one thousand feet a minute at the worst of it. “One pilot stabs the other and tries to do a 9/11,” an Israeli official said.

In the cabin, nobody knew any of that yet. All they knew was the drop. “There were moments when we were sure this was the end,” one passenger said. All those kids, and the plane was falling out of the sky.

You know what happened instead?

Someone shouted “stabbing.” Tzvika Manes’ wife was standing by the cockpit when she heard the screams, and she yelled at a relief pilot sitting right there to get in. He called for help. Manes, a finance executive, went in with two other men. Yitzhak Lieber was in there with them. A woman named Meital said her husband “immediately understood what was happening and rushed to the front of the plane.” They broke the cockpit door. They pulled him out. They tied him up. “I’m covered in blood,” Manes said. “It was insane.”

Then they turned around and treated the man he’d stabbed, Capt. Smit Machchhar, from India. There’s footage. Israelis in the cockpit giving first aid to the captain and holding the door, a doctor and a nurse from the cabin working beside them, while a second crew riding in the back as passengers took the controls and steadied the plane.

Down here, around 8:30 a.m., the plane’s transponder started signaling an emergency, then a hijacking. The jets went up. The prime minister and the defense minister went into a room. The whole country stared at a little plane on a phone screen until it disappeared. First word was a fight between the pilots, and we all exhaled. Then the passengers started talking.

The landing’s on video. The whole cabin clapping and singing Am Yisrael Chai, Od Avinu Chai. The people of Israel live. Our Father still lives. Jews have been singing those words since 1965, when we sang them for the Jews locked behind the Iron Curtain. Sixty-one years later a planeload of Israelis sang them onto a runway in Tabuk, in a country that has no relations with Israel, with a stabbed captain up front and a terrorist under guard behind them. The captain? Alive. The kids? Every one of them. The Omani? Him too. They could have done anything to that man up there and not a soul on earth would have said a word. They handed him to the Saudis, and the airport at Tabuk said both pilots went to hospital, the man who was stabbed and the man who did it.

By 4:30 p.m. Bibi was talking about them. “I salute these heroes on the flight from Dubai who showed resourcefulness and exceptional courage. They saved many lives and prevented a grave disaster.” Defense Minister Israel Katz went further, calling it “an attempted jihadist terrorist attack that was thwarted only thanks to the heroism of several Israeli passengers.” After that, Israel did what Israel does. It went to get its people. El Al offered a plane. The IDF was told to send one, into Saudi Arabia. By late afternoon they were boarding a flight home, due in that evening, in time for the end of the holiday.

All of this happened on Sukkot. What kept them alive was the hand of God and the Israelis it was holding. That’s a Sukkot miracle. That morning every synagogue in Israel sang the holiday psalms, and there’s a line in there that goes, “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.” We were singing it while that plane was in the air. One hundred seventy-four people are going to spend the rest of their lives declaring it.

None of this is new. On Sept. 11, 2001, an Israeli named Danny Lewin, a former commando sitting in row 9 of American Flight 11, got out of his seat and went at the hijackers. He was one of the first people killed that morning. In July 1976, hijackers held Israelis hostage at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda, and Israel sent its commandos to bring them home. Fifty years later, the Israeli passengers of FZ1073 pulled off their own Entebbe rescue, while still in the air, and this time Danny Lewin had company.

Now look at the week he picked. Israeli airlines haven’t flown to the UAE since the war with Iran, so Israelis fly home on Gulf airlines, and he knew exactly where that plane was headed. On Monday, Israel and the UAE confirmed that Netanyahu had quietly visited Abu Dhabi. On Tuesday, Iran’s top negotiator warned that “no infrastructure will remain safe” in this region. Wednesday afternoon, with the passengers still stuck in Tabuk, a senior Iranian, Mohsen Rezaei, warned the Gulf that “hosting the ‘Butcher of Gaza’ will also not have favorable consequences.” Go back to Tuesday. Bibi stood at Tel Nof air base and warned our enemies. “Don’t mess with us. Our long arm will reach you anywhere, and at any time.” Wednesday morning, somebody tried us anyway, and found out the long arm was already on board, sitting in the rows behind him. Not the airline. Not a resolution. Israelis.

That’s Israel, and it’s the one thing the liars can’t explain. When they scream “killers,” we’re giving first aid on a cockpit floor. When they scream “genocide,” we’re counting children onto a runway. When they scream “resistance,” this is what it looks like, a co-pilot stabbing the man beside him and aiming a full airplane at the ground. So a few questions for the people who’ve had so much to say for two years. You think this was peaceful? You think this brings a Palestinian state one inch closer? You think this helps the cause you’ve been chanting about? Let’s be very clear. Cowards with knives do any cause more harm than good. Zohran Mamdani. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Abdul El-Sayed, her pick and now the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. Cat got your tongue? How are you going to downplay this one? Put Wednesday next to what Hamas did with knives on Oct. 7 and tell me who the killers are.

So yeah. The world can keep its word for us. We’ll keep the 27 kids. They can keep their resolutions. We’ll keep the captain. They can keep Mamdani. We’ll keep the men who ran at a knife.

Israelis don’t sit back and watch. Not on the ground. Not at 34,000 feet, with the floor falling out from under us. Somebody shouts, and we get up. To my brothers and sisters on that flight who took matters into their own hands, this country owes you, and so do I. Am Yisrael Chai. I have never been prouder to be Israeli. You saved every life on that plane. Including his.

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