This week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei, contains a commandment that sounds remarkably modern:
“Thou shalt not have in thy bag diverse weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not have in thy house diverse measures, a great and a small.” –Deuteronomy 25:13–14
The Torah is describing an ancient marketplace. A merchant cannot keep one weight for buying and another for selling, choosing whichever benefits him.
These spool-shaped weights from Tiryns, in Bronze Age Greece, weighed about the same as their counterparts in other parts of Europe and the Middle East.
But the commandment reaches far beyond stones and scales. It is about maintaining two versions of the truth.
Today, the second weight might be a spreadsheet, a rent roll, an appraisal, a tax return or a loan application. It might be one set of books showing how a business is actually performing and another presented to the bank. It might even be one transaction reflecting what was actually paid for a property and another showing the lender a different price.
The technology changes. The commandment does not.
That message has become uncomfortable in light of recent financial fraud cases involving members of Orthodox Jewish communities. The Real Deal has documented mortgage schemes involving inflated financial statements, false rents and properties represented at different transaction prices to lenders.
But those cases are only a contemporary illustration of a problem the Torah identified thousands of years ago.
“A perfect and just weight shalt thou have; a perfect and just measure shalt thou have” – Deuteronomy 25:15
The word “perfect” matters. Judaism demands extraordinary precision. We measure the dimensions of a sukkah. We calculate when Shabbat begins and ends. We examine the letters of a Torah scroll and mezuzah. We measure matzah and wine.
The Torah demands that same precision in business.
An observant Jew cannot be meticulous about measurements in the synagogue and casual about numbers in the office. An accurate set of books is also an expression of religious observance. So is an honest closing statement. So is giving the bank the same numbers that describe the actual business.
Perhaps that is why the Torah says not merely that we should not use two different weights. It says we should not have them. Neither outside the home nor inside.
Do not create the second ledger. Do not prepare the alternate transaction. Do not keep a different measure available for when it becomes convenient.
The Torah then uses unusually strong language:
“For all that do such things, even all that do unrighteously, are an abomination unto the LORD thy God.” – Deuteronomy 25:16
There is no exemption because everyone does it, because the bank can afford it, because the loan will probably be repaid or because manipulating the numbers has become customary.
Ki Teitzei offers a simple accounting principle for a complicated financial world: integrity.
The Torah does not ask whether the numbers balance. It demands that they are true.
Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle once watched 20 passengers board a flight using wheelchairs. When the plane landed, only three needed wheelchairs to get off.
“We are healing so many people,” he joked.
Airline executives and frequent travelers have complained for years about what has become known as “Jetway Jesus”: passengers who seemingly need a wheelchair to board but miraculously walk after landing.
Some of those passengers undoubtedly have legitimate needs. Being able to walk off an airplane does not mean someone can walk a mile through an enormous airport. Disabilities can be invisible, intermittent and complicated.
But the incentives to game the system are also obvious.
Airlines for America estimated that its members were providing about 1.77 million wheelchair assists every month in 2018—more than 21 million annually. American Airlines alone reported more than eight million wheelchair-assistance requests in 2023.
The Government Accountability Office found that some international flights can arrive with 50 to 80 wheelchair requests. More tellingly, airport and airline stakeholders told the GAO that some passengers request wheelchairs because they believe assistance will move them through the airport faster.
Why wouldn’t they?
Wheelchair assistance can come with an attendant through a sprawling terminal, help navigating security, preboarding and early access to increasingly scarce overhead-bin space. The passenger pays nothing.
The airline does. So do the passengers waiting for attendants and chairs that have been diverted elsewhere. And ultimately so does the genuinely disabled traveler whose assistance is delayed because a finite system is overwhelmed.
The instinctive solution is to catch the fakers. It is also perhaps the wrong one.
A gate agent cannot determine whether the person standing up from a wheelchair has arthritis, multiple sclerosis, heart disease—or no disability at all. Requiring medical documentation would create another bureaucracy while inevitably making travel harder for people who actually need help.
There is a much simpler answer:
Make wheelchair assistance easier to get, but less valuable to game.
Europe offers the beginning of a model.
In America, wheelchair assistance through an airport is generally the responsibility of the airline. Airlines commonly hire contractors, meaning multiple carriers operating in the same terminal maintain separate obligations for moving passengers through the same building.
Europe largely puts that responsibility on the airport.
That makes intuitive sense. Airports operate the terminal, elevators, escalators, trains and other common infrastructure. Mobility through the terminal can be another common airport service.
America should consider adopting that model—and then go further.
Imagine the passenger’s journey.
At the curb, anyone who needs mobility assistance gets it. No doctor’s note. No interrogation. No charge. The airport’s common mobility service gets that passenger through the terminal and to the gate.
But a wheelchair is transportation, not a Fast Pass.
Needing help traveling three-quarters of a mile through Newark does not necessarily mean someone cannot wait in the ordinary security process. Assistance should help passengers through security without automatically moving them ahead of everyone else.
The same principle should apply at the gate.
A passenger who needs help crossing the terminal does not necessarily need help boarding an airplane. Passengers requiring an aisle chair, additional boarding time, assistance transferring to a seat or other physical accommodation should continue to preboard.
Someone who simply needed a ride to the gate can board with the appropriate regular group.
That distinction matters because early boarding has acquired real economic value. When airlines charge for checked luggage and overhead-bin space becomes scarce, getting onto the aircraft first means getting the bin. Wheelchair assistance should not be the way to acquire it.
Arrival could work similarly.
Passengers who need physical assistance getting off the aircraft receive it. Where operationally appropriate, assistance requiring an attendant could occur after ordinary deplaning rather than creating another potential time advantage. Current federal rules would need modification before airlines could impose a universal last-off requirement, but the principle is worth considering.
The objective is not to punish someone for needing help. It is to make assistance neutral.
And then measure it.
DOT and airports should publish wheelchair-assistance requests per 1,000 passengers, broken down by airport, airline and perhaps domestic and international routes. If comparable flights routinely generate radically different assistance rates, operators and regulators would finally have data to investigate rather than anecdotes about miraculous recoveries on the jetway.
Most importantly, none of these reforms requires deciding who is disabled. That is the elegance of changing the incentive instead of policing the passenger.
The wheelchair should get that passenger exactly what was requested: Mobility. Nothing more—and nothing less.
A sprawling mortgage fraud investigation has been working its way through a corner of American real estate with deep connections to the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
The Real Deal spent months mapping the people and companies caught up in it. Its conclusion was striking: “A commercial mortgage fraud scandal is getting big and ugly.”
The publication estimated that the financial scale of suspected fraud “likely runs well into the billions,” although the exact amount remains unknown. Fannie Mae alone claimed roughly $700 million of exposure to eight sponsors it had blacklisted, according to an internal email obtained by the publication.
Federal investigators have already secured guilty pleas and prison sentences. Others remain under investigation or scrutiny and have not been charged with wrongdoing.
The Real Deal noted another common thread among the sprawling cast of borrowers, brokers, lawyers and title companies it examined: “Many have ties to each other and to heavily Orthodox Jewish communities in Lakewood, New Jersey; Brooklyn; and Monsey, New York.”
The Real Deal graphic of players in wide mortgage fraud, July 2025
The schemes themselves were often surprisingly straightforward.
One method was to inflate a property’s financial performance, particularly its trailing 12-month financial statements, making the building appear more profitable and therefore capable of supporting a larger mortgage.
Another was even more audacious: create a second transaction.
The Real Deal calls it “the flip.” A property would be purchased at one price and then purportedly sold to another party at a substantially higher price. The second transaction could involve an affiliate or straw buyer and no genuine exchange of money. The higher fictional price was then presented to the lender to support a larger mortgage.
In one transaction, the deception became almost literal.
Moshe Silber, Fredrick Schulman and their co-conspirators acquired the Williamsburg of Cincinnati apartment complex for $70 million in March 2019. But that wasn’t the price presented to the lender and Fannie Mae.
Using a stolen identity and fraudulent documents, the conspirators presented a purchase contract for $95.85 million. The lender consequently funded a $74.25 million mortgage—more than the actual purchase price of the property.
And there weren’t merely two numbers on paper. There were two closings on the same day. The Justice Department says one closing reflected the true $70 million purchase price. The other reflected the fraudulent $95.85 million price presented to the lenders.
Silber ultimately pleaded guilty and received 30 months in prison. At sentencing, Judge Robert Kirsch described the conduct as involving layers of “chicanery and deceit.”
A second property followed a similar pattern.
Troy Technology Park in Michigan was actually acquired for $42.7 million. Aron Puretz and his co-conspirators submitted documents supporting an inflated $70 million purchase price, helping obtain a $45 million JPMorgan loan. Puretz ultimately received five years in prison and was ordered to pay more than $22 million in restitution.
Other cases involved different methods.
Jacob and Aron Deutsch pleaded guilty to fraud charges arising from a scheme involving Freddie Mac and HUD. According to prosecutors, false rent rolls and leases were supplied to lenders and appraisers, including leases identifying tenants who didn’t actually live in apartments or overstating rents. Vacant apartments were even staged with furniture to deceive inspectors into believing they were occupied.
The investigation has reached far beyond a handful of borrowers.
The Real Deal’s examination includes sponsors, brokers, brokerages, attorneys and title companies. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have blacklisted or restricted various individuals and businesses while the Federal Housing Finance Agency and other government agencies have investigated suspicious transactions. Some people identified by The Real Deal have not been charged with any crime, an important distinction in a scandal whose perimeter remains unsettled.
The investigation also raises uncomfortable questions about the institutions surrounding the borrowers.
Title companies had visibility into transactions. Brokers arranged financing. Lenders underwrote the loans. Attorneys prepared documents. The Real Deal notes that no lenders or underwriters had been indicted or accused of wrongdoing by federal agencies as of its investigation, while asking how much responsibility lenders have to ensure borrowers and transactions are legitimate.
Federal authorities have already been investigating for years. The prosecutions have involved the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, with investigations by the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s inspector general, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and HUD inspector general. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have conducted their own reviews and imposed restrictions on industry participants.
There is another institution worth considering: the community itself.
The Real Deal did not identify these communities incidentally. Lakewood, Monsey and Brooklyn contain some of America’s largest and most intensely religious Orthodox Jewish populations. The people implicated in the scandal cannot be generalized to those communities, and many people appearing in the broader investigation have never been charged with wrongdoing.
Yet when a pattern becomes significant enough that a national real estate publication specifically identifies connections among participants and heavily Orthodox communities, it becomes reasonable for the community to ask what is happening in its midst.
One of the convicted participants ultimately asked that question of himself.
Before his sentencing in June 2025, Boruch Drillman apologized to his family, investigators and the financial institutions he had helped defraud. He had pleaded guilty to participating in a $165 million mortgage fraud conspiracy and ultimately received five years of probation after cooperating with investigators.
Then he addressed the contradiction between his conduct and the community and values with which he identified. “I tarnished the Jewish people, and I failed to live by my values that I claim to hold so dear.”
Federal prosecutors can investigate fraudulent closings. Fannie Mae can blacklist borrowers. Freddie Mac can restrict vendors. Judges can impose prison sentences and restitution.
But who is policing the values before the government has to police the people?
It is very strange that Sen. Jon Ossoff would make fun of Donald Trump.
Trump has many more followers and, candidly, is much better at insulting people than just about anyone. So it begs the question as to Ossoff’s motivation.
At an Atlanta rally, Ossoff mocked Trump for supposedly not wanting to do the job of president, saying Trump wanted to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace,” referring to Trump aide Natalie Harp. He later doubled down, describing Harp and other aides around Trump as a kind of “security blanket” to make him feel good about himself.
Ossoff had to know that would provoke Trump’s ire and generate targeted insults.
And it did.
Trump mocked Ossoff as a “Pee-wee Herman” look-alike, while White House officials piled on with insults of their own.
But those insults would go out to millions of Trump followers. Ossoff’s supporters and anti-Trump people would simultaneously pile on online. Suddenly, Ossoff becomes the topic of conversation, and people start talking about him running for president in 2028. Indeed, that is already part of the discussion surrounding the episode.
It is all manufactured to improve his visibility.
Ugly. Vapid. And that’s politics.
But what about Rep. Jamie Raskin claiming that Trump manufactured the antisemitism-in-schools narrative?
Raskin seized on a whistleblower complaint from former Justice Department attorney Haley Van Erem, who alleged that the Trump administration’s investigations of antisemitism at Harvard, Brown and Columbia were driven by predetermined political objectives and, in some instances, pursued without sufficient factual or legal grounds. The Justice Department disputes those allegations and stands behind its investigations.
Raskin went considerably further in describing what the report meant. He accused Trump officials of abusing Title VI investigations to attack universities while using “antisemitic discrimination as a pretext and a ‘ruse.’”
That is not a silly swipe at Trump. It is an anti-factual smear about Jews under attack.
Why would Raskin do that?
In politics, it is to generate views and, consequently, power. He might get picked up by Hasan Piker or others who trade in Jew hatred online. He chums for antisemites to get their support for his own personal brand while simultaneously scrubbing any scent of Jew from his person.
That is a whole different kettle of fish than silly insults about Trump.
And it says terrible things about the state of the Democratic Party, that Jewish progressive politicians are whitewashing antisemitism in an appeal to votes from antisemites.
Two decades ago, Israel had a Jewish mafia problem.
Crime families including the Abergils, Rosensteins, Abutbuls and Alperons fought over drugs, gambling and territory. Their wars spilled into public spaces. In 2003, an attempt to assassinate mob boss Zeev Rosenstein with a bomb in Tel Aviv killed three innocent bystanders and wounded about 50.
Israel responded aggressively. Police investigations, prosecutions and financial enforcement eventually broke much of the power of the major Jewish crime organizations.
But something unexpected followed.
An analysis by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) cites a comprehensive government report that “suggests that the collapse of Jewish crime organizations in the early 2000s transferred criminal activity to Arab towns, where police presence is lacking and enforcement is ineffective.”
Arab communities offered criminal organizations opportunities to flourish: illegal weapons, black-market lending, protection rackets, socioeconomic problems and deep distrust of police.
The enforcement gap was enormous. The State Comptroller found approximately 9,200 shooting incidents in 2019 alone, while indictments were filed in only 3% to 5% of investigated shooting cases between 2017 and 2019. Government gun-collection campaigns recovered just 15 weapons in 2017 and 19 in 2019.
Criminal organizations grew from gangs into economic powers.
In 2021, Public Security Minister Omer Barlev told the Knesset that crime families were infiltrating government spending intended for Arab communities by threatening bidders and extracting protection payments.
MANY ILLEGAL weapons in the Arab community are stolen from Israeli army bases, while others are smuggled from the borders with Jordan and Egypt. Here, illegal weapons are displayed after a police operation against illegal gun dealers, in Nazareth in 2021. (photo: MICHAEL GILADI/FLASH90)
Four years later, Tira Mayor Mamoun Abd al-Hay told a Knesset committee: “The city is run today by the organized crime groups, not by the police.” He called organized crime “an economic enterprise for all intents and purposes.”
The Abraham Initiatives found that 71.7% of the Arab homicides it could classify in 2023 involved conflicts between criminal organizations or family and clan disputes. Some victims were innocent relatives murdered in revenge attacks.
Israel briefly showed that the trajectory could be reversed.
The Bennett-Lapid government launched Safe Track and Government Resolution 549, a five-year, roughly NIS 2.4 billion campaign against crime and violence in Arab society. Police worked with tax and financial authorities to attack the organizations rather than simply arrest individual shooters.
Arab crime deaths fell in 2022.
But the campaign did not dismantle the organizations. The death toll reached 244 in 2023 and remained above 200 in each of the next two years.
Now WAFA reports that 151 Arabs have already been killed in crime and violence inside Israel in 2026.
That number provides a striking update to the FirstOneThrough article Which Arab Murders Count? published in May. At the time, roughly six Arab Israelis were being murdered in internal violence for every West Bank Arab killed by a West Bank Jew.
The disparity has grown substantially. Using the UN’s broader count of 18 West Bank Arab deaths linked to settler attacks this year—including deaths attributed to Jewish civilians, Israeli forces or disputed responsibility—the comparison is now more than eight to one. Using only the 12 deaths the UN attributes directly to civilians, it exceeds twelve to one.
The Israeli government knows the dimensions of the problem. The State Comptroller launched another audit this year into organized crime and its penetration of municipal tenders after previously finding that nearly 90% of contractors were required to pay protection money. The Knesset National Security Committee has repeatedly examined organized crime, illegal weapons and the low rate at which Arab murders are solved.
Arab organizations blame inadequate policing, discrimination and underinvestment. Police point to illegal weapons, entrenched criminal organizations and witnesses afraid to cooperate.
All may be true. The question that remains is whether anyone will do anything about the runaway Arab Israeli violence that kills hundreds of people each year.
She is the woman in pink disrupting congressional hearings, confronting politicians and attacking American foreign policy. Since October 7, CODEPINK, which she co-founded, has made opposition to Israel one of its most visible causes.
The image is deliberately grassroots: activists, homemade signs, street protests and women getting dragged from hearing rooms.
Follow the money, however, and a very different CODEPINK emerges.
Start with Benjamin herself.
She was born Susan Benjamin to Jewish parents on Long Island and later chose the name Medea—the mythological woman who, in the best-known version of the story, murders her own children – perhaps a tell about her intention to destroy America and the Jewish State.
“I know indeed what evils I am about to commit, but my spirit is stronger than my resolves, which is the source of all man’s worst evils.” – Euripides (480-406BCE) in “Medea”
Benjamin is president of Arc of Justice, formerly called the Benjamin Fund, a private foundation substantially capitalized by wealth from her parents, including the estate of her mother, Rose Benjamin, and money from her father, Long Island real-estate developer Alvin Benjamin.
Public filings show the foundation held nearly $48 million at the end of 2022. A 2026 investigation reported assets exceeding $51 million by the end of 2023. That foundation has funded CODEPINK.
But that’s only one fortune. The second enters through another CODEPINK co-founder: Jodie Evans.
In 2017, Evans married tech multimillionaire Neville Roy Singham of Shaghai. That same year, Singham sold ThoughtWorks in a transaction valued at $785 million.
Curiously, Evans, who had previously criticized China’s human-rights record, became increasingly supportive of Beijing. CODEPINK eventually launched its “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign. And The New York Times reported that more than $1.4 million flowed to CODEPINK after 2017 from two organizations connected to Singham.
Investigators are following parts of his financial network. Congress is examining nonprofits associated with him, foreign influence and nonprofit financing. Lawmakers have separately sought investigation of CODEPINK for possible foreign-agent violations. [see below]
CODEPINK founders Medea Benjamin (left) and Jodie Evans (right)
While CODEPINK presents itself as a grassroots antiwar organization, it is backed by the 0.1% of America’s wealthiest families. Much like George Soros, they are using their wealth to attack the West, and since October 7, 2023, Israel with greater frequency.
Perhaps it is time Americans should look beyond the pink shirts.
When elitists with ties to China and American adversaries, dress up as grassroot movements and start to attack America and American interests, people should investigate and demand transparency.
Three years ago, Palestinian Arabs thought October 7 might change their future by changing Israel. Polls show how much that ambition has changed.
In December 2023, 72% of Palestinian Arabs said Hamas was correct to launch the October 7 attack.70% believed Hamas would emerge victorious.63% preferred armed struggle as the best way to achieve Palestinian goals.
Nearly three years of war produced something very different.
According to PCPSR’s August 2026 poll, only 20% now believe Hamas won the Gaza war. Hamas political support has fallen to 24%. Half of Palestinian Arabs say “armed resistance” (aka massacring Jewish civilians) failed to protect them or end the “Israeli occupation” and instead brought destruction. Among Gazans, 65% say so.
Support for armed struggle has fallen from 63% to 27%. 44% now choose negotiations as the most effective strategy.
Their priorities have shifted with it.
Asked in the August 2026 poll what the next Palestinian legislature should address, Palestinian Arabs answered:
19% — Unifying the West Bank and Gaza
18% — Stopping the killing in Gaza
15% — Improving the economy
11% — Rebuilding Gaza
10% — Confronting “settler terrorism”
9% — Combating corruption
Settler violence ranks fifth.
That is a very different Palestinian Arab story from the one dominating international headlines. Palestinian Arabs put reunification, ending the Gaza fighting, economic recovery and rebuilding Gaza ahead of attacks from West Bank Jews.
While the ambitions of October 2023 were directed outward, towards ending the Jewish State, the priorities of August 2026 are directed inward, to unification, rebuilding and recovering.
And Hamas remains part of that project.
The Palestinian Authority wants candidates in the coming elections to accept the commitments of the Palestine Liberation Organization, including its agreements with Israel. 66% of Palestinian Arabs oppose that requirement. Only 27% support it.
Because Palestinian Arabs envision Hamas remaining part of their future.
Asked what Hamas would become if it gave up its weapons, 53% said it would remain both an armed resistance and political movement. Another 36% said it would become solely a political movement. That means 89% see Hamas continuing as a political movement in some form.
There is a historical lesson in what happens after a genocidal society launches a disastrous war and loses.
Postwar Germany did not rebuild by simply disarming the Nazi Party and inviting it to contest elections. The Nazi Party was abolished and banned. Its political structures were dismantled. Germany’s reconstruction required a break with the movement that had led it into catastrophe.
Palestinian Arabs are not making that equivalent break. While they increasingly recognize that Hamas’s war failed, they want Hamas to be part of the Palestinian future.
As the western media and United Nations narrows a focus on violence committed by Israeli Jews against Palestinian Arabs, those same Arabs are no longer focused on those Jews. Instead, the Arabs prioritize rebuilding after the disaster while maintaining the eliminationist ideology in their society for a future war.
Eight Muslim countries issued a joint statement Sunday condemning Israel’s rejection of the latest roadmap for implementing President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. They are: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia.
They have no formal collective name. So call them the Muslim Eight — the M8.
Together, the M8 countries have roughly 817 million people and contain forty percent of the world’s Muslims. Indonesia and Pakistan alone are two of the world’s largest Muslim-majority countries.
The M8 was assembled by U.S. President Donald Trump with a specific purpose.
On September 23, 2025, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Trump convened the leaders and senior officials of these eight Arab and Muslim countries. The goal was to end the Gaza War and build a day-after framework. Trump needed Muslim and Arab countries with street-cred in Gaza to make that happen, as well as a history of operating functioning governments.
Egypt controlled the critical border with Gaza and, together with Qatar, was central to negotiations with Hamas. Jordan brought its relationship with Israel, the Palestinian Authority and sensitive holy sites in Jerusalem. Saudi Arabia brought money, Arab leadership and the enormous prize of possible normalization with Israel. The UAE brought capital, administrative expertise and an existing relationship with Israel. Turkey brought regional power and channels to Hamas. Pakistan and Indonesia brought two enormous Muslim populations and legitimacy extending well beyond the Arab world.
Trump assembled M8 to be directed at the problem in Gaza. Help end the war. Get the hostages released. Stabilize the ceasefire. Keep Hamas from returning to power. Reconstruct Gaza. Support a new Palestinian administration. Reform the Palestinian Authority. Create a workable security structure.
Six days after Trump’s meeting, the M8 jointly welcomed his Gaza peace proposal and committed themselves to working with the United States and the parties to implement it.
When Hamas responded to Trump’s proposal in October, the M8 responded together. When disputes developed over Rafah, the M8 responded together. When Trump established his Board of Peace to oversee Gaza’s transition, all eight announced together that they would join.
Trump had created a Muslim steering committee for Gaza. But soon, the M8 discovered it could steer other things.
By December, it was collectively defending UNRWA, even as Trump’s postwar architecture was establishing new institutions to govern, finance and rebuild Gaza.
In March 2026, the M8 jointly condemned Israeli restrictions at Al-Aqsa Mosque/ the Jewish Temple Mount. Later that month, it issued another statement about Muslim and Christian access to Jerusalem’s holy sites.
In April, it jointly declared that the entire 144-dunam Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif compound was exclusively a Muslim place of worship and backed the Jordanian Waqf’s authority there.
The M8 began issuing collective positions on Israeli settlements, Israeli sovereignty measures, “settler violence” in Judea and Samaria.
None of that was why Trump assembled the M8.
The Board of Peace was created around a specific Gaza program: maintain the ceasefire, demilitarize Gaza, establish transitional Palestinian governance, rebuild the territory, reform Palestinian institutions and create conditions for a different future.
Yet the M8 now speaks on subjects well outside of Gaza with the institutional weight it acquired by becoming Trump’s chosen Arab-Muslim partner. A coalition created to solve Gaza has become a platform to pressure Israel over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, UNRWA and Palestinian statehood.
Trump gave the M8 a mandate to help fix Gaza. The M8 is turning it into a mandate to lecture Israel.
Charts regularly circulate showing the countries with the most “unicorns” — private companies that achieve valuations of at least $1 billion. Divide the totals by population and tiny Israel suddenly jumps toward the top of the world.
But the headline number obscures a three more interesting stories.
Israel did not spend 75 years steadily accumulating unicorns. Most of its unicorn phenomenon is remarkably recent. And many of the companies created by Israelis aren’t headquartered in Israel at all.
Then there is what these companies actually do.
Put those three pieces together — when they emerged, where they are headquartered and what they sell — and Israel’s unicorn story looks like a specialized company-production machine for today’s world.
The Unicorn Explosion
In 2011, only 16 new unicorns were created in the entire world. Israel was hardly overflowing with them either. TechAviv data show Israel produced just four new unicorns in 2015 and nine in 2019.
Then the curve turned sharply upward.
Israel produced 19 new unicorns in 2020 and 42 in 2021. By December 2021, TechAviv counted 79 Israeli-founded unicorns. By December 2022, there were 98.
That means the Israeli unicorn story people now take for granted is largely a phenomenon of the last several years.
“Israel ranked first globally in terms of its number of technology unicorns per capita. As of 2025, the country’s startup scene contained 90 active tech unicorns, and raised billions of dollars in investments annually. These are indicators of an exceptionally well performing startup ecosystem, which forms the basis of the country’s robust technology industry.” – Statista.com
The cheap-money technology boom certainly helped. Valuations soared everywhere in 2020 and 2021. But Israel’s performance was exceptional even within that global frenzy.
Israeli Unicorn Doesn’t Necessarily Mean in Israel
Of the 79 Israeli-founded unicorns counted at the end of 2021, only 33 — 42% — were headquartered in Israel.
The rest were spread around the world:
19 in New York.
15 in Silicon Valley.
5 in Boston.
3 in London.
2 in Los Angeles.
1 in Singapore.
1 in Chicago.
A year later, the ratio was almost identical. Of 98 Israeli-founded unicorns in December 2022, 40 were headquartered in Israel and 58 abroad. Silicon Valley had 24 and New York had 19.
So roughly three out of every five Israeli-founded unicorns were headquartered outside Israel.
That matters when looking at those viral country rankings. A ranking based strictly on corporate headquarters can count an Israeli-founded company as American. A ranking based upon where the entrepreneurs came from can count the same company as Israeli.
Israel is creating companies for a market vastly larger than Israel.
What Israel Is Creating
Israeli unicorns aren’t distributed evenly across the economy. The country’s technology ecosystem has become increasingly concentrated around enterprise software, fintech and cybersecurity.
The Israel Innovation Authority found that these three categories represented 29.4% of companies founded in 2013 but 42% by 2021. By 2022 they were attracting 53.4% of all investment in Israeli startups.
Cybersecurity is particularly extraordinary.
Dealroom currently counts 26 cybersecurity unicorns headquartered in Israel. It calculates that Israel is 9.15 times more represented in cybersecurity unicorns than its overall share of the world’s unicorn population would predict. Tel Aviv alone ranks behind only the Bay Area in Dealroom’s global cyber-unicorn count.
And that is based on headquarters. It therefore doesn’t fully capture Israeli-founded cyber companies headquartered in places such as New York and Boston.
Israel also over-indexes in semiconductors, health technology and medtech, although nowhere close to its extraordinary concentration in cyber.
Meanwhile, the composition of Israeli technology has been changing.
Communications — historically one of Israel’s great technology strengths, including hardware infrastructure and chips — represented about 8% of newly established Israeli technology companies in 2013. By 2022 it was just 1.7%.
” In H1 2025, High-Tech accounted for 57% of all Israeli exports, the highest share ever recorded. The export mix points to a clear trend: 72% software services versus 28% High-Tech industry. This means Israel is increasingly reliant on software services exports, while the High-Tech industry, including the defense industry, has been relatively stagnant. Israel increasingly went from building the pipes to building the software running through them.” – Israel Innovation Authority
Israel Invents. America Scales.
That industry mix helps explain the geography.
A cybersecurity company potential customers are banks, governments and Fortune 500 corporations around the planet. An enterprise-software company can develop its technology in Tel Aviv while putting executives and salespeople close to customers in New York. A fintech company can maintain Israeli engineering operations while establishing its corporate headquarters in the world’s largest financial market.
And those American headquarters aren’t simply mailing addresses.
In 2023, the United States–Israel Business Alliance identified 88 Israeli-founded unicorns with global or regional headquarters in the United States. Together, those companies employed nearly 62,000 people worldwide.
The available data do not establish how many of those employees were specifically in America, so the 62,000 should not be described as American jobs. But broader state studies show that Israeli-founded companies have become meaningful American employers. In California alone, Israeli-founded companies directly employed more than 14,000 people, with their broader economic activity supporting more than 22,000 jobs.
That economic relationship runs in both directions.
American venture-capital and private-equity firms finance Israeli entrepreneurs. Israeli founders establish U.S. headquarters and hire American salespeople, executives and other employees. American corporations then acquire some of the most successful companies, bringing Israeli-developed technology inside American businesses.
Google’s acquisition of Israeli-founded Wiz for $32 billion provides an extraordinary recent example. Cisco agreed to buy Israeli-founded CyberArk for approximately $25 billion in 2025. Intel’s earlier $15.3 billion acquisition of Mobileye demonstrated the same model on a massive scale. Three Israeli technology companies. More than $70 billion of announced acquisition value. Three American buyers.
The relationship is particularly important because Israel’s strongest sectors overlap with technologies the United States increasingly considers strategic: cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and advanced computing.
The Israeli and American ecosystems therefore aren’t competing with one another for unicorns. They are often parts of the same machine.
Israel supplies entrepreneurs, engineers, military-trained cyber expertise and dense technical networks. The United States supplies enormous customers, deep pools of capital, experienced executives and the world’s largest technology exit market.
The result is a peculiar multinational organism: Israeli-created, frequently American-headquartered, American-financed and globally sold.
A Very Young Herd
Israel’s unicorn phenomenon is not simply impressive because a country of roughly ten million people has produced so many billion-dollar technology companies. It is impressive because the herd appeared so quickly.
It is unusual because most of the herd established headquarters outside the country that produced its founders.
And it is revealing because the herd increasingly congregated in a few industries where Israel developed extraordinary comparative advantages — particularly cybersecurity, enterprise software and fintech.
For Americans, there is another reason to care.
Israel’s technology success isn’t occurring on the other side of the world in isolation from the American economy. Some of the value Israel creates lands in New York, California, Massachusetts and elsewhere in the United States — as headquarters, jobs, investment opportunities, technology and acquisitions.
The familiar unicorn-per-capita chart therefore captures only the surface. The deeper story isn’t that Israel has a lot of unicorns.
Over the last decade, Israel became very good at manufacturing global technology companies — together with American capital and talent.
For two years, Europe’s movement against Israel looked like a one-way ratchet.
After October 7, governments that had resisted recognizing a Palestinian state for decades suddenly did so. Spain, Ireland, Norway and Slovenia moved in 2024, followed by additional countries in 2025. Each recognition was celebrated as permanent diplomatic progress for the Palestinians and another irreversible loss for Israel.
But then Slovenia held an election and the government that recognized Palestine lost. The new right-of-center government is dramatically more pro-Israel, with discussion of reversing Palestinian recognition and moving Slovenia’s embassy to Jerusalem.
Palestine didn’t lose Slovenia because Israel won an argument. It lost Slovenia because Slovenia changed governments.
Slovenia is small but the precedent isn’t.
France and Spain vote in 2027. Both have been important forces behind Europe’s turn against Israel. Both could move rightward. Spain, in particular, has become one of Israel’s most antagonistic governments in Western Europe under Pedro Sánchez, and parties on the right are predicted to do well.
If Slovenia is a preview, the supposedly permanent European diplomatic shift after October 7 may prove to have been something much less permanent: the policies of a particular collection of governments at a particular moment.
But before France and Spain vote comes Israeli elections in October 2026.
A new Israeli government could deprive European politicians of the convenient ability to present hostility toward Israel as merely opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu. Or a reelected Netanyahu would carry something different: a fresh democratic mandate from Israelis after October 7 and the wars that followed.
Whichever way Israeli elections go, France and Spain would be making their choices in a new political environment.
And Donald Trump will still be in the White House.
That matters particularly for Spain. Trump and Sánchez have already clashed repeatedly, while Washington remains closely aligned with Israel. A future Spanish government could therefore inherit not merely an opportunity to repair relations with Jerusalem, but an incentive to move closer to Washington at the same time.
Israel should be preparing for that possibility now. That means building relationships with plausible future governments before they take office.
Israel and pro-Israel organizations – including global evangelical groups – should be talking now with the parties, parliamentarians, foreign-policy advisers and prospective ministers who could govern France and Spain in 2027. And those conversations should extend beyond defending Israel to demonstrating what closer relations offer: defense, intelligence, technology and trade.
Israel should also have a menu ready for the morning after an election: reconsider Palestinian recognition, change hostile UN voting, reverse restrictions on Israel and deepen bilateral relations—including, where politically possible, moving embassies to Jerusalem. Importantly, in the immediate present, Israel can show the world via Slovenia the benefits of close diplomatice ties.
For the past two years, Israel has treated every European move toward Palestine as another irreversible diplomatic loss. Slovenia just demonstrated that the ratchet works both ways.
Governments can change. And when they do, Israel should be ready to make the ratchet click backward again.
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