Author: avram miller

Elon Musk-the Modern Alpha Male

Recently, I realized that my dislike of Elon Musk was interfering with my ability to acknowledge his significant accomplishment. That bothered me. I have spent much of my life working with exceptional people such as Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Ken Olsen, Bill Gates. I thought I capable of separating my feelings about a person from my judgment of their work.

I managed that with Steve Jobs. I met Steve when he was 25 and I was 35, and knew him in various capacities until he died. I never liked him, but I always admired him. My personal feelings did not prevent me from recognizing what he accomplished. The same thing was true of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.

With Musk, I have found that separation more difficult. Probably it has more to do with his personality which I find very disturbing.

The visionary autocrat

I have never met Musk, although I know people who know him well. For instance, he would often sleep on the sofa of a close friend of mine.

During the second half of the 1990s, when PayPal was an important internet company, I was leading much of Intel Capital’s investment activity, with a particular focus on residential broadband and the emergence of the internet as a new medium. Others on my staff were closer to the entrepreneurs building online commerce and payments. Of the people associated with PayPal, Max Levchin was the one I knew personally.

I left Intel and Palo Alto in 1999 to concentrate on international internet development. Looking back, I wish I had gotten to know more of that group. They went on to exercise extraordinary influence over technology and now, increasingly, politics.

Musk belongs in the company of the great industrialists. Tesla helped make electric vehicles desirable and pushed the automobile industry to take them seriously. SpaceX demonstrated what a privately led organization could accomplish in a field long dominated by governments and their established contractors. He helped start Open AI and continues to have a major role in AI with Grok.

Neither of these achievements belongs to Musk alone. Thousands of engineers, managers, factory workers, and others made them possible. But assembling those organizations, attracting capital, choosing ambitious goals, and persisting through the possibility of failure are substantial accomplishments in themselves.

Having spent decades evaluating technologies and the people behind them, I know how difficult it is to turn an ambitious idea into a functioning business. Musk has done that repeatedly.

Like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, he fits what I think of as the visionary autocrat: someone with an unusually strong sense of what should exist and an equally strong determination to make other people build it.

The question is what happens when that approach extends beyond a company and crosses into politics.

The attraction of the alpha male

Years ago, I spent two days in Rwanda visiting with the silverback gorillas. Watching the silverbacks and the behavior of the animals around them, I found myself thinking about human authority. We share almost 99% of our genome with other primates so there is a lot to learn by observing their behavior, I think.

But the comparison has limits. Primates have different social arrangements, and human societies are far more complicated. We cannot explain modern politics simply by pointing to our evolutionary relatives but nor should we ignore them.

Still, the experience left me with a question: how much of our attraction to powerful leaders comes from an old desire to have someone strong protect us and impose order?

In human society, strength takes many forms. It can mean physical force, but it can also mean intelligence, wealth, confidence, the ability to organize others, or the ability to tell a story that people want to believe. Over our evolution and particularly after the development of language, intellectual strength has overtaken physical strength.

Musk is clearly a complex person with tremendous drive and a great tolerance for risk. His achievements make his confidence persuasive and to some extent this feeds on itself. When someone has accomplished things that others considered impossible, it becomes easier for them to believe that he may also have answers to questions far beyond his original expertise. And at some point, they themselves start to believe that as well.

That is where admiration can become dangerous. Success can encourage both the successful person and his followers to stop recognizing the limits of his judgment.

Trying to understand Musk

To examine my own reaction, I began listening to interviews with Musk and discussions about him. An Ezra Klein interview with Quinn Slobodian led me to Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff.

The book helped me think about Musk as more than an unusual individual. It examines the broader worldview he represents and the relationship between technological ambition, private wealth, and political power.

I do not have to accept every argument in the book to find its central question important: what kind of society emerges when people who control powerful technologies also expect to determine how the rest of us should live?

My own experiences in South Africa gave that question a particular resonance.

South Africa and the experience of hierarchy

Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971 a year after my first son was born. I first visited South Africa in 1974, when I was living in Israel and had established a medical computer business based on work I had done at the Thoraxcenter in Rotterdam.

For someone who had participated in civil rights protests, going to apartheid South Africa was an uncomfortable decision. I justified it to myself by arguing that medical technology could benefit everyone. I also insisted on being able to visit hospitals serving black patients and brought some equipment as a personal donation.

I fell in love with the country’s beauty and returned many times. Much later, I discovered that I had family in Cape Town.

But the memory most relevant to this discussion is a small one.

While staying in someone’s home in Johannesburg, a young Black servant brought tea to my room every morning at seven. I tried to engage her in conversation. She seemed surprised that I would want to talk with her. Eventually, I learned that she had to leave her village at about four in the morning to arrive in time to bring me that tea.

Her three-hour journey was part of the machinery of someone else’s comfortable morning.

What struck me was how little attention the white people around me appeared to give to the lives of the Black people whose work sustained their households. It was as if they did not even see them.

I cannot know what lessons Musk absorbed from growing up in that society. Sharing a country does not mean sharing the same experience or drawing the same conclusions. But I wonder how growing up amid such an explicit hierarchy affected his understanding of power, service, and the people entitled to make decisions.

Humanity and individual humans

The tension I find most troubling in Musk is the distance between his concern for humanity’s future and his apparent willingness to disregard particular people in the present.

He speaks about enormous goals: making life multiplanetary, developing sustainable energy, and addressing the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence. These are serious subjects.

Yet accounts of his treatment of employees and people close to him, alongside some of his own public behavior, can suggest that individual dignity matters much less to him than the mission.

He seems to care about humanity more than he cares about humans.

That is my interpretation of his conduct. I do not know what he feels privately, and I would not claim that he is incapable of empathy although I have my doubts. But we can judge how someone treats people without pretending to understand everything happening inside his mind.

I also recognize a difficulty here. Leadership sometimes requires decisions that hurt individuals while benefiting a larger group. Empathy does not automatically tell us how to resolve those conflicts. A leader who cannot tolerate causing anyone distress may be unable to make necessary decisions.

But the opposite danger is at least as serious. Once someone believes his mission is essential to civilization, almost any harm can become justifiable. There is always a larger goal, a more distant future, or a greater number of hypothetical beneficiaries.

From accomplishment to a sense of destiny

Musk showed technical ability and initiative as a child, teaching himself programming and selling a computer game. Whether that makes him a child prodigy is less important to me than what happens when early ability is followed by extraordinary adult success.

I know something about the gift and burden of feeling different because of one’s abilities. It can create confidence, but also isolation. It does not necessarily produce wisdom about other people. Fortunately, my mother thought me compassion.

I wonder whether Musk’s repeated successes have encouraged him to see himself as indispensable: someone whose judgment must prevail because humanity’s future depends on it.

I cannot know whether that is how he understands himself. But parts of his public rhetoric invite that interpretation.

There is a considerable difference between believing you can build a better car or rocket and believing you are entitled to decide what is best for civilization. The first belief can be tested against engineering and commercial results. The second requires a kind of authority that business success alone cannot confer.

The “woke mind virus”

Musk’s use of the phrase “woke mind virus” is revealing.

He uses it to describe progressive ideas that he believes encourage ideological conformity, suppress disagreement, and distort thinking about race, gender, and identity.

There are legitimate questions to ask about intolerance and conformity in progressive institutions, just as there are in conservative ones. No political movement has a monopoly on independent thinking or on the suppression of it.

But describing a collection of ideas as a virus changes the argument. People who disagree become carriers of an infection. Their reasons no longer need to be considered on their merits.

For Musk, the subject also has a personal dimension. He has linked it publicly to his estrangement from his transgender daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson. She has disputed his account of their relationship and her treatment. I do not think an outsider can resolve that family conflict, and I would not use it as a complete explanation of his politics.

What interests me is the larger pattern: disagreement becomes a threat to civilization, and combating it becomes a mission.

That framing leaves little room for compromise. If you believe you are saving humanity from an infection, listening to your opponents can begin to look like weakness.

Is Musk dangerous?

I think he is.

My concern is the combination of his abilities, wealth, influence, and apparent certainty that he knows what the future requires. I am so glad that the recent elections in the USA turned against his candidates and goals.

Wealth can give someone the ability to act on a scale that would otherwise require public agreement. Control over important technologies can make governments and societies dependent on decisions made inside private organizations. A large communications platform can give its owner an exceptional role in shaping public debate.

These forms of power deserve scrutiny regardless of who holds them.

Running a company does not prepare someone automatically to govern a society. Employees may be expected to carry out a chief executive’s decisions. Citizens are entitled to challenge the decisions that shape their lives.

My effort to give Musk credit has not made me comfortable with him. It has made my concern more specific. I can admire what he has helped build and still question the authority he appears to claim from those achievements.

Perhaps the lesson of the alpha male is as much about the followers as the leader. We want someone capable to solve difficult problems. We may become so impressed by what that person can do that we stop asking what he should be allowed to decide for everyone else.

I began this journey because I wanted to acknowledge Musk’s accomplishments more fairly. I believe I can now do that.

I still do not want to live in a world where admiration for an exceptional individual becomes permission for him to rule.

Musk is just 55 years old as we are about to enter the most rapid evolution of human culture ever. I am sure he will play a significant role and I hope it will be a positive one but fear it will not.

November 8, 2026

It Will Take Innovation, Not Debt, to Save Italy

In my recent post, “The Next War Will Be Like No Other,” I wrote about the growing tension between generations. As populations age, younger people are being asked to support more older people, while also inheriting the debts accumulated by their predecessors.

That tension becomes especially difficult when economic growth is weak. Governments face demands to protect pensions, improve public services and preserve living standards. Borrowing offers a politically convenient way to postpone difficult choices. But postponing a problem will likely make it more difficult to solve.

I moved to Italy in February 2025, and it is now my home. In this post I want to explain the economic challenge Italy faces as I see it, suggest some ways forward and describe the part I hope to play.

Government debt must be measured against the economy’s ability to support it

Debt per person tells us something about the scale of public obligations. Adjusting it for inflation helps distinguish a real increase from the declining purchasing power of money. But debt relative to GDP adds an essential perspective: how large are those obligations compared with the income the economy generates?

The first graph shows how inflation-adjusted debt per person has changed. The second shows the debt burden relative to annual economic output.

Line graph showing government debt per person from 2005 to 2025, highlighting growth for USA, France, Italy, and Israel. USA shows a 145.2% increase, followed by France at 93.0%, Italy at 33.7%, and Israel at 14.5%.

Figure 1. Real government debt per person, percentage change since 2005. Cumulative change 2005–2025, with the compound average annual rate in parentheses: Italy +33.7% (1.5%), France +93.0% (3.3%), USA +145.2% (4.6%), Israel +14.5% (0.7%).

Line graph displaying government debt as a share of GDP from 2005 to 2025 for Italy, USA, France, and Israel.

Figure 2. General government gross debt as a percentage of GDP.

Starting and ending values

Measure · 2005 → 2025	Italy	France	USA	Israel
Real GDP per person Index, 2005 = 100	100 → 103.5	100 → 114.0	100 → 129.7	100 → 144.6
Real debt per person Index, 2005 = 100	100 → 133.7	100 → 193.0	100 → 245.2	100 → 114.5
Real debt per person Average annual change	1.5%	3.3%	4.6%	0.7%
Government debt / GDP	106.2% → 137.1%	68.2% → 115.5%	65.8% → 124.4%	85.7% → 67.9%

Source: IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2026, and calculations used in the accompanying graphs. Rounded estimates, subject to revision. Real series are indexed to 2005 = 100, not dollar amounts; debt is adjusted using the GDP deflator. Average annual changes are compound rates. GDP per person is an output measure, not household disposable income.

The table tells an important story. Italy’s real debt per person rose by about a third over twenty years—less than in France or the United States. Italy’s problem is not that it borrowed more than they did. It is that its economy barely grew: real GDP per person rose just 3.5% in twenty years. The United States borrowed far more, but stronger growth cushioned part of the effect. Israel is the striking exception. Its debt per person barely increased, its GDP per person rose by 45%, and its debt burden fell. Growth, not austerity, is what brought the burden down.

The principle is straightforward: government debt cannot persistently grow faster than the economy without the debt burden rising. The ratio comes out the same whether we compare nominal debt with nominal GDP or adjust both for inflation, as long as the same price index is used for both. That is why the real indices in the table produce exactly the same debt-to-GDP ratios.

That does not mean governments should never borrow. Borrowing can help during emergencies and finance investments that improve future productive capacity. Nor must every country eliminate its debt. Borrowing to finance productive investment can strengthen the future; borrowing indefinitely to sustain commitments that outgrow the economy cannot. Interest payments compete with education, infrastructure, research and other spending that might improve that future. As younger people realize that their future is being mortgaged, they may opt to leave the country, weakening it even more.

In Italy, this is already happening. ISTAT, the national statistics institute, estimates that over the past decade Italy has suffered a net loss of about 97,000 young university graduates—people whose education the country paid for and whose talent now strengthens other economies.

Population aging intensifies the problem. Pension and care needs rise while the workforce supporting them may shrink. This combination can produce prolonged stagnation, painful tax increases, cuts in services or a fiscal crisis. Collapse is not inevitable, but neither is a comfortable adjustment.

The politics of postponement

The protests over pensions and public spending in Europe reveal how difficult these choices have become. People reasonably fear losing security or being asked to work longer without suitable jobs. Their concerns deserve serious attention.

Populism makes that harder when politicians promise benefits today while disguising the future cost. Borrowing can become an electoral tool: the benefits arrive before the next election and help keep politicians in office, while much of the bill arrives afterward.

This temptation belongs to no single political camp. It appears whenever leaders promise that difficult trade-offs can somehow be avoided.

Nor do I believe that “tax the rich” is a sufficient economic strategy. Wealthy people should contribute, and effective enforcement matters. But capital, entrepreneurs and highly skilled professionals have choices about where to invest and live. Tax policy must account for those choices.

Longer lives require a change in retirement policy

A government needs a productive, expanding tax base. It cannot substitute ever-higher claims on that base for the work of helping it grow.

As people live longer, retirement policy needs to adjust. If longer lives mean longer retirements without longer working lives, the cost falls increasingly on younger workers through contributions, taxes or government borrowing.

The relevant measure is life expectancy among people approaching retirement. Linking pension ages to that measure would make adjustment more predictable and help distribute the benefits and costs of longevity across generations.

The goal should be to enable longer, productive working lives. Governments and employers must support flexible hours, gradual retirement, retraining and opportunities for older workers. There must also be protection for people whose health or physically demanding occupations make continuing unrealistic.

Italy already has a relatively high standard pension age. The greater challenge is the gap between the legal retirement age and when people actually stop working. Raising the threshold has limited effect if workers instead shift to unemployment or other benefits.

Retirement reform can help, but it needs to be part of a broader economic strategy.

Italy needs to grow

I am uncomfortable with presenting “austerity” as a complete prescription for Italy. Spending discipline matters, but indiscriminate cuts can weaken the education, research and infrastructure on which future growth depends.

Italy needs to examine what government spends, what that spending achieves and what government makes unnecessarily difficult.

Bureaucracy can hang like a wet blanket over a business. A large company can employ specialists to navigate complicated requirements. A small company may find that compliance consumes the time and money it needs to survive.

This is especially damaging for innovative companies, which are already dealing with technical uncertainty, limited capital and the challenge of finding customers.

Simpler procedures, predictable decisions and faster administration are economic policies. Their value should be measured in businesses created, investment attracted and time returned to productive work.

Israel shows that an economy can change

Israel was not always the “Startup Nation.” The Israel I knew decades ago had a much stronger socialist orientation and a far larger role for the state in economic life. Its later transformation was a process involving economic reforms, research institutions, technical capabilities, immigration, entrepreneurship and access to international markets.

Government helped connect those ingredients. The Yozma initiative helped develop a venture-capital industry capable of attracting international investors. Technology incubators helped entrepreneurs move from ideas toward businesses. These policies addressed a practical problem: research and technical talent do not automatically become successful companies.

Immigration also mattered. Engineers and scientists arriving from the former Soviet Union expanded Israel’s technical capabilities. Giving that talent opportunities to build companies helped turn immigration into an economic advantage.

Innovation is an important part of Israel’s economic story, although it is not the only explanation for its performance. Italy cannot copy another country’s history. It can learn from the deliberate effort to connect talent, research, capital and customers. A key to Israel’s remarkable success was government policies. The Israeli government was proactive in creating the environment that led to the Startup Nation.

Three priorities for Italy

I would concentrate on three connected priorities.

First, make it more attractive to finance and join innovative companies.

Italy should offer strong, straightforward and predictable tax incentives for early-stage investors and employees. Employee ownership is particularly important. Young companies often cannot compete with established employers on salary. Equity allows employees to share in the value they help create. Tax rules should recognize that an ownership stake in a young company may be illiquid and highly uncertain.

Investor incentives should encourage genuine risk-taking and new investment. They should be simple enough to use and evaluated against results.

Second, actively attract the people the innovation economy needs.

Italy should welcome entrepreneurs, engineers, researchers and other professionals who wish to move to Italy and help build new businesses. It should also make it easier for international graduates to stay and for Italians abroad to return.

Immigration policy should connect to practical needs: permission to work, timely decisions, recognition of qualifications and workable arrangements for families. The contributions of Indian immigrants to American technology and former Soviet immigrants to Israel illustrate the opportunity. Talent is distributed across the world. Countries benefit when they give that talent a reason to come and a way to contribute.

Italy’s quality of life is an advantage. For people reconsidering their future in the United States, Israel or elsewhere, Italy could become an attractive professional destination as well as a beautiful place to live. But that requires a credible opportunity to build a career or company.

Third, improve the path from research to business.

Italy has excellent research institutions, including IIT. The challenge is to turn more of that research into products, customers and growing companies. The OECD has explicitly noted the gap between Italy’s excellence in basic research and its weaker commercial innovation.

This requires experienced entrepreneurs working alongside researchers, practical arrangements for intellectual property, access to early capital and incubators that provide more than office space.

Education also belongs here. I would like to see more approaches that connect learning with technology, entrepreneurship and practical problem-solving, with H-FARM as an example worth examining. Students need opportunities to experiment, collaborate and turn ideas into something useful.

None of this is free. Tax incentives have costs, and effective institutions require people and resources. But progress does not always require an enormous new spending program. It often requires imagination, simpler rules and better use of capabilities that already exist.

AI must be central to the response

For an aging country, one of the most important questions is how to produce more value with a constrained workforce. I believe AI will be the most powerful tool for doing so in the coming decades, and a driving force of innovation.

Italy should stop debating whether AI will change work. It will. The practical question is how Italian companies, researchers, educators and public institutions can use it well to raise productivity and create businesses.

This matters especially in Italy, where most businesses are small. A small company cannot afford a team of specialists, but AI can help it with software, customer service, translation, analysis and administration. For researchers, it can accelerate parts of discovery and development. For government, it offers a way to cut delays and repetitive paperwork—the same bureaucracy that weighs on businesses today.

The opportunity extends well beyond creating AI companies. It includes helping existing Italian businesses become more capable and competitive. AI will also change jobs, and some people will need help moving into new work. That makes education and adaptation more urgent. Resistance alone will not protect living standards if competitors become more productive.

A contribution to my new home

Before coming to Italy, I lived in the Netherlands and, before that, spent eight years in Israel during my second time living there. While I understand America and Israel very well, I am still becoming familiar with this beautiful country and increasingly aware of the economic challenges it faces. I also recognize the extraordinary capabilities it could bring to solving them.

My professional life has largely involved helping turn new technologies into businesses. But I am still a scientist and inventor at heart.

I decided to devote some of that experience to my new community. I became a Fellow at the Italian Institute of Technology, invested in Elevo, a venture studio, and began advising H-FARM and CMCC. At 81, I still want to be relevant and experience the satisfaction of making a significant contribution. I have been fortunate to enjoy that throughout much of my life. I would like to continue here.

Eventually, I decided to focus on creating an innovation ecosystem in Lecce, where I live. I hope to help startups develop here and persuade American and Israeli companies to locate their European headquarters in Lecce. So far, I am making good progress. I do know that innovation will be key to making Italy economically vibrant once more.

I do not believe Italy lacks talent, creativity or ambition. I see those qualities around me. I want to help create conditions in which more of them can become successful enterprises. I feel like I entered an auditorium and found an amazing orchestra but one without a conductor. Italy needs company builders. I have met a few, like Davide Rota who helped create Generative Bionics along with Elevo and Riccardo Donadon, the visionary founder and leader of H-Farm. But we need many more. I strongly believe this will take attracting people from outside of Italy and in particular America. Most will be surprised to learn that about 50% of the CEOs of the top technology companies in the USA are immigrants (most from India).

What draws me to Lecce

What draws me to Lecce is the possibility of connecting research, entrepreneurs, investment and international experience in a community that blends the ages. A place where the past can meet the future surrounded by beauty and warmth of the land and the people.

My wife and I are renovating a palazzo built in 1731 in Lecce’s historic center. It is a major undertaking and symbolizes my work here: integrating modern technology into a home built from carefully carved local limestone.

I cannot promise that my efforts to accelerate growth in Italy will succeed. Building companies has taught me to respect uncertainty. It has also taught me that worthwhile change can only begin when people decide to try.

Building, not borrowing

Longer working lives can help sustain the workforce. Immigration can bring additional talent. Innovation can increase what each worker produces. Better government policy can make all three more effective.

We cannot ask younger generations to carry debts they did not create while denying them the economic dynamism to pay them. Borrowing buys time, but time alone solves nothing. If we want to honor our past without mortgaging our children’s future, our only real choice is to build things that matter and create the growth that debt never could.

October 25, 2026

The Billions Invested in Nothing (The Story of BiiN)

Steve McGeady, a friend and former colleague at Intel, posted a link to an YouTube video that covered the creating of BiiN a joint venture between Intel and Siemens. I played a significant role in making BiiN happen. It was one of many failures that I had in my career. Watching the video and remembering that time, I thought I would write something about it. Then I get a an idea. I had already written a chapter in my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck, so I asked ChatGPT to create a blog post from that chapter which you can read below.

You can also read the full chapter here.

Adapted from my memoir, The Flight of a Wild Duck.

When I joined Intel in August 1984, I assumed I was joining a semiconductor company that understood where computing was going. What I found was a company that, for a while, wanted to be a minicomputer company. This is the story of the three years I spent on that detour, and what I learned from it.

Arriving at Intel

I came out to California without my family and spent my first few weeks at Intel’s site on Bowers Avenue in Santa Clara. Intel denied having a headquarters, but this sure came close. Gordon Moore and Andy Grove had offices there, and even Bob Noyce, then chairman of the board, still had one. It was a good place to meet the people who ran the company.

I was going to be based in Hillsboro, Oregon, so my boss, Les Vadasz, and I decided I should attend the staff meetings of the Systems Group headquartered there and see if I could help. Much to my surprise, I discovered they were developing personal computers to sell as a “white label” product to companies that wanted their own branded PCs.

My experience at Digital and then at Franklin made the cost side of this something I knew well. I quickly concluded the plan was a serious mistake. It would create friction with Intel’s own microprocessor customers, it was unlikely to succeed, and even if it did, it would not be very profitable. Through my industry contacts, I got pricing from other manufacturers willing to build private-label PCs. Their prices were lower than Intel’s cost to build the same machine. The project was terminated.

The company that didn’t see the PC coming

It is hard to believe today, but Intel did not anticipate the personal computer. By the mid-1970s, Gordon and Andy understood that the microprocessor would matter, and they pushed for a “mainframe on a chip.” But they believed the industry would go on being dominated by expensive, proprietary mainframes and minicomputers from companies like IBM and Digital Equipment.

The first hobbyist personal computer, the Altair 8800, used an Intel 8080 in 1975. Still, Intel showed little interest when Atari asked about the 8080 for its home computers, so Atari chose the 6502 from MOS Technology. Steve Jobs had worked at Atari, and Apple followed it to the 6502. When the Apple II, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET and the Atari VCS all came out in 1977, none of them used an Intel chip.

Meanwhile, Intel put its big bet on an ambitious new architecture, the 432, meant to incorporate the best academic ideas in computer design. Because it was risky, a simpler 16-bit chip, the 8086, was developed in parallel and released in 1978. Then came the critical decision to build an 8-bit-bus version, the 8088. IBM chose it for the PC because it fit the I/O design of the Datamaster, an IBM word processor whose motherboard the PC team wanted to reuse. The 432 did not ship until 1981, and it turned out to be too complicated for both the market and the semiconductor technology of the day.

Lew Eggebrecht, the architect of the IBM PC, told me personally that Intel’s development systems, its compilers and debugging tools, were the most critical factor in his choice. That was the genius of Bill Davidow, who co-managed the microprocessor business with Les. He got Intel to understand that the product was not the device. It was everything that made the device successful: development systems, documentation, support and reference designs. That is how Intel beat Motorola with an inferior chip. Many credit Davidow’s famous Operation Crush campaign for the IBM win. I don’t believe it had anything to do with it.

Had IBM not chosen the 8088, Intel would likely never have led in microprocessors. It probably would not exist today. Until the IBM PC took off, microprocessors were less than 10 percent of Intel’s revenue.

Part of the problem was that Intel’s founders, Andy included, did not really understand computer architecture or even digital logic. They were process people, chemists and physicists. Memory chips, Intel’s main business until 1984, are far simpler than microprocessors and need no software. Management lacked the experience to judge a project as complex as the 432. The exception was Dave House, who came from computer systems and spoke out against it.

Gemini: a minicomputer company after all

Before the PC took off, Andy came to believe that half of Intel’s revenue should come from selling systems. The computer industry was still vertical, and IBM and Digital were very profitable. In 1980, Les was asked to figure out how to get there. Sudhir Bhagwan and Ed Slaughter proposed a family of multiprocessing, distributed, fault-tolerant computers to take on Digital and Tandem. The price tag was $100 million, far beyond what Intel could afford on $350 million in annual revenue. Andy told them to find a partner who would put up 90 percent of the cost for 50 percent ownership.

That partner was Siemens. They needed a highly reliable computer for factory automation and nuclear plants, they had a struggling commercial computer business, and they had a lot of money. The agreement was signed in 1982, and the project was named Gemini, for the two companies. Siemens paid for the computer development and Intel for the chips, with Oregon as the main site.

In 1983, two senior Intel executives, Casey Powell and Scott Gibson, walked out with fourteen others to start Sequent Computer Systems, a competitor with a simpler approach. Sequent later moved to Intel’s 386 and Unix, partnered with Oracle, and was bought by IBM in 1999 for $850 million.

The heart of Gemini was a processor architected by Glen Myers that became the i960. It was the first microprocessor that could execute multiple instructions at once, a 33-bit machine. The extra bit tagged every word in memory as either ordinary data or a protected pointer to an object, and only privileged instructions could set it. A program could not forge a pointer or reach outside its own boundaries. Combined with redundant processors that checked each other, the system could detect and recover from its own failures. It was built for Ada, the language the Defense Department had commissioned. The architecture was elegant and incredibly overengineered. It made the 432 look simple, which was no easy feat. It needed four highly complex chips, a new operating system and compilers for several languages.

When I looked closely, I found three engineering groups and not a single businessperson. I reluctantly concluded I had to take responsibility for the business side, at least for Intel. I had joined Intel hoping to take the company into the consumer market. This was the opposite. But I felt it was my duty, because I knew more about the computer industry than anyone else at my level.

My reluctance was justified. Revolutionary products rarely succeed. I was once again on an overly ambitious project, like the Professional I had led at Digital, and this one was a lot less fun. I moved to Jones Farm in Hillsboro and stayed three years, isolated from mainstream Intel. I wondered whether I had made a significant mistake in taking the job and moving my family to Portland. Intel’s stock fell 40 percent in my first years, then crashed again on Black Monday in 1987, along with my dreams of paying for my children’s university. Fortunately, it recovered in time for my oldest son, Adin, to go to Brandeis University.

We did find some good homes for the i960 as a component, in markets that needed high reliability: military, avionics and workstations. We even tried to get Steve Jobs to use it for NeXT. Boeing used it in the 777, its first fly-by-wire airplane.

BiiN

The original agreement left Intel and Siemens free to compete with each other using the same technology. I knew that without a change, our partner would soon become our competitor. So I proposed a joint-venture company. I spent the better part of a year negotiating it, flying to Germany every month to meet my Siemens counterpart, and we got the approval of both boards. Along the way I worked on the branding, and we named the company BiiN. It was announced in July 1988. By then I had already left the project for corporate business development in Santa Clara, the work that would ultimately lead to Intel Capital.

Both companies wanted a well-known CEO. I don’t think I was ever considered, and I would not have taken the job. Thankfully, I was done with big computer systems. They hired Joe Kroger, who had been the number-two person at Unisys. Joe was a big-company guy and fundamentally a sales guy, and BiiN had nothing ready to sell. He was not dealt a good hand. Siemens had its own internal politics, including a competing effort with Sequent, and Intel was now totally focused on the PC. In 1989, both companies pulled the plug. Six years of work by hundreds of engineers were flushed.

Inside Intel, people joked that BiiN stood for “Billions Invested in Nothing.”

The joke exaggerated, but not by much. When the plug was pulled in October 1989, the trade press reported that the two partners had put about $250 million into the venture through that July, and that winding it down could cost up to another $100 million. Intel took a $35 million write-off for its share of the shutdown. Those figures cover only the joint venture. They leave out the years of chip development Intel paid for on its own under the original Gemini agreement, which never showed up as a separate number anywhere. All told, the two companies probably spent well over $300 million.

Not quite nothing

Still, the joke missed something. Intel never recouped its investment directly, but Gemini had brought in many talented computer scientists and engineers. After BiiN closed, Intel created the Intel Architecture Labs to give them a home, led by Ron Whittier. People like Kevin Kahn, Fred Pollack and Steven McGeady, who had come to Intel for Gemini, went on to play very important roles. IAL was essential to Intel’s evolution, and I would later work closely with it on residential broadband.

The chip at the heart of Gemini also earned its keep. Freed from BiiN, the i960 became one of the best-selling embedded processors of the 1990s. From 1993 to 1995, Intel shipped more than five million a year, more than double any other RISC chip. Nearly half went into HP LaserJet printers, and about a third into networking equipment from companies like Cisco. By Intel’s standards it was never a big earner, a tiny fraction of what the Pentium made, but it stayed in production until 2007.

For Les, the failure must have been incredibly painful. Gemini was his baby, started when everyone at the top believed Intel’s future was selling computers as well as chips. Les and Andy appreciated what I had done in putting BiiN together, and I had shown I could get things done. But I considered it three years of wasted effort.

Looking back, I should have seen that launching a new proprietary computer architecture was impossible just as the PC was transforming the world of computing. Like so many others, including Intel’s top management, I was slow to grasp what was happening in front of us: the restructuring of the whole computer industry, from vertical to horizontal. The very technology Intel was making was the thing driving that change.

As it happened, though, I now found myself in the right place at the right time. I moved to Silicon Valley and began the most significant period of my career, co founding Intel Capital and playing a major role in establishing broadband internet.

October 20, 2026
The Next War Will Be Like No Other

The war of the generations

We are living in a remarkable time, and a frightening one. Artificial intelligence is driving a transformation that gives us reasons for both excitement and fear. The world order that emerged after World War II appears to be coming apart. Whether another order will replace it, or whether we are heading toward greater chaos, is unclear. Meanwhile, climate change is beginning to make its power felt.

But beneath all of this is another transformation whose consequences, I believe, are greatly underestimated: the inversion of the population pyramid.

For most of human history, there were many young people and relatively few old people. Each generation could expect a larger generation behind it, helping to support society and care for those who could no longer work. It generation expected to be better off than the previous one.

That arrangement is changing.

Across the OECD, fertility is below replacement level in every country except Israel. Even India is now below that threshold. This does not turn a population pyramid upside down overnight. But combined with longer lives, sustained low fertility changes the balance between generations.

We built our institutions around one demographic reality. We are entering another. The implications go far beyond the financing of pensions. They reach into the distribution of wealth, political power, opportunity, and hope.

What happens when young people begin to believe that the society they are expected to support has no place for them? They face expensive housing and uncertainty about their working lives. They are asked to prepare for a future in which AI may eliminate or transform the very jobs they are studying to obtain. At the same time, they see people who already own homes, investments, and businesses enjoying advantages that seem increasingly beyond their reach.

I do not know whether AI will replace most workers. But I worry that it could generate enormous wealth while weakening the connection between work and economic security. We have no broadly accepted answer to how that wealth should be shared.

For someone starting out, the promise that hard work will lead to a better life may become difficult to believe.

Look at France. Protests that began over school conditions and teacher shortages have broadened into anger about inequality, living costs, and public services. These demonstrations involve several generations and many grievances. Yet I see in them a warning about what happens when young people lose confidence in the institutions responsible for their future.

My fear is that this loss of confidence will deepen as the demographic balance changes.

Democracy does not automatically resolve the problem. Politicians need to get reelected. Older voters are an influential constituency, and asking them to accept fewer benefits or contribute more so that younger people can have better opportunities is politically difficult. The politicians themselves are getting older. In the last fifty years the average age of someone in congress went from 40 year to 50 years.

Protecting existing promises brings immediate rewards. Investing in people whose influence is smaller, and whose needs will unfold over decades, requires a longer view than our political systems encourage.

I write this as someone who is in their 80s. I understand why people want security in their later years. Many older people have little wealth and depend on public services. Nor do all young people face the same disadvantages. Those who inherit substantial assets may have a very different future from those who inherit nothing.

But those differences do not remove the underlying tension. They may make it worse. A society in which opportunity increasingly depends on what you already owns will struggle to persuade young people that the system deserves their loyalty.

For generations, there has been an implicit agreement: the young support the old, with the expectation that their turn will come.

What happens when the young no longer believe that promise?

I can imagine a breakdown in which age becomes one of the defining lines of political conflict. Anger could turn toward pensions, property, taxation, inheritance, and the institutions that determine who gets what. Movements could gain power by promising to tear down arrangements that younger generations believe have excluded them.

This is the war I fear: a struggle between generations over who must sacrifice, who deserves protection, and who gets to have a future. It would unfold within countries, communities, and families. That could make it particularly bitter. Growing government debt adds another dimension to this generational imbalance. Younger people stand to inherit not only the private wealth accumulated by older generations, but also the public obligations we leave behind. The two inheritances will not be distributed equally: private wealth will flow disproportionately to those whose families already have assets, while the cost of servicing public debt will compete with education, infrastructure, research, and other investments in everyone’s future. Borrowing can make sense when it builds a more productive society. But when it primarily sustains current consumption, we are passing the bill forward without necessarily passing along the means to pay it.

I do not believe this outcome is inevitable. But avoiding it requires us to take the possibility seriously. We need to give younger people credible reasons to believe that they can build secure and meaningful lives, and that the gains from technological progress will reach them. That will require difficult choices from my generation as well as theirs. I know this is pessimistic. But it is what I think, and what I feel compelled to share.

A society cannot remain stable indefinitely when its young people believe their future has already been spent.

October 18, 2026
My Mother Was Born 100 Years Ago but she will always be young to me

It is hard for me to think of my mother as someone born a hundred years ago. In my mind, she will always be a beautiful young woman.

She was born Marlyn Harris in San Francisco on October 16, 1926. She married my father when she was still seventeen and was just over eighteen when I was born.

I wrote extensively about my mother in my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck, but there is always more to say. I think of her constantly. She was a complicated woman who suffered a great deal, yet she was always there for me. Her love and commitment gave me the foundation on which I built my life. Whatever success I have had owes much to her.

It has been thirty-four years since she took her own life. I am now fifteen years older than she was when she died. That is difficult to comprehend, too.

It saddens me that she never got to see my children become adults or meet my grandchildren, as my father did. I wish she could have known them, and they could have known her. I wish she could have know my wife Deborah. They would have enjoyed each other.

Today, a hundred years after her birth, I am thinking of the young woman she was, the pain she carried, and the love she gave me. That love is still part of my life.

October 16, 2026
Bringing fiber internet into a palazzo built in 1731.

As many of you know, I played a leading role in developing the residential broadband so many of us now take for granted. From 1993 to 2000, I spent seven years working across the ecosystem, from silicon to applications. As Intel’s Corporate Vice President of Business Development, I also used Intel Capital, which I co-founded, to invest in critical startups such as Broadcom. Today, I’m bringing fiber into a palazzo built in 1731.

In 1993, 14.4 kbps modems were a mainstream option. By late that year, you could buy a 28.8 kbps modem but you still had to find a service that could answer at that speed. There were none.

I realized that a single channel on a cable television network could deliver 10 megabits per second. Compared with a 14.4 kbps modem, that was almost 700 times faster. There was a catch: that capacity was shared among homes. Still, even allowing for sharing, cable broadband offered an enormous improvement. For a rough comparison, let’s use 1 Mbps as an effective speed for early cable broadband. In 1996 I convinced Steve Case, AOL’s CEO, to open AOL to connections over the internet, including cable broadband. That meant customers could reach AOL through their own internet connection.

Now, thirty years later, I’m living in the historic center of Lecce, in southern Italy, renovating a palazzo built in 1731. Today, I ordered fiber internet: up to 2.5 gigabits per second for about $30 a month.That advertised speed is 250 times the original cable modem’s 10 Mbps capacity. But fiber capacity is also shared, so comparing the headline numbers doesn’t tell the whole story.

In the place I’m renting while the palazzo is being renovated, I have a 500 Mbps fiber plan and typically get around 200 Mbps. I don’t yet know what the new connection will deliver, but suppose I average 1 Gbps. Using those rough figures 1 Mbps then and 1 Gbps now that would be a thousandfold increase over thirty years. It works out to compounded growth of about 26% a year, or a doubling roughly every three years. Not quite the pace associated with Moore’s law, but not bad.

I also plan to add Starlink as a backup if the fiber connection fails. An eighteenth-century palazzo, connected by fiber and backed up by satellites. Quite a journey from the dial-up days.

October 13, 2026
Goodbye Mark Stephens AKA Bob Cringely

My friend Mark Stephens died last Saturday. Most of the world knew him as Robert X. Cringely. I knew him as the neighbor who stood with me on garage roofs in Sonoma County, pointing dish antennas at distant ridge tops in 2020, because it was not possible to get a broadband internet connection at my location. That is how we became friends, more than 25 years ago. We managed to use directional wifi and created a link to someone that had broadband several miles from my home.

Mark was creative, technically competent and a dreamer. He was a gifted writer and storyteller. One of the few historians of his time to track the development of the computer industry. Sometimes we would dream together. He and his family lived close to our home in Sonoma for many years. He had an amazing family including a wonderful wife, MaryAlyce. Eventually they moved back to South Carolina where is wife had family. With all his moving and all my moving, we did not communicate often but we meant a lot to each other.

When I published my memoir, I asked Mark to write the foreword. He ended it this way: “I believe I know Avram well enough to love the guy.” I want to say the same about him. I wish I could have been near him towards the end of his life so I could have held him and told him what a special person he was.

Below you will find, his obituary, the forward he did for my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck and finally a long interview he did with me for a series on nation television in 2014. It is my favorite interview.

Obituary of Mark Stephens

https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Mark-Stephens?obId=49806651

FOREWORD to the Flight of a Wild Duck

Though our careers in Silicon Valley overlapped by a dozen years, I didn’t meet Avram Miller until shortly after his retirement from Intel in 1999. We were neighbors in the rural Wine Country of Sonoma County, sharing the struggle of using long-distance Wi-Fi as the only alternative to crappy telephone dial-up Internet. We literally goto know each other on garage roofs aiming dish antennas at distant ridge-tops.

Over the subsequent 20 years I came to know Avram, his children and grandchildren, his wife and ex-wife, even Avram’s father, who died a bit more than a year ago. I know most of the people mentioned in this book and I believe I know Avram well enough to love the guy.

Avram is known for his intellect and specifically for his rare habit of asking the question Why? Why do we do things the way we do rather than some other way? In Silicon Valley the operant question for most people is How? not Why? But why is more powerful than how. How is by nature evolutionary while why is revolutionary. The other big proponent of asking why in Silicon Valley was Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which pretty much makes the point of how important why can be.

Dave House, one of Intel’s most senior executives—a noted asker of How? who worked with Avram at Intel before moving on to become CEO of Bay Networks, an important networking company—once told me at a Computer History Museum event that Avram was crazy “but also the smartest man I ever met.”

Avram Miller co-founded Intel Capital and, by doing so, brought the chip giant into businesses that Intel founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore would never have considered on their own. Avram used Intel money to literally create home broadband Internet, even though Intel was not intrinsically a networking company. But the why for Intel and broadband was obvious to Avram if a mystery to those others.

Home broadband drove demand for faster and more powerful processors in home computers, directly driving Intel’s growth and changing both the Internet and the world in the process. Avram Miller did that.

The best part about this book you are about to read is its modesty. It’s the story of an inquiring mind finding its way in the world from very modest beginnings and almost no expectations. Avram’s lifestory is one of choices. Did he want to become a rabbi or a jazz piano player? Did he want to be a neuroscientist or a computer pioneer? All paths were open for Avram because of his ability and his creativity. The world is a better place for the choices he made. Young Avram once rented the space under a baby grand piano for a place to sleep. That’s a modest beginning and yet charming, like Avram, gaining him not only a place to live but also an instrument to play.

Imagine how far he might have gone had Avram been able to afford to live under a concert grand?

—Robert X. Cringely, host of the PBS TV series Triumph of the Nerds, and author of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date

Mark interviews me

October 11, 2026
The Netherlands, a Graveyard for Jews, Makes a Choice

In 1969, I moved to Rotterdam to help found the Thoraxcenter at Erasmus University. There I met my first wife. We lived in the Netherlands for five years, and both of our sons were born there. I became fluent in Dutch, a skill I have retained. My wife and I had agreed that our sons would be raised Jewish. She eventually converted as well.

While we met a few Dutch Jews (our closest friends were Jewish), there were not many in the Netherlands to meet. Before the Holocaust, about 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands. That was about 1.5% of the population, less than half the share in the USA at the time. Today the Jewish population is about 35,000, or around 0.2% of the population, roughly the same as the percentage of Jews worldwide. And it will keep shrinking, as the death rate exceeds the birth rate.

Jews had played an important role in the development of the Netherlands until WWII. There were many brave Dutch people who sheltered and protected Jews (the story of Anne Frank is just one example). But the Dutch largely failed to save their Jewish fellow citizens. Denmark saved nearly all of its Jews. In Italy and France, around three-quarters or more survived. In the Netherlands, only about 26% survived.

I have always identified, and continue to identify, as a Zionist. After my sons were born, I realized that I could not raise them in the Netherlands, a country that had become literally a graveyard for Jews. My wife agreed, and we emigrated to Israel in 1974 and stayed until 1979 when we moved to the USA. I returned to Israel again in 2015 where I stayed for another eight years. I have been a Zionist my whole life, meaning that I believe there had to be a Jewish homeland. I still hold that view. That does not mean I support the actions of the current Israeli government, just as I do not support the actions of the American government.

I am writing this post because I am outraged at the recent actions of the Dutch government. Since 22 September 2026, the Netherlands has banned travelers from bringing in goods made wholly or partly in Israeli settlements that the Dutch government considers unlawful. This includes souvenirs, gifts and items for personal use, even if they were bought before the ban. Customs may inspect luggage and ask travelers to prove where a product came from. Prohibited goods can be seized, and the Public Prosecution Service says violations can bring fines or up to six years in prison.

In its first week, Dutch customs reportedly singled out passengers arriving on El Al flights from Tel Aviv for luggage searches, including travelers who had gone through the “nothing to declare” lane. A country that failed its Jews so badly eighty years ago, and where so few Jews remain, is now pulling aside travelers from Israel to search their bags for a bottle of wine or a jar of Dead Sea mud. I would have hoped the Netherlands, of all countries, would think twice before doing that.

The situation is complex. The Dutch definition of occupied territories includes the Golan Heights, which Israel annexed (recognized by the USA but not by many other countries); parts of the Dead Sea shore; suburbs of Jerusalem; the established Jewish city of Ariel; and settlements that are clearly in the West Bank, including outposts that are illegal even under Israeli law. The ban demonstrates, at best, the ignorance of the Dutch officials who drafted it. The Druze of the Golan can choose Israeli citizenship, and a growing number have. What do the people who wrote this ban hope to accomplish? Do they think Israel will give back the Golan Heights to a Syria whose future is still uncertain, so that Israeli farmers in the valleys below could once again come under fire?

If this ban succeeds, it will hurt Palestinians as much or more than Israeli Jews. Many Palestinians work in settlement factories and farms, including along the west side of the Dead Sea. When those businesses lose their markets, those workers lose their jobs.

Meanwhile, products made with child or forced labor can still be sold in Dutch shops. The European Union’s ban on goods made with forced labor will not take effect until the end of 2027. The ban on a souvenir from Ariel took effect two months after it was published.

Fifty-two years ago, I decided I could not raise my sons in the Netherlands. I take no pleasure in saying that the Dutch government has just reminded me why.

September 30, 2026
I am getting tired of being me

I always had a lot of drive. I used to joke that I would wake up standing because I jumped out of bed. It was not really a joke. It was the truth. For such a long part of my life, I woke up with tremendous energy. That energy would keep up pretty much during the day but would start to fade in the evening. But even that was relative. My low point was probably equal to most people’s high point.

Now that energy is fading. It probably has something to do with being 81 years old, but there may be other factors. I am really speaking about my physical energy. The opposite seems to be happening with respect to my mind. It seems to be on fire, lit by a match called AI.

Unfortunately there’s sort of a mismatch between my mind and my body. It’s not the first time I’ve experienced this. I used to joke that my body was just a socket for my brain because I had a pretty big disconnect between my mental self and my physical self. Then when I was 40 I was able to integrate the two parts of who I am. That happened when I started working out regularly at the gym, doing yoga, and then later doing Pilates.

I still am physically active, but I’m starting to feel a decline in my energy level. I don’t have the same drive, but I have the same desire to do things. In fact, while my body may be declining some, my brain seems to be going the other way, particularly as it has been stimulated by AI. There are so many things I want to do every day, so many things I want to write, so many things I want to learn. I want to play piano more. I want to study Italian more. I am still helping to start companies and continuing my work in medical science. I have all these desires but I can’t keep up with it. At a certain point I just don’t have the energy, and this is really a new experience. I’m grappling with it and I worry that the schism will increase. What’s worse, perhaps I will want to do more and more and I will be able to do less and less.

Thinking about this takes me back to my childhood, a time when severe asthma ruled my life. It was a curse and a blessing. Without it, I doubt that I would have developed the creative abilities that have played such an important role in my life. Back then, we did not have “devices,” so my device was my mind. I am in no way comparing myself to the great physicist Stephen Hawking, who suffered from ALS from the age of 21. By the time he was in his 30s he could no longer write by hand. He lost the ability to speak with his own voice at the age of 43, 33 years before his death. I have been interested in how he handled this transition, including the tools he used and in particular the skills he developed to work on complex problems just in his head.

Perhaps my decline in energy is related to taking a small dose of GLP-1 every week or two to maintain my weight at a very healthy level and derive additional and significant health benefits (my labs are amazing). Another possibility is it’s my diet. I have been on an intermittent fasting diet for more than 6 years. I eat between 12 pm and 8 pm, although sometimes I eat a little bit later than that. I’m wondering if taking GLP-1 and intermittent fasting have reduced my energy level. It could be. This is something I could experiment with and get some more information. Another possibility is just really changing my diet. Also, for the longest time I was on a very low-carb diet, but that’s virtually impossible here in Italy. Everything is carbs and you just end up in situations where you’re eating a lot more carbohydrates than you used to, which also means I’m eating less protein.

Many of the hours of my day are spent standing in front of my computer (I don’t have a chair), writing or reading or watching. I’ve been using a standing desk for probably 15 years. I don’t know if that contributes to the lack of energy, but I don’t like to sit and I actually think sitting is not a good thing. I either stand or lie down and read.

I am starting to use tools like Wispr to help me dictate. This blog post was dictated using Wispr, for instance. I love that I can now write just using my voice. This has freed me up to work on my writing while I am also taking a walk. I also do a lot of work with ChatGPT or Claude just using voice. So my dependency on being in front of a screen and some kind of keyboard is declining.

It has also occurred to me that I might actually be working harder than I have been in the last several years, and that’s one of the causes of the sense of losing energy.

What do you think?

September 26, 2026
People Need Something to Lose

My garden was built by workers from Gaza in 1975

A friend of my wife, a well-known television producer, is visiting Israel. During one of his meetings, he learned that on October 7 thousands of Gazans who were not Hamas fighters followed Hamas into Israel and took part in the atrocities. He was astonished.

The Israeli army later estimated that about 6,000 Gazans crossed the border that day. About 3,800 were Hamas’s elite fighters. The other 2,200 or so were a mix of members of other armed groups and ordinary civilians. It is the civilians I want to talk about. Frankly, I was not surprised when I learned about this a few days after October 7. The civilians of Gaza had been living in what was called by some the “world’s largest open-air prison.” A prison, I have to add, that was run by a gang of inmates, Hamas. I was not surprised; this was the first time they could leave, and the opportunity to take “treasures” like automobiles, TVs and computers must have been so tempting. However, I was shocked to learn about the violence some of them committed against Israelis they found, including murder and rape. I do not want to conclude that these civilians were typical of the people living in Gaza. I do not know. I do know that since the 1990s, they have been systematically taught to hate Israelis.

The Gaza I first knew

I found myself thinking not only about October 7, but about the Gaza I first knew more than fifty years ago. I moved to Israel in 1974. Gaza and the West Bank were under Israeli military occupation, but the physical separation that exists today did not exist in anything like its present form. I lived close to the West Bank, and I regularly drove there to buy vegetables. I didn’t often go to Gaza as it was about forty miles away but I employed workers from Gaza to help me build my garden. This sounds almost unimaginable today.

I don’t mean to romanticize the occupation at that time. Palestinians and Israelis certainly had grievances against one another then. But the relationship was different. There was human contact. The populations were intertwined economically and physically in ways that have largely disappeared.

Oslo and the two intifadas

This started to change with the first intifada, which began in 1987. Then came the Oslo peace agreement in 1993, and on July 1, 1994, Yasser Arafat returned, first to Gaza and a few days later to Jericho in the West Bank. I believe Israel, under a left-wing government at the time, was serious about a two-state solution, but Arafat was not. I also believe that Arafat stole billions from his own people, and his successor, Abbas, has faced persistent allegations of corruption, but that is another story.

Over the next fifty years, Israel built walls, some physical, some political and some psychological. The government also kept expanding the Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in both the West Bank and Gaza, which had begun after the 1967 war, under the mistaken belief this would make Israel safer.

How did we get from there to here?

One of the decisive moments came in 2005.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made the extraordinary decision to remove every Israeli settlement from Gaza and withdraw Israeli forces from inside that territory. Roughly 8,000 Israeli settlers were evacuated, some forcibly by Israeli soldiers and police.

I remember how traumatic this was within Israel. Israelis watched Israeli soldiers carrying other Israelis from their homes.

Whatever one thinks about Sharon’s decision, it created an extraordinary moment. For the first time since 1967, there were no permanent Israeli settlements or military bases inside Gaza. But there was opportunity.

Hamas takes over

What happened next was not what many people hoped for. In January 2006, Hamas defeated Fatah in Palestinian legislative elections. The struggle between the two movements eventually became violent, and in June 2007 Hamas seized control of Gaza. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority remained dominant in the West Bank. Gaza and the West Bank effectively became two different Palestinian political entities.

The open-air prison

Rocket attacks against Israel continued. Israel progressively tightened restrictions around Gaza, particularly after the Hamas takeover, while Egypt also severely restricted movement across its border.

Gaza became increasingly isolated, “the world’s largest open-air prison.” One run by its imates.

Israel controlled most access by land as well as Gaza’s airspace and maritime access. Egypt controlled the other land frontier. There was no functioning airport. Movement of people and goods became highly restricted, although Gazans could sometimes obtain permits to enter Israel for work, medical treatment and other purposes.

There was an undeniable reality behind that phrase: roughly two million people were living in a very small territory from which leaving was extraordinarily difficult. It was a prison of geography, politics, security and history. And Hamas ruled inside it.

A generation grew up behind the fence

This is the part of the story that worries me most. Half the population of Gaza is under 18. They grew up without any knowledge of the world I had known in the 1970s, a world where someone from Gaza could work in my garden. Rather, they knew checkpoints, permits, rockets, Israeli air strikes, Hamas, periodic wars and a border fence separating them from a country they were taught to regard as their enemy.

At the same time, Israelis living near Gaza grew up with rocket shelters, warning sirens and the knowledge that an organization committed to armed struggle against Israel governed just a few kilometers away.

Each side accumulated its own memories. Each generation inherited the fears of the generation before it.

Then came October 7, 2023.

Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups broke through the Israeli defenses and attacked communities, military positions and a music festival. About 1,200 people were killed and roughly 250 were taken hostage.

For Israelis, October 7 changed something fundamental. The border fence had represented security. Suddenly it represented the failure of security. And whatever sympathy many Israelis had once felt for the civilians living on the other side of that fence became much harder to sustain.

The war that followed

The war that then resulted brought death and destruction on an enormous scale to Palestinians. I do not support the actions Israel took and is taking after October 7 in Gaza. I think Israel should have first asked other countries to help it get its hostages back and to participate in disarming Hamas. Instead it acted out of rage. The rage is understandable, but the results were not good. I will not speak here of the ignorance of so many that only see Israel’s actions and do not assign any responsibility to Hamas and its supporters like Iran. Where does this end?

Netanyahu’s responsibility

The government of Netanyahu carries a heavy share of the responsibility for the situation. He has been in power about two-thirds of the time since 1996. He did not just ignore Gaza. For years he allowed Qatar to send money to Hamas there, because a divided Palestinian leadership suited him. What did he think would happen? Israel needed to work with other countries to find a solution for the people that lived there, not just build a bigger fence. The people of Gaza, like all people, deserved a decent life for themselves and their children. When you have nothing to lose, you will risk everything.

My dream for Gaza

I had, and still have, a dream for Gaza. Imagine, for a moment, something radically different.

It starts with both Israel and Egypt offering land to create a “Gaza II” adjacent to the current one, “Gaza I.” Then imagine a massive regional development project involving Israel, Egypt, Palestinians and outside countries willing to finance it. New Palestinian communities would be built with modern infrastructure.

Desalination plants could produce water, as they already do on a massive scale in Israel. Solar installations could produce abundant electricity. Modern agriculture could use some of that water and energy. New cities could be designed rather than improvised. Industry could provide jobs. A functioning port could connect the population with the outside world.

Most importantly, imagine hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians waking up in the morning with someplace to go. A job, a business, a university, farms, and industry. A future!

Can prosperity become part of security?

We have spent decades trying walls, checkpoints, military deterrence, blockades, rockets and wars. They have not produced peace. We need a different way forward.

The West Bank is equally difficult but needs a different solution

I understand why many Israelis fear the creation of a Palestinian state immediately adjacent to Israel’s principal population centers. Israel is extremely narrow in places, and October 7 made territorial security concerns much more visceral.

Palestinians, however, cannot reasonably be expected to live indefinitely without political rights, economic opportunity and control over their own future.

At the same time, there are Israelis who regard the West Bank, Judea and Samaria as an inseparable part of the historical Land of Israel and support permanent Israeli control or annexation.

These positions do not fit neatly together but that is the reality.

I can imagine arrangements that might eventually reconcile Palestinian self-government with Israeli security. I have much more difficulty imagining the political leadership capable of implementing them today. And perhaps that is what saddens me most.

A word about the hatred directed at Israel and at Jews in general

My heart breaks to see how Israel and Jews in general are being treated. I have no problem with people being critical of the Israeli government. I am myself. But unless you think that every American is responsible for Donald Trump, you cannot think that every Israeli is responsible for Netanyahu, let alone non-Israeli Jews. How people can support Hamas is beyond me. I do not understand the stupidity of gay people that support the people that would kill them after cutting off their testicles. Women that support rapists who would cut off their breasts.

The supporters of the Palestinians have accomplished nothing for the Palestinian people. They are not really for Palestinians because they know nothing about them. They are just against Israel and Jews. The result of their actions has only strengthened Israel’s resolve and feeling of isolation, which can lead to the government taking more actions against the Palestinians.

I remember something different

I keep returning to those men from Gaza who helped me build my garden in 1974.

I don’t remember discussing geopolitics with them.

They came to work and I paid them.

We worked together, we smiled. My wife would bring them water. My children would play with them

Then they went home to their wives and children

It was hardly a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it was human contact, and human contact matters. Today a young Israeli and a young Gazan can live perhaps twenty kilometers apart and inhabit completely different universes. Each may know the other primarily as someone dangerous.

Something to lose

I don’t pretend to know how to solve it.

I do believe, however, that security alone cannot be the objective. Nor can Palestinian nationalism, Israeli nationalism, revenge, historical entitlement or military victory by themselves produce a livable future.

People need something to lose and something to love.

They need homes, jobs, education, businesses and families whose futures seem more valuable than the promises offered by extremists.

Maybe that sounds naïve after October 7 and the war that followed. Perhaps it is.

But after watching this conflict for more than fifty years, I find the alternative much harder to believe: that another wall, another generation of hatred and another war will somehow produce a different result.

September 20, 2026