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.
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.
Whateverone 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’slargest 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 Palestinianleadership 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.
In the early days of the automobile industry, competition was driven by engineering. Faster engines, better suspensions, and more reliable cars won customers. But by the 1950s, something changed. America’s highway system had matured, and most cars were already fast enough for the roads people actually drove on. Competition shifted away from performance and toward design: tail fins, chrome trim, annual styling changes, larger bodies, and more luxurious interiors. The industry had moved from performance to fashion.
Watching Apple’s recent announcements, I found myself wondering whether the company is entering its own tail-fin era.
I am deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem. I have a Mac mini, a MacBook Air, an iPad, an iPhone, an Apple TV, several HomePods, an Apple Watch, AirPods, and a dozen AirTags. There was a time when I would have been first in line to buy every new Apple product. Not anymore. I still use an iPhone 15, an older MacBook Air, and a previous generation of AirPods. The upgrades no longer feel compelling.
Even so, I used to look forward to Apple’s product announcements. They were often a glimpse into the future. This year’s event felt different. I found myself losing interest, and eventually I turned it off. The repeated promises that new features would “delight” users reminded me of something I witnessed nearly forty years ago at Intel.
The Wild Duck at Intel
In 1988, I made my first presentation to Intel’s Board of Directors. My role at Intel was to be a change agent. As Andy Grove would later say, “Avram was Intel’s wild duck.” That phrase eventually became the title of my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck.
At the time, Intel was focused almost entirely on microprocessors and the PC industry. I believed that networking would become just as important as computing itself. The network was no longer merely connecting computers. It was becoming the computer.
To explain my concern to the board, I used the same automobile analogy. Intel, I argued, was like an engine manufacturer, focused on making ever-faster processors while ignoring the emerging highway system that would connect them. I wondered what would have happened to the automobile industry if carmakers had taken a more proactive role in building the highway system itself. I believed Intel needed to establish a major position in networking, just as it had in microprocessors.
To do that, I proposed exploring significant acquisitions. One obvious candidate was Cisco. It had not yet gone public and had recently taken venture funding at a valuation of only about $10 million. Intel, by contrast, was worth roughly $5 billion. Cisco represented a rounding error against Intel’s value. Another possibility was 3Com, which had already gone public.
The board approved the strategy of looking for acquisition opportunities. But the acquisitions never happened. Andy Grove thought Cisco was too expensive and that 3Com had too many problems. He did not like anything I proposed. Later, other executives such as Frank Gill would try to get Intel into the networking business, but they were stopped by Andy.
So over the next decade, Intel repeatedly failed to establish a significant position in networking. History took a different path. Today, Cisco is worth roughly as much as Intel.
I have posted my book, The Flight of the Wild Duck for free on Substack. The chapter that deal with the network acquisition strategy can be found here.
It took me three years to write my memoir. The first year was spent doing research, the second writing, and the third editing. I enjoyed the process immensely.
I had three audiences in mind while writing it. The first was people like me or parents of people like me who could not follow the normal path through life. The second was readers interested in the history of technology and the computer industry. The third was people fascinated by early-stage investing, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
That combination made the book somewhat unconventional. But I could not really write three separate books.
I had also intended to include a section called Lessons, one hundred short lessons, each only a page long. But by then the manuscript was already 340 pages, and I had spent three years on it. I decided instead to publish those lessons separately someday. I still intend to do that.
The book was published in 2021. It has sold fewer than a thousand copies. I never expected it to become a bestseller, and I certainly did not write it for money, but those numbers have still been disappointing.
I believe the book is both well written and historically valuable. After all, I was “in the room” when many of the decisions that shaped the technological world we now live in were made and often by me. I felt that part of my contribution to the future of technology was helping document its past. But if nobody reads the book, it is hard to accomplish that goal.
I chose to self-publish rather than work with a traditional publisher because I wanted complete editorial freedom. But that also meant I had little guidance on how to market the book, and in retrospect I made a strategic mistake.
I decided to promote it primarily through podcast interviews. Looking back, that was probably not very smart. If someone listens to an hour-long interview with me, they may feel they already know the story and no longer need to read the book. And I suspect that many podcast listeners simply read fewer books.
Selling the book through Amazon created another barrier: people had to buy it, even though I never cared much about the monetary side. I also found Kindle Direct Publishing surprisingly unfriendly and opaque. There are people who know how to game the system and maximize visibility, but I neither understood those tricks nor wanted to spend my time learning them.
For quite a while, I had been thinking about putting the book on Substack. I did not want it behind a subscription wall. I simply wanted the entire book available — for free. On Substack, people can share links not only to the book itself but to individual chapters. That creates at least the possibility that the book could spread organically.
What held me back was learning the ins and outs of Substack. But yesterday, Claude Cowork and I finally made it happen. It is not perfect yet. I still want to add visuals as Claude could not move those over automatically. There are a few formatting issues. But it is already 95% of what I hoped it would be. I will fix the rest over time.
So I am inviting you to read all or part of The Flight of a Wild Duck. And if you think it is worthwhile, I would deeply appreciate it if you shared the link with your social network and with anyone who might enjoy the story.
My body is slowing down as my brain speeds up. It is quite a dilemma. It is understandable that my body would be slowing down. After all, I am 81 years old. But why is my brain speeding up? That is not to be expected. Now, I feel like I felt when I was an eight-year-old, reading a book a day as I consumed a library. Then I only had two things to stimulate my mind: books and, most importantly, my imagination. I learned by creating and by doing. I was destined to find my own way because I was incapable of following anyone else’s.
Now, at this advanced age, I am still driven to learn and to create. Perhaps the advent of AI has set my brain once again on fire. But like my childhood when I was so ill that most of my days were spent in a bathrobe, my body cannot keep up with my brain.
I have begun to feel tired. Not sleepy tired, but weary. While I am still strong, doing pilates and gym training four days a week, walking miles every day, and doing push-ups and planks at home, the physical energy that sustained me over all these years is dissipating. I am beginning to be at war with myself. My body wants to lie on the sofa passively, but my mind demands that I stand up and go to my computer. I still put in about 10 hours a day of what others might think of as work, but it is the struggle to do this that I am expressing, as well as the concern about how this situation will evolve.
I saw a video on Facebook this week that I cannot get out of my head.
A big, powerful Black man is attacking a middle-aged man on a street somewhere. The middle-aged man is wearing a Star of David. The bigger man kicks him again and again, shouting the word “Gaza” over and over, as if this stranger in the street whose views he does not know, whose politics he could not possibly have asked about, was personally responsible for everything happening in Gaza. .
He was not. He is a Jew. Apparently, that was enough to beat and kick him.
The first thing I felt watching this video was rage, but that soon transitioned into something closer to grief, a feeling of mourning as I remembered when things were different, when Black and Jewish Americans worked together to help make Dr. King’s dream come true. For me, this is personal.
When I learned that Ted Turner had died, I felt unexpectedly sad.
I met Ted several times during the 1990s, mostly around the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley. The first time may have been at a party or event where he was with his then wife, Jane Fonda. Like many people, I already knew of Ted Turner long before I met him. By then he was already a legend, the founder of CNN, owner of the Atlanta Braves, media mogul, environmentalist, and one of the largest landowners in America. But what struck me wasn’t his fame. It was his presence.
Ted Turner was not polished in the modern corporate sense. He did not feel media-trained, rehearsed, or carefully calibrated. He felt authentic, impulsive, funny, competitive, and very alive. He had enormous energy. When you were around him, you felt it.
Today many executives sound interchangeable. Their language is cautious, optimized, and professionally sanitized. Ted came from another era, an era when entrepreneurs often looked and behaved like the companies they built: messy, ambitious, emotional, unpredictable and bigger than life.
Ted Turner represented a type of entrepreneur that may be disappearing. Before CNN, the idea of a 24-hour news network sounded absurd. The major networks thought nobody would watch news all day. Ted ignored them and built it anyway.
Ted has been replaced by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. While they are certainly capable of building great companies, they are no match for the personality of Turner. They also seem to lack some of his character.
Ted could be outrageous and thoughtful, bombastic and vulnerable, deeply competitive yet deeply committed to causes larger than himself. He amassed enormous wealth, yet spent much of his later life focused on conservation and restoring bison herds across his ranches.
People like Ted are hard to categorize because they were never only one thing.
As I get older, I realize that what I miss most about certain eras is not the technology or even the business opportunities. It is the personalities. The people who entered a room and altered its energy. Ted Turner was one of those people. What I remember most now is his smile.
Strangely, over the last ten years, I would occasionally run into Jane Fonda in Los Angeles. Every time, it would bring Ted back into my mind for a moment recalling Sun Valley, the media world of the 1990s, the giant personalities of that era.
I decided to upgrade my internet to fiber. There is one company that does all the fiber for the city of Lecce (Open Fiber). Then there are various companies like TIM, FastWeb that “rent” the fiber. The Open Fiber people came out to bring the fiber into our home. The fiber connects to a device inside called an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) which converts the optical signal into ethernet. An ethernet cable connects that device to the router. The people that installed the fiber and ONT told me that TIM would do the next step of providing a new router and getting it to work and in the meantime my old system would continue to work. But after a few hours it stopped working.
The result was two days without internet and multiple phone calls by various people trying to help me. Everyone we spoke to said something different including, the fiber system was not yet working, we needed a new router, everything was fine. Then finally, someone said I just had to reset the router (one of those small reset buttons you can hardly see). I did that and now everything is working and I have 500megs up and down.
Apple turned out to be the most influential computer company since IBM and it continues. So while we celebrate its 50th year, we need to take amount to recognize the genius of the man who was responsible for that, Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs entered my life in 1982 and remained a recurring presence—sometimes directly, sometimes at a distance until his death in 2011. Apple’s 50th anniversary prompted me to revisit a post I wrote years ago called “30 Years of Not Being Steve Jobs.” https://twothirdsdone.com/2015/04/11/34-years-of-not-becoming-steve-jobs/
Apple was founded in 1976. Its story has been told many times and doesn’t need repeating here. I became aware of the company after joining Digital Equipment Corporation in 1979, three years after Apple’s founding. Within a year, I was promoted to group manager for professional computer which was our term for what the world was beginning to be call personal computers.
The computers my group was developing were far more sophisticated than Apple’s Apple II. We were building, what we believed, the future of computing would look like but we were wrong at least in the short term. At that time Apple wasn’t my primary concern. IBM, who had just introduced its PC, was.
Palm Springs, 1982
I met Jobs for the first time at the second annual PC Forum in Palm Springs in 1982. I flew in from Boston on a Learjet, fresh off the announcement of Digital’s Professional Series computers, full of confidence and convinced I was about to help reshape the computer industry. I had no idea I was also walking toward one of the more significant failures of my career.
That evening, I attended a dinner that included Bill Gates, whom I had met the year before, and Steve Jobs. They were both 27, 10 years younger than I me.
The next day, during a presentation, Jobs sat down next to me. I already knew his reputation. I remember hoping he wouldn’t try to recruit me. He was known for his charisma, and I didn’t want to be tempted. Digital was the second-largest computer company in the world, and I had been promoted four times in two years. I was, as they say, a rising star who in just a few years would crash. As it turned out, Jobs showed no interest in me.
I met Jeffrey Epstein exactly once, over breakfast at the Carlyle Hotel in New York in 1998. What I remember most is how boring he was. He seemed distracted, almost uninterested in the conversation. I chalked it up to a bad meeting and moved on. It was only years later, after the full scope of who Epstein was became public, that I began to reconsider what had actually happened that morning.
The meeting came about through my friend Lynn Forester, who later became Lady de Rothschild. Lynn was friends with Epstein and was starting a new company. She hoped he might invest and asked if I would take a meeting with him on her behalf. At the time, I was Corporate Vice President of Business Development at Intel and the co-founder of its venture and M&A arm, Intel Capital. Intel was one of the most valuable companies in the world, and plenty of people in the financial world would have gladly taken a meeting with me back then. Now, not so much. So giving an hour to support a friend seemed like reasonable. I knew nothing about Epstein beyond what Lynn had told me which was he was a financier.
The breakfast was forgettable. Epstein showed little curiosity about Intel, about Lynn’s investment opportunity, or about me. I left thinking he was simply dull. That impression sat undisturbed in my memory for years.
Then recently, I watched an episode of the Ezra Klein Show titled “The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power,” and something clicked. The episode laid out how Epstein operated not as a traditional financier, but as a predator who cultivated relationships by identifying what people wanted and what made them vulnerable. He had a remarkable ability to detect exploitable weaknesses, whether it was a hunger for money, status, or sex. He would find the crack and work his way in.
