AILSA CHANG, HOST:
President Trump approaches Middle East peacemaking as a business deal. He's even put a price of $1 billion on membership to his Board of Peace. That's the body originally intended to oversee the recovery of Gaza. But many Palestinians are skeptical as they continue to confront the massive devastation and death toll caused by Israel's ongoing military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. On the Israeli side, some business leaders do like what they hear from Washington, but like everything in the Middle East, it's complicated. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
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MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Just off the beach in Jaffa, there's a sign that reads Dream Big. This is the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, where Tamar Nitzan curates an expo on Israeli startups. She says the late Israeli leader Shimon Peres came up with the idea after President Obama asked to see the startup nation.
TAMAR NITZAN: That was that Eureka moment for Paris, where he's like, I want to create this place that is a window to Israeli innovation - past, present, future - what makes it unique. And that's what this place is.
KELEMEN: She's highlighting startups in health care, food science and climate solutions.
NITZAN: When an Israeli innovator wakes up in the morning, they don't want to change Israel. They want to change the world - right? - because this is a very small market.
KELEMEN: But one health care company in her expo had its international funding put on hold because of the war in Gaza. Around the world, Israel faced charges of genocide, which it denies, and calls for boycotts. A major Israeli tech investor, Eyal Waldman, was worried that Israel would lose its cutting edge as young educated Israelis left the country. But he believes that could change if voters choose a different government and hold Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to account for failing to prevent the October 7 attack.
EYAL WALDMAN: I think there's many more things that Netanyahu himself and the government are doing wrong. I see a lot of corruption.
KELEMEN: Waldman is one of the founders of the tech company Mellanox that was acquired by chip-making giant Nvidia in 2020 for $6 billion. Like many Israelis, he suffered a personal loss in the October 7 attack led by Hamas. His daughter, Danielle, was killed, along with her boyfriend.
WALDMAN: It's extremely painful. She was an amazing girl. She was an American. She was born in California. She did no harm to anyone. On the contrary, she helped a lot of people. They murdered her.
KELEMEN: His company had 30 employees in Gaza, but he doesn't know what happened to them. Waldman says he made sure Nvidia retained the 150 Palestinian staffers in the West Bank that he had hired, and he still believes in a two-state solution. But he's looking elsewhere in the region for business opportunities in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as in Syria and Lebanon.
WALDMAN: I think business should precede the political engagements, and we are looking for investments opportunity in some of those countries, the same thing we've done employing Gaza employees in the West Bank.
KELEMEN: Waldman remains bullish on the Israeli economy and thinks President Trump is right to talk about business as a path to peace. A former legal advisor to Palestinian negotiators, Diana Buttu, says Trump can't look at the Palestinians like a business investment.
DIANA BUTTU: How do you deal with all these people who have been made disabled? How do you deal with all these orphans? You can't economically revitalize that, right? That doesn't get addressed through being a CEO of a company, which is the way that Trump views the world.
KELEMEN: The Israeli government, though, is strangling the economy in the West Bank. Waldman blames Netanyahu's right-wing ministers for that, and at times, he sounds like he wants to run for office himself.
WALDMAN: A lot of people want me to go to politics.
KELEMEN: And?
WALDMAN: I hope there's going to be better people.
KELEMEN: For now, he's looking for more business opportunities throughout the Middle East. He says he thinks, in a couple of years, Israel will be at peace with more of its neighbors and perhaps even Saudi Arabia, which he says can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tamar Nitzan says, in some ways, this is a vision that Shimon Peres would have shared.
NITZAN: He always envisioned not a startup nation, but a startup region. And I think here, we still believe that that's possible.
KELEMEN: Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Tel Aviv.
CHANG: It is a different picture for the Palestinian economy. Israel's war in Gaza has not only left that territory in ruins, Israel has also cut off much of its economic ties with the West Bank. More than two years on, the devastation has cascaded down to every level of the Palestinian economy. That story next week on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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