Israeli tech billionaire hopes for peace despite daughter’s killing

• Posted on December 12, 2023December 12, 2023
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

Danielle Waldman danced the last dance of her young life some time before dawn on 7 October. Soon afterwards she and her friends had to run for their lives, but they never made it home.

There is a record of her final moments – a brief video, recorded on a phone. It gives only a hint of the horrors to come.

The 24-year-old sits in the back seat of a car with two friends – strands of her long curly hair escaping from her grey hoodie. All three are casually dressed. There are fleeting smiles and overlapping voices, and a glimpse of blue wrist bands from the Supernova trance music festival they have just attended.

They are trying to remain calm, but they are being hunted.

Danielle’s boyfriend Noam Shai is in front, behind the wheel.

“Want me to drive very, very fast?” he asks. “I know how to do that.”

“Correct,” replies a female passenger. A bearded young man sitting beside Danielle tries to provide reassurance. “We will be all right,” he says. “Everything is ok, right?”

Next, from the front, an urgent demand – “left, or right?”

Then the video ends.

Minutes later Hamas gunmen riddled the car with bullets. Noam, Danielle, and their friends in the back seat were killed – as were nearly 360 other Israelis who went to dance at the festival in the Negev desert near the Gaza border.

The front seat passenger was taken hostage.

When the sun set on that day, 1,200 Israelis had been slaughtered – either at the festival or in their homes in kibbutzim close to the border. It was the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust. The vast majority were civilians.

Since then, Israel has gone to war in Gaza “to eradicate Hamas”, and Palestinians in turn have been slaughtered.

Almost 18,000 people have been killed at last count – according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza – 7,300 of them children.

In Gaza now, as in Israel after 7 October, parents are burying their children. And for every parent, Palestinian or Israeli, the loss is incomparable.

We meet Danielle’s father Eyal in his art-filled office, high above Tel Aviv. He has long been a tech giant – who founded the Israeli chip maker Mellanox Technologies, and sold it for $6.8bn in 2019.

But now he is simply a father, raw with grief, robbed of his youngest daughter.

“She was an amazing girl,” he says in a voice laden with love and grief. “She loved to dance. She loved animals. She loved people. She had many, many friends. She loved to snowboard, to scuba dive, to go on a motorcycle with Noam.”

-BBC