Eyal Waldman Keeps a Two-State Bet After Gaza

Eyal Waldman still wants two states for two peoples, nearly three years after Hamas killed his daughter at the Nova festival. The Gaza coding team he spent years hiring is gone, and he does not know if those engineers are alive.

Nvidia kept the West Bank staff he had pushed onto the payroll. Israeli public opinion did not keep his map of the future. In September 2026, Pew Research Center found that only 17% of Israelis see coexistence with an independent Palestinian state as possible. Waldman is still in that slice, with a short-term clause attached: destroy Hamas first.

He Built a Payroll in Gaza and Rawabi

Waldman, born in Jerusalem and a Golani Brigade infantry officer as a young man, co-founded Mellanox Technologies in 1999 in Yokneam with colleagues from Intel, among them Michael Kagan, now Nvidia’s chief technology officer. He ran the chip-and-interconnect firm as chief executive for about 21 years. On March 11, 2019, Nvidia announced a $6.9 billion cash acquisition at $125 a share. The deal closed on April 27, 2020.

Long before that sale, he treated Palestinian hiring as both cheaper labor and a political brick. Mellanox opened an R&D site in Rawabi, the planned West Bank city, in 2010. From 2016 it also used contractors for a small Gaza team. After the Nvidia closing he pressed the buyer to put West Bank engineers on staff instead of leaving them as outsourced contractors in Hebron, Nablus and Rawabi; Gaza workers, he said at the time, would stay contractors for a while.

THE HIRING BET

1. 1999: Waldman co-founds Mellanox and spends the next two decades arguing that Israelis and Palestinians can share a product roadmap.
2. 2010: The Rawabi development center opens; Nvidia Israel software chief Amit Krig later said that site employed 100 engineers.
3. 2016: A Gaza contractor team starts writing code for the same company that sold networking gear into the world’s data centers.
4. 2020: Nvidia takes Mellanox, West Bank engineers move toward direct employment, and Waldman donates $360,000 to an oncology ward at a Gaza hospital.

He later described the point as “positive friction,” people talking about soccer and children instead of only about the conflict. In one breakfast with a Palestinian colleague, his daughter Danielle walked in with her partner, Noam Shay, who was carrying a Tavor rifle. The woman froze. Waldman told her that at her checkpoint, the soldier was afraid of her too.

October 7 Closed the Gaza Lab

Danielle Waldman was 24, born in California, and was at the Nova music festival near the Gaza fence on October 7, 2023, with Noam Shay, a former Nvidia employee. Waldman was in Bali when the attack began. He flew home and went south. He found her car on Monday morning, with fighting still nearby and bodies around the vehicle. He hoped she had been taken into Gaza. Four days later her body was identified.

Before she reached the car, he said, she stopped to help a woman who needed her. “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,” he told Michele Kelemen in January 2026.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, sent staff a letter that called the attacks a living nightmare for “3,300 Nvidia families” in Israel, noted that nearly 400 employees had gone back to military duty, and eulogized Danielle. The company paid $10,000 grants to Israeli staff and later announced a $15 million donation, which it described as its largest to that point, for groups aiding people hurt by the war. Hitting chip deadlines while hundreds of people are in uniform is the daily work of a tech CEO running a company from the battlefield.

THE PAYROLL AFTER OCTOBER 7

• Gaza team: About 30 people, by Waldman’s count in January 2026; he said he does not know what happened to them.
• West Bank staff: He said he made sure Nvidia retained the 150 Palestinian staffers he had hired.
• Rawabi site: Krig put that one office at 100 engineers, a subset of the West Bank total.
• Gaza contract: Stopped “due to the war and the client’s request,” Krig said in May 2024.

The lab that was supposed to prove the thesis sat in the same territory that launched the massacre. The West Bank seats stayed. The Gaza seats did not.

The Long Bet Survived the Short One

On November 29, 2023, Waldman spoke to about 200 people on a call hosted by Offir Gutelzon, the Palo Alto co-founder of the diaspora group UnXeptable. He had already met President Joe Biden in Israel and said he had sat with Secretary of State Antony Blinken three times. He still used the Egypt analogy he has repeated ever since: in 1973 Egypt was the enemy, and four years later Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made a peace most people had not believed.

By November 2024 the short-term half of the wager had been rewritten. Before October 7 he had thought Hamas might, in some situations, be willing to talk. That idea, he said, came partly from employing people in Gaza. It was “proved wrong.”

Either we need to continue to kill each other, or we need to continue to learn to live next to each other, I think the second option is much better

Eyal Waldman, Mellanox co-founder, November 2024

Asked later whether the hiring look naive in hindsight, he said he did not think he would have done anything differently. He did say he felt betrayed by senior Palestinian officials he had worked with closely, people he believes supported Hamas. The jobs were not the apology. Hamas, in his telling, was never the workforce.

WHAT HE STILL PUTS ON THE TABLE

• First move: Destroy Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and anyone who crossed the fence on October 7.
• New bosses: Replace the leadership on both sides before any deal is worth the paper.
• The state: A Palestinian state with autonomy, a currency, and an airport, living behind “very clear borders.”
• The limit: No indirect fire and no weapons that can threaten Israel; part of Jerusalem, he has said, might be international so both sides can claim it.

In late 2023 he hoped that two-to-four-year window might be enough. In a later conversation he stretched the hope to about five years, after new leaders show up. The calendar moved. The sequence did not: hostages and Hamas first, politics after.

Only 17% of Israelis Still See Two States

Pew asked Israeli and Palestinian adults in spring 2026 whether “a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully.” Fieldwork ran from March 30 to May 6, during the Iran war and across the April 7 ceasefire declaration. Interviewers sat with 1,001 people in Israel and 1,038 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They could not work in Gaza.

PEW SPRING 2026 COEXISTENCE FINDINGS

Among Arab Israelis, 46% declined to answer. Among Israelis overall, 20% gave no answer, twice the share that skipped the question a year earlier. Pew has asked Israelis the coexistence question since 2013. 2026 was the first time more than half said, outright, that it is not possible. The 17% who still say yes is the lowest band in that series, statistically unchanged from 2025.

Waldman’s long-term line sits inside that 17%. The people who told Pew that peace cannot happen talked about land that cannot be split, about fear after the recent killing, and about an independent Palestinian state as an existential threat. Palestinians who said no pointed to occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A payroll in Rawabi does not show up in those answers.

A Handshake That Did Not Hold in Venice

On May 7, 2026, Waldman walked up to the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale while pro-Palestinian protesters shouted outside. He put out his hand. A protester from Gaza shook it, then pulled back when Waldman said he was Israeli, and said he did not want to put his hand in Waldman’s hand. Security moved Waldman inside. Video of the exchange spread the same day.

The man in that clip had opened a design center in Gaza, put Palestinian engineers on a multinational payroll, and written a $360,000 check to a Gaza cancer ward. None of that traveled with him across the pavilion threshold. A crowd that speaks in the name of Palestinians would not take the hand of the Israeli who had actually hired them.

He has said he is not against Muslims and not against Islam. He has also said that people who took part in October 7 “will be eliminated,” and that Israel knows who came, from videos and from cell phone numbers. Those two sentences have lived in the same interviews since the first weeks after the massacre. Venice did not add a third.

The Prize the Government Tried to Block

In 2024 Israel awarded him the Israel Prize for Entrepreneurship and Technological Innovation, the state’s highest civilian honor. Education Minister Yoav Kisch had moved to shrink that year’s prize list to war-related categories, a change Waldman and others read as a way to keep the award away from a loud critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of the 2023 judicial overhaul. After petitions to the High Court of Justice, Kisch restored the usual categories. Waldman still received the prize, which he said he took in Danielle’s honor.

He told a Knesset science committee he believed Kisch was not acting on his own, and that pressure had come “from above.” He has kept the same charge about the government in quieter rooms: corruption, no vision, no worthy leadership “not in the opposition or the coalition.” In mid-September 2026 he said Israel could face serious political and economic consequences if Netanyahu wins the election.

People have asked him to go into politics himself. “A lot of people want me to go to politics,” he said in January 2026. Asked whether he would, he said, “I hope there’s going to be better people.”

The Next Hires Are in the Gulf

The business method has not been retired. It has been rerouted. “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,” he said, naming Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Lebanon. He has also talked about using the Abraham Accords, with Bahrain, the Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, and eventually Saudi Arabia, to take on Gaza “the day after.”

He still chairs Waldo Holdings, the private investment shop he set up after leaving Mellanox. He still says a Jewish liberal-democratic Israel has to hold, and that only a few tens of thousands of skilled people leaving would bruise the economy. He still says the hostages come first, then the demolition of Hamas, then a neighboring government that can actually govern.

The Gaza desks are empty, and he cannot say who among those about 30 people is alive. The West Bank desks are still Nvidia’s. The polls have moved against him. Venice would not shake his hand. The long bet is the same one he described on that UnXeptable call in 2023, minus the hope that Hamas might ever be a partner, and he has not taken it off the table.