Google’s Wiz deal in a time of war offers a new answer to “what is Zionism?”
Even as missiles threatened Tel Aviv, the $32 billion acquisition highlighted Israel’s forward-looking nationalism.
What is Zionism? This seemingly trite question received a surprising and multilayered answer on Wednesday on one of the most difficult days ever for the Israeli home front, and at the same time one of the most historic for its economy.
Google’s official announcement that it had completed the acquisition of Wiz was made while interception trails could still be seen in the skies above Tel Aviv, directly above the company’s offices in the city center. Only hours earlier, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had published a list of what it called legitimate targets for Iranian missiles and drones across the Middle East, a list that included Google’s Israeli development center.
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Wiz offices alongside a missile interception above Tel Aviv.
(Photos: Omer Hacohen, Jack Guez / AFP)
None of this caused Google to reconsider the acquisition, even though it could still have walked away from the deal by paying a relatively modest termination fee of about $3 billion. Instead, Wiz, now part of Google Cloud, though maintaining its Israeli brand, also announced that it had signed a lease for 13 floors in Tel Aviv’s Landmark Tower, in a six-year agreement worth more than 350 million shekels.
By coincidence, an essay by the American-Jewish journalist Alana Newhouse was published in the United States on Wednesday and quickly attracted attention under the striking title “Zionism for Everyone.” The long and carefully argued article, published in Tablet magazine, presents a thesis that at first glance seems almost as improbable as Google completing the largest acquisition in its history while the target company sits between threats from Iran in the east and Hezbollah in the north.
According to Newhouse, the Western world is in some sense jealous of Israel because Zionism represents an unusual form of nationalism, one that looks forward rather than backward. In her view, it is a kind of futuristic nationalism, not one rooted in nostalgia or trapped by the past.
Newhouse proposes four “survival tests” for societies that wish to move forward. In her view, Israel is perhaps the only Western country that currently meets them all: demographic resilience, with a positive birth rate exceeding deaths; the ability to defend itself, reflected in the willingness of Israelis to fight for their country in a way that many citizens of Western nations are no longer prepared to do; and levels of happiness, where Israel consistently ranks near the top of global indices.
The final point becomes particularly relevant in the context of the Wiz deal. In an era shaped by artificial intelligence, influence and leverage in the international arena are increasingly determined not by physical size but by intellectual capital.
In that sense, Zionism can be viewed as another technology of national renewal, one developed by the “Startup Nation.”
Few examples illustrate this modern form of Zionism more clearly than the creation of companies like Wiz or Vast Data, which this week completed a funding round valuing it at $30 billion. Although less visible in headlines than Wiz’s sale to Google, the valuation places it in the same league as Wiz, and potentially positions it to surpass that milestone in future funding rounds.
Yet there remains one place, perhaps the most important of all, where this new form of Zionism struggles to gain recognition: within Israel’s own government.
There, instead of directing the billions of shekels flowing into the state coffers toward investments in the future, particularly in education that could foster the creation of even larger new companies, much of the money is spent on policies aimed at preventing dropouts from yeshivahs and encouraging Haredi culture. This culture undermines one of the central foundations of Zionism: the willingness to defend the state and its security. Perhaps this tension helps explain why Israel has become less popular internationally in recent years. While Israeli society may embody a new form of Zionism, the government is pulling the country back toward the 19th century.
