If your understanding of Israel comes from The Guardian or the New York Times, Ali Ayoub shouldn't exist.
Ayoub is an Nvidia VP of software engineering in Israel, with hundreds of people working under him worldwide. He earned his degree at the Technion, worked at an Israeli tech company Mellanox, moved to the US to work at Google, founded a startup, move back to Israel and Mellanox which was acquired by Nvidia.
In other words, he is a fantastic Israeli high tech success story, similar to many others but now one of the most powerful tech executives in Israel.
He is also an Arab, born and raised in the Galilee village of Majd al-Krum.
While Ayoub is happy to discuss his upbringing and the importance of Arabs in the Israeli tech sector, there is something missing from the coverage of one of the highest profile Israelis in AI.
Criticism.
If Israeli Jews are the Jewish supremacists and anti-Arab bigots like we are constantly told, shouldn't there be some racist articles about him? On the contrary, the Hebrew media treats him as another Israeli success story, exactly as they treat Jews who succeed in technology.
Yet at the Technion, the percentage of engineering students who are Arab is the same as the general population who are Arab. Ayoub may be somewhat unusual but hardly unique - Johny Srouji, Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies at Apple, is also an Israeli Arab. .
I'm sure that they ad challenges that Israeli Jews do not have to achieve success. But those challenges didn't doom them to permanent status as oppressed individuals who cannot possibly succeed, which is the way that the progressive crowd looks at minorities - helpless and hopeless.
America and Israel share the same DNA - if you work hard you can succeed, no matter who you are. The Leftists say this is a myth. Perhaps to an extent it is. But myths are powerful. They point to the world we want to live in, not the world that we are in now.
The problem is that the progressive crowd sees the myth not as a noble goal but as an attack on their worldview. They support policies that entrench the permanent second class status that they claim to oppose, to validate their ideology rather than try to fix the real problems of minorities having to work harder to succeed.
Ali Ayoub is proof that the binary of oppressor/oppressed, white/Black, Jewish/Arab is the real myth. And the most remarkable thing about him is that his success, like that of other Arabs who thrive in Israel, is not considered anomalous in Israel itself. It is accepted not as exceptional but as the way things must be. The predominant Israeli response to seeing an Arab Israeli reach the top tier of a global tech powerhouse is not anger at one of "them" - but pride at one of "us."
Which is the real story about how Israeli Jews think, not how the media wants to pretend Israeli Jews think.
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