When Boaz Arbel woke up Saturday to the news of what was happening in Israel, he knew immediately that he would need to go back and find a way to help defend his homeland.
Arbel took a 10-hour flight from Boston to Tel Aviv, and by Tuesday he was working as a coordinator between the Israeli Air Force and ground forces on the frontlines in Israel’s rapidly escalating war with Gaza and Hamas militants.
“The magnitude of the attack, the number of casualties, the number of civilians taken over the border by terrorists — that was unbelievable,” Arbel told GeekWire via a Zoom call Tuesday. “I knew immediately that I had to do something. I cannot just stand aside and do nothing. It was a no-brainer.”
Upon arrival in Israel, he barely had time to visit with family in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv, where he grew up.
“I kissed my parents, gave them a hug and rushed to base. There’s no time to waste here, unfortunately,” said Arbel, who was also interviewed by a Boston TV station this week.
Arbel, 53, is a Needham, Mass.-based technology executive who is co-founder and chief revenue officer of Worknet, a Redmond, Wash.-based startup that helps enterprises integrate external communication into Slack and Microsoft Teams.
The company emerged from stealth mode this summer with $5 million in funding, and is led by CEO Ami Heitner, a former SAP and Microsoft exec who co-founded machine learning platform Komiko.
Heitner, also an Israeli who was an officer in the Israeli Air Force, said he and his colleagues are “immensely proud of, and fully support, Boaz’s decision.”
“In these challenging times for Israel, individuals and companies have the opportunity to demonstrate their true values and priorities,” Heitner told GeekWire. “Clearly, this is the right choice.”
Arbel is joining his four daughters, ages 21-to-26, who all graduated from Boston-area high schools and are now serving in the Israel Defense Forces. He said his wife, Naomi, who works for a nonprofit called Friends of the IDF, “has a lot to worry about.”
Arbel himself enlisted in the IDF when he was 18, as is the law for every citizen in Israel. He served for seven years and then stayed on as a reserve fighter navigator in the Israeli Air Force. He has lived in Munich, Germany; in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast; and he got his master’s degree in Birmingham, England.
At age 40, after 22 years of active service, Arbel moved to the U.S. His tech experience in Massachusetts includes roles at Profitect, Logz.io, and MaiView.
‘If you work with people that have values, that are willing to sacrifice their comfort and their income for a good reason, for a reason they believe in, I want to work with those people.’
— Boaz Arbel
“There’s no place like Israel, and it will always be home,” he said. “We became American residents and citizens and we see America now as our home. But it’s OK that we have two homes. And I’m willing to do for America what I’m doing for Israel.”
Returning to active military duty wasn’t as easy as just deciding to hop on a plane. Arbel said it took some effort to find connections to people who were willing to find him a role.
He credits an officer who was convinced that it’s OK to think outside of the box in order to achieve extraordinary results. He said that mindset can be a typical one for Israelis, and it shows up in the country’s robust tech scene.
“I think that’s why Israel became a startup nation,” Arbel said. “If I thought that I should serve, there’s no way someone will stand in my way. I will find a way to do that in one unit or another, in this assignment or another.”
And if a military position didn’t pan out, Arbel would have found a civilian role to take on, volunteering at a hospital or delivering supplies for soldiers on the frontlines, or whatever else was needed.
Arbel is one of many tech startup employees, both in Israel and beyond, who are leaving their day jobs to join the war.
Worknet employs 10 people. Beyond Redmond and Boston, the company has engineering teams in Israel and in Warsaw, Poland, where employees hosted refugees from Ukraine after Russia invaded.
“And now [Israel] is under attack,” Arbel said. “Imagine how hard it is to sit down and try to do some work and concentrate when you are in a bomb shelter and mortars and missiles are shot at you, and jets and helicopters are flying all over.”
Arbel calls Worknet “lean and mean” and he’s optimistic that the startup can weather ongoing economic uncertainty back in the U.S. He thinks what’s he’s doing reinforces the message to employees to believe in and love what they do, and that standing for something makes them better.
“If you work with people that have values, that are willing to sacrifice their comfort and their income for a good reason, for a reason they believe in, I want to work with those people,” Arbel said. “Because when push comes to shove, I know they can deliver. They can show up in hard times.”
