Earlier this week, Google announced that it had agreed to acquire the Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz—which offers essential services to companies employing large and complex software—for $32 billion. It marks, by far, Google’s largest acquisition ever, and the largest ever acquisition of an Israeli-founded company. (Wiz is based in the United States, though its founders and many of its employees are Israeli.) Sharon Wrobel examines the deal’s background and consequences:

Wiz was founded by four tech musketeers who met in the Israeli army and served together in the IDF for almost a decade. Assaf Rappaport, forty, Yinon Costica, forty-one, Ami Luttwak, forty, and Roy Reznik, thirty-five, are graduates of the famed elite Israeli military intelligence unit 8200, which has built a track record of churning out serial tech entrepreneurs and founders of startups, including Nice, Palo Alto Networks, CyberArk, and Waze.

[Today] businesses face heightened network-security risks, including sophisticated ransomware, malware, and other breaches. The changing environment bolstered the need and ample demand for Wiz’s fast-growing multi-cloud security platform powered by artificial intelligence. Its customers include more than 40 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, such as Slack, Mars, BMW, DocuSign, Plaid and Agoda.

The estimated tax revenue Israel could earn from the transaction is equal to about 0.6 percent of the GDP and would help relieve government pressure to introduce measures to fund the war’s defense and civilian expenditures and bring down the budget deficit and high debt levels.

If a deal is finalized, it would also further anchor Google’s commitment to develop key technology in Israel and cement its presence in the country.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.