
Meet Hillel.
He has spent his career in technology ensuring that his voice is a trustworthy news source. Since October 7th, he has been leveraging his credibility, his understanding of viral content, and his ability to reach beyond narrow echo chambers to educate the world on what has happened and what continues to happen in Israel.
Hillel moved to Israel with his family over 30 years ago. He was fifteen years old. His family was a hardcore Zionist family, before Zionist became a dirty and distorted word. He completed high school, served in the artillery unit in the army, studied political science, and then joined the work force. “I found my first job 20 years ago, was bored out of my mind, and I opened the internet. I started a website and began writing. Blogging wasn’t a thing yet. I started to write about tech, and very quickly entrepreneurs started to reach out to me. I quickly understood that Israeli entrepreneurs are very good at building tech, but very bad at building businesses. I would help them with their pitch and competitive analysis to help them get to market – whatever I could help with, and it wasn’t for money. I had a job.”
This ended up being a great business model for Hillel, because entrepreneurs flooded his inbox wanting to work together years down the line. “I built a pretty sizable consulting business, with companies from two guys in a garage to Google in Silicon Valley and Microsoft in Herzliya and Oracle and other leading large companies. I deal with all things growth, anything to do with growing a company on the qualitative side. I was living the dream; it was the best career ever.”
The news of the October 7th Massacre found Hillel while he was at synagogue celebrating Simchat Torah. “None of us had phones, but rumors began to circulate. I remember talking to a few people and telling them to stop with the hysteria, that they were scaring people, that there was no way that thousands of terrorists could break through the border. I didn’t believe it, but then my friend’s kids started to get called up to the army.” Of course, he heard the many sirens and booms of the iron dome, but “that’s kind of routine, as sad as that is to say.”
He turned on his phone after the holiday was over. “In retrospect, I should have turned on my phone earlier, but what would it have helped?” However, when he finally turned on the TV to see the news, he was taken back to a very personal trauma.
Hillel’s older brother, Ari, was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in 2018. He was shopping for groceries for his family, when a Palestinian teen came at him from behind and stabbed him multiple times in his back and neck, ultimately killing him. Before he died, Ari managed to shoot and neutralize the terrorist moments before he could kill his next victim. In his final act Ari became a hero of Israel. Ari was a father of four. Ari’s murderer was one of the hundreds released in exchange for the hostages Emily Damari, Romi Gonen, and Doron Steinbrecher that Hamas violently kidnapped from Israel on October 7th and were held in Hamas captivity for 471 days.
“When my brother was murdered – I remember the day like it was yesterday. I remember what socks I was wearing; I remember everything. But the day after – I don’t remember a thing. For the next month? Zero. Complete trauma. I completely blocked it out. I have zero recollection. The same is true for October 7th. I remember hearing the rumors. I remember shutting down my business. I don’t remember the second I turned on my phone. I probably blocked it out because it’s trauma. It’s such a scary thing how your brain plays tricks on you.”
After October 7th, Hillel knew what he had to do.
“I had complete clarity of what I needed to do. I shut down my business. I realized that I had built a platform for the last 15 years of a few hundred thousand followers who trust me – as they should, I never tried to sell them anything.”
Hillel was in a unique position. “The tech world was listening to me.” He decided to leverage his platform to be a reliable source of real-time, accurate information. “It’s a difficult combination. If it’s verified news, it’s not in real time, if it’s in real time, it can’t be verified. My ability to cross reference different sources and to make sure that I’m reporting in an accurate manner is very important to me.”
“I also want to give people a reason to wake up in the morning.” Hillel shares inspiring videos, good news, milestones in the war. “Anything that’s good.”
In his mission to share news, he has been very successful. “We’re talking over a billion impressions across all platforms.”
“The impact in clear.” He measures his success not only in the number of impressions, but in the content of the private messages that he receives. “People send messages thanking me for explaining what Zionism is, and for opening their mind to a different perspective.”
It is something he is very proud of. “It’s great for my soul. It’s great for the state of Israel. It’s not too great for my bank account. It’s been super challenging, and you have to be on 24/7 basically.”
If you are a person who has been on the internet since October 7th, you have seen the vile comments that pro-Israel and Jewish content creators have been subjected to. Hillel is no different. “The internet has the sickest of the sickest. The craziest of the craziest are on the Internet because they are behind a screen and can say whatever they want. I get some of the sickest messages, things I couldn’t repeat if I wanted to. My brain doesn’t go that dark.” In order to maintain his sanity, he will post and then mute the comments, advice he received from Ben Shapiro years ago. Of all of social platforms, Twitter/X receives the most violent and unhinged comments. “I’m talking death threats, they will find a picture of my kids to threaten them. It’s sick.”
People who have been following him for years were just following a tech guy who happens to write for large websites. He built his credibility, and now he leverages that trust to promote Israel. He had the ear of the tech world, and he saw exponential growth on social media – from 50,000 followers to 150,000 mostly from America, Canada, and Israel.
Hillel has the ability to break out of the Jewish Social Media echo chamber. “It’s an accurate statement to say that the Jewish world follows me. But I am speaking to the tech world and people that are completely out of our echo chamber. Just on Twitter my posts have had millions of impressions. Some posts have seen 40 or 50 million impressions which vastly outnumbers the amount of Jews that exist."
Being an expert in the field, Hillel encourages everyone to continue posting and sharing the truth. “It’s the mechanism of social media. If you post something to your friends or followers and one person finds that post meaningful and shares it, you have just reached beyond your echo chamber.”
The aftermath of October 7th left Hillel with big questions. “I’m sure we will be investigating those for a decade. The truth is that there have been many attempts before October 7th. Why were we dumb enough to believe that it couldn’t happen, to leave the Gaza border without a buffer zone, to have a fence that could be breached that easily?” He reflected on the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, a day that commemorates the breach of the walls of Jerusalem before the destruction of the second temple. “My whole life I heard about the walls being breached, I never understood it until now. Why haven’t we been preparing for something like this? What would happen if they come marching from Judea and Samaria in the tens of thousands? How can we prevent this from happening again, and worse?”
He doesn’t believe that policy will change drastically moving forward. “I want to be a cup-half-full guy, but we’re a compassionate nation. When you take anything that’s good too far it turns into something bad. The Mishna famously says that if you are compassionate to evil, you end up being evil to the compassionate. Our compassion leads us to being naïve, and unfortunately I don’t think we will learn our lesson.”
Before October 7th, Israel was extremely divided. Friends and families stopped talking. People painted groups of people on the left and right with a wide brush and drew conclusions solely based on belonging to a certain group. “It wasn’t just division on a philosophical level, it was really hatred. I don’t want to say that’s what caused October 7th, I don’t know how G-d works, but I will say that when we are split that way, our enemies smell it. It’s tragic that after a brief period of unity at the beginning of the war, we are seeing the same hateful rhetoric return. The fact that we are already dividing again is devastating.
Hillel is unsure what the future holds for his business after the war ends. As things stand, he doesn’t foresee himself going back to life as usual. The work he takes on in the future has to “have a stronger Zionist angle,” and it must have an element of making the world a better place.
As for his larger mission, Hillel has been encouraging that Jews in the diaspora start strongly considering making Aliyah. “People are pissed that I’m saying it, and of course I push back. I do get messages from people telling me that they changed their minds and have decided to make Aliyah. People tell me that the articles that I have written have inspired them to change their lives in a significant way. That feels good.”
He has an answer for any excuse people have ever given him as a reason to not make Aliyah. “I can write a book on these excuses. There are so many. But what has to happen abroad to make people wake up and see the writing on the wall? There are antisemites in Congress, there are people shattering Jewish windows, synagogues are being targeted, people are being attacked in the street, people are waving Hamas flags openly in the streets of every major city in the world. When you talk about the writing on the wall in Germany… how much clearer does it need to be?”
“Of course people question the safety of Israel after the monumental security failure of October 7th, but there is a fundamental difference between a failed mission and no mission at all.” As the world turned inside out and upside down, we have seen that Jewish communities around the world are not protected from antisemitic attacks. “Jews belong in Israel. I feel ten times safer here than I do in America. The state of Israel, the land of Israel is protecting us.”
Hillel knows firsthand what the costs of living in Israel are, and what the immediate impact of terrorism feel like. He hasn’t let this change him or his goals in life. It has made him more outspoken for the things he cares about, and unapologetic in his approach. “Here’s the bottom line. We are in one of the darkest periods of our history, but let’s not forget our history. Let’s not forget that we celebrate Purim and Chanukah and Passover. Our history has seen us overcome slavery, annihilation attempts, and we are still here, celebrating. We will overcome our enemies, we will dance again.”
“Am Yisrael Chai isn’t just a phrase. It’s not just words. It’s historical reality. We’re here, we’re not going anywhere. And so we have to go through this war. It’s not going to be easy, but we will dance again, and that’s the most important thing.”
Get your updates straight from Hillel himself at: https://nas.io/the-inner-hilz
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