Smadar Nehab

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Summary

Smadar Nehab (b. 1951) is an experienced high tech executive and entrepreneur with 25 years of experience starting and leading research and development organizations in Israel and California. In 2007, Nehab transitioned to social entrepreneurship: she ideated, initiated, and, together with partners, established Tsofen – High Technology Centers, a non-profit organization aimed at fully integrating the Arab community in Israel with the Israeli high-tech industry. Nehab led considerable social change in Israel by up-starting high-tech industry in Arab cities and by changing Israeli high-tech to be more inclusive of Arabs. In recognition of this work, she received, together with her partners from Tsofen, the 2016 Knesset Speaker’s Quality of Life Prize. In 2017, Nehab joined forces to co-found Siraj Technologies Ltd., a social business that focuses on upstarting high-tech in the Bedouin community in Israel.

Biography

Early Years and Education

Smadar Nehab was born in 1951 in Kibbutz HaZore’a. Nehab grew up in a humanistic household. Her parents were both born in Germany and moved to Israel/Palestine in 1933 with Hitler’s rise to power. She attended high school at Shomria High School in Mishmar Ha’Emek and wrote her final high school project in software programming. Nehab earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science. She also holds a certificate in Business Administration from the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University.

Social Activism

Nehab’s activism has always focused on aspiring to build a more shared and just society between Jews and Palestinians. Since leaving the high-tech industry, she has focused on integrating marginalized communities into it, with emphasis on Palestinian citizens of Israel. To that end, she established two not-for-profit organizations – Tsofen – High Technology Centers Ltd. and Siraj Technologies. She was also involved in the early stages of the non-profit organization She codes;. Today, Nehab is formalizing the Tsofen and Siraj model into a replicable model for connecting marginalized communities to the high-tech industry and is examining its potential for implementation among migrant and refugee communities in Europe and the United States.

Tsofen - High Technology Centers

In 2007, Nehab founded Tsofen – High Technology Centers Ltd., together with Sami Saadi and Yossi Coten. Tsofen’s objective was to connect Israel’s Arab society to its high-tech industry. The organization was established in the Arab city of Nazareth and initially centered its activity in Israel’s Galilee region, though today it works nation-wide with offices in the Triangle region (in the town of Kafr Qasim), and activity at high schools, universities, and high-tech companies across Israel.

Together with her partners, Nehab developed the organization’s model, which emphasized incentivizing high-tech industry to open branches in Nazareth. Nehab believed that the existence of a high-tech company in the heart of Israel’s largest Arab city would prompt growing employment rates of Arabs in the industry. When Arab professionals join the high-tech industry, she believed, especially young people, they not only act as role models for other young Arabs who, until then, did not think a career in high-tech was possible. Rather, the existence of high-tech industry impacts the community as a whole: parents, teachers, thought leaders, and local municipal governments. A “buzz” is created, sending a message to Arab candidates that a career in high-tech is not only desired, but also achievable, thereby encouraging more Arab college and university STEM graduates to sign up for Tsofen’s trainings, and more high school students to choose STEM and other high-tech related paths in their academic studies. Tsofen’s model is innovative in its focus on creating industry demand for employees from the marginalized group first. This is different from many employment training models, which first prepare and train members of the marginalized group, before ensuring that there is demand at the other end for this new workforce.

“When we started, 350 Arabs worked in high-tech companies, and at the end of 2014 there were 2,200,” tells Nehab. As of 2020, over 800 Arab college and university graduates have taken part in Tsofen’s professional training program, and approximately 2,000 found employment in high-tech through the organization’s placement services. Overall, in 2020 the high-tech industry in Israel employs over 6,500 Arab engineers – a 20-fold increase over 12 years. Additionally, in 2019, Tsofen worked with approximately 4,500 high school students and played a role in the allocation of government budgets for training, high school programs, and building high-tech zones in Arab cities.

“My whole life has been guided by the desire to make Israel a good place for both Jews and Palestinians that live in it,” Nehab tells about her motives for establishing Tsofen. “As a high-tech worker, I witnessed the total lack of Arab engineers in the industry. I believe that technological advancement and economic equality will contribute significantly to building a better, more shared society. Furthermore, as a senior executive in the industry, I recognized the growing shortage in good engineers, and I knew that integrating Arab engineers in the industry will do good for the industry itself, not only for social justice.”

At the end of 2015, Nehab left her role as Co-CEO of Tsofen and joined its Public Council. Today she continues to work with Social Export Israel to identify international partners (so far in France and Belgium) to implement Tsofen’s model, adding local adaptations to encourage the integration of marginalized communities into the local high-tech industry.

She Codes

She codes; is a community of women established with the goal of reaching 50% women software developers in the Israeli high-tech industry. It was founded by Ruth Polachek in 2013 and now has over 50,000 members. Its members include women who want to learn software development, move into the high-tech sector, or develop new programming skills, as well as high school students interested in programming.

Nehab joined Polachek in 2015 when She codes; was forming its organization infrastructure. She contributed to its transformation from a volunteer-only organization to a scalable one funded in part by Israel’s Ministry of Economy.

Siraj Technologies Ltd. & Siraj NGO

In 2017, Nehab joined a group of leaders from high-tech, social entrepreneurs, and academics from the Bedouin community to establish Siraj Technologies Ltd, a Bedouin-led startup company located in Be’er Sheva. It offers software development services with a focus on Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). As a social business, Siraj Ltd.’s vision is full and equal participation of the Bedouin community in the Israeli high-tech industry – participation that will enable economic growth, partnership, and equity between the Bedouin community and Israeli society as a whole. A full list of Siraj Ltd.’s Board of Directors is available on the company’s website.

As a social business, Siraj Ltd. is partly owned by an NGO, Siraj - Building Hi-Tech in the Bedouin Community. The social business model dictates that the company’s profits partially fund the activities of the NGO, thereby promoting its social mission. In addition to profits from the company, the NGO’s activities are funded by philanthropic gifts.

The Siraj NGO’s activities include On-the-Job Training in which early career Bedouin engineers join the Siraj Technologies team for several months of training. To increase the supply of Bedouin high-tech candidates, the NGO also operated a mentoring program for Bedouin university and college students in STEM subjects. It also hosts groups of Bedouin high school students and exposes them to the world of high-tech – for many, such a visit is their first exposure to a technological professional setting – and organizes technological meetups for the Bedouin community, including engineers and professionals, teachers, parents, and thought leaders. The Siraj NGO’s strategy is similar to Tsofen’s: in its early stages the organization emphasizes creating demand for Bedouin engineers – in this case by establishing a high-tech company in the Bedouin community. In contrast to the conditions that Tsofen faced in the Galilee, Israel’s Bedouin population until 2017 was completely cut off from the country’s high-tech industry, with only a handful of Bedouin engineers. Therefore, Siraj’s task at hand presents additional challenges.

As of early 2020, the Siraj NGO’s activities reached over 1,000 Bedouin high school students and over 300 college and university students. Siraj Technologies Ltd. currently employs 16 Bedouin engineers, including two women – the company’s team has doubled since 2018, and tripled since its establishment.

High-Tech Industry Experience

During her career in high-tech, Nehab led software development efforts in three main domains:

1. Electrical Design Automation Systems – EDA: Nehab worked at Motorola Semiconductor Israel in Ramat Gan, Israel, where she built the company’s first CAD.
2. 1990-1997 Color Imaging: The Kaminer-Nehab family relocated to California, where Nehab worked in the field of desktop color imaging. In this way, she played a part in the early stages of the desktop imaging revolution from black and white to color. She worked as Team Lead at Electronics for Imaging (EFI) in San Mateo. EFI was founded by Efi Arazi, founder of Scitex and one of the fathers of the Israeli high-tech industry. There, she managed development of the company’s core technology. Later, Nehab joined Canon Information Systems in Cupertino as Manager of the Imaging Department. The teams she led developed the software for Canon Inc.’s first personal digital cameras.
3. 1998-2006 Application Performance Management Systems: With her return to Israel, Nehab joined Verisity, a company with breakthrough technology in the field of design verification, as VP R&D. She later transitioned to the field of application performance management systems and served as VP R&D at several companies, including Conduct which was later sold to Mercury/HP. In 2003, together with David (Dudi) Barzilay, Nehab founded the startup Certagon, and served as VP R&D and Israel Site Manager.

Family and Personal Life

Nehab married Noam Kaminer, who held a PhD in information systems from the University of California – Berkeley, and Master’s degree in history from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Kaminer worked in high-tech and passed away from cancer in 2014 at the age of 61. He and Nehab had a son and daughter: Matan Kaminer, who holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and researches the anthropology of migrant workers, and Carmel Kaminer, who completed her BA in Nursing at Tel Aviv University and works as an internal medicine nurse.

Prizes, Academic Publications, and Patents

• Knesset Speaker’s Quality of Life Prize, 2016. Received together with Tsofen co-founders, Sami Saadi and Yossi Coten, as Tsofen as an organization.
• Article: Using color management in color document processing, International Society for Optics and Photonics, 1995.
• Article: Data Framework for VSLI Design, ICCAD, 1991.
• Patent: Method and Apparatus For Detecting Performance, Availability and Content Deviations in Enterprise Software Applications.
• Patent: System for generating a custom formatted hypertext document by using a personal profile to retrieve hierarchical documents, Justia Patents.
• Patent: Halftoning with gradient based selection of Dither Matrices.

Additional Reading

Selected Articles in English

• Yoav Fromer, “The Nazareth Code: Can Israel’s Booming Tech Sector Heal the Wounds of Israeli Arabs?”, Tablet, 18.7.2013
• Elhanan Miller, “For the ‘start-up nation’, an Arab challenge”, The Times of Israel, 12.11.2013
• Gwen Ackerman, Alisa Odenheimer, As Tech Jobs Go Unfilled, Israel Looks to Hire More Arabs, Bloomberg, 4.11.2014
• Kate Shuttleworth, “Biblical Nazareth goes hi-tech thanks to Arab push”, USA Today, 18.2.2015
• Inbal Orpaz, “A New Innovation for Startup Nation: Employing Israeli Arabs”, Ha’aretz, 27.7.2015
• Shlomo Meital, "Silicon Nazareth", The Jerusalem Post, 7.9.2015
• “Integrating Arabs into Israel’s Hi-tech Sector”, Knowledge@Wharton, 1.2.2016
• Hagar Revet, “Israeli Tech Veteran Giora Yaron Wants to Bring Israel’s Bedouins into the Tech Fold”, C-Tech, 18.5.2018
• Othman Alshekh, “WeWork and Siraj Technologies: Advancing tech development in Bedouin society”, The Times of Israel, 5.6.2018
• Rina Bassist, “Israel and French experts meet at innovation confab”, Jerusalem Post, 19.6.2019

Selected Articles in Hebrew

• Galya Yemini, “Smadar Nehab’s Code”, Ha’aretz, 23.12. 2007
• Tzahi Hoffman, “Even ‘Arab’ Companies Like Provigent Could Be Established in Nazareth”, Globes, 28.3.2011
• Rotem Shtarkman and Inbal Orpaz, “Forget 8200, Ramat HaHayal, and Herzliya Pituach: Israel’s Next High-Tech Centers”, The Marker, 10.7.2015
• Odeh Bisharat, “Racists, Say Thank You to Arabs”, Ha’aretz, 14.12.2015
• Nehamah Almog, “Arab Women in Israeli High-Tech: A Situation Report”, People and Computers, 8.3.2016
• Television interview with Siraj team, 9.8.2017 (the interview takes place between minute 44:11-49:20)
• Elyashiv Reichner, “Within A Decade Hundreds of Bedouins Will Work in High-Tech”, Makor Rishon, 27.9.2018
• Shiri Dover, “I Grew Up in a Bedouin Village, When I Started Learning Computers at University I was In Shock”, Globes, 29.10.2018

References

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