Check Point billionaire, Sheba hospital chief to attend Bahrain peace confab
Pair, along with bakery chain proprietor, among a small number of Israeli businesspeople set to to join US-led economic workshop
Shoshanna Solomon was The Times of Israel's Startups and Business reporter
Israeli billionaire tech entrepreneur Marius Nacht, the co-founder of Israel’s largest cybersecurity firm, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., and of the VC fund aMoon Partners, will be among the select Israeli business representatives attending a US-led economic peace workshop in Bahrain this week, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.
Prof. Yitshak Kreiss, the director general of the Sheba Medical Center since 2016, will also be attending the confab, the source said, along with businesswoman Netta Korin, the proprietor of Bakery 29, a network of bakery and coffee shops in Israel.
A spokesman for Sheba Medical Center confirmed Kreiss will be attending. Kreiss is an expert in internal medicine and former IDF chief medical officer.
A spokesman for Nacht declined to comment.
The US administration and Bahrain announced in mid-May that they will host an economic workshop in Manama on June 25-26 that “will facilitate discussions on an ambitious, achievable vision and framework for a prosperous future for the Palestinian people and the region.”
Kreiss “is attending and will be an active participant as Sheba is already working closely with the Palestinian Ministry of Health treating nearly 1,500 men, women and children from Gaza and West Bank on an annual basis,” a spokesman for the Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan said in a text message.
Sheba was ranked by Newsweek in March as one of the world’s top 10 hospitals and a “leader in medical science and biotechnical innovation, both in the Middle East and worldwide.”
Nacht’s aMoon is a life sciences venture capital fund that invests in innovative health technologies. Nacht has also set up a nonprofit organization, the 8400 Health Network, to gather the brightest brains at the intersection of health and technology to help Israel become a life science powerhouse. The billionaire entrepreneur is also seeking to set up a digital bank in Israel.
Last week, The Times of Israel revealed that Yoav Mordechai, a former head of the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, will attend the confab.
American officials have said that the summit will deal with the economic portion of the White House’s apparently forthcoming plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The US administration has only invited “a single-digit number” of Israeli businesspeople to the conference, an unnamed American official who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Times of Israel last week.
Neither Israeli officials nor Palestinians will be attending the event. Palestinians have refused to participate, or engage at all with the Trump administration since it moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. Israeli officials and cabinet ministers were not invited.
On Saturday, days before the US-sponsored Bahrain conference, the White House released its proposal to boost the Palestinian economy by offering a $50 billion aid package that can only be implemented through an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
