Google Israel CEO Barak Regev reflects on his rise from teenage orange seller to tech executive, a confrontation with a pro-Palestinian engineer, anti-Israel backlash, Wiz's success and the AI revolutionIt happened two years ago, on March 4, at a Calcalist conference celebrating Israeli high-tech at Rockefeller Center in New York. Barak Regev, CEO of Google Israel, which sponsored the event, was standing onstage before dozens of senior technology executives from the American and Israeli industries.Regev: "I went up to speak after the mayor of New York at the time. In my view, it was a very important event, certainly after October 7. Throughout that entire period, we met all of Google global's targets. I even jokingly asked my managers not to get used to the fact that we manage to survive under any circumstances. Eventually they'll kick us out of the offices and say, 'You manage just fine without them.'GalleryBarak Regev, CEO of Google Israel (Photo: Oz Mualem)"I started the presentation and then I saw someone at the back, at the edge of the room, wearing an orange shirt and waving his arms. It made me stop for a moment. I thought he was part of the production team, but then the man began shouting, said he was a software engineer at Google and that he refused to build technology that promotes genocide and apartheid through Project Nimbus."Security guards restrained him within a few minutes. I stood there fairly calmly onstage. I felt compelled to tell the audience that one of the things I'm very proud of at Google is the value we place on diversity of opinion — that within the company you can express your views on any issue without fear. But I think this employee got a little confused about the appropriate place and way to do it."Google employees protest against the company in San Francisco (Photo: Reuters)The protester was Eddie Hatfield, a software engineer in Google Cloud's New York division and one of more than 600 Google employees who had signed a letter to the company's leadership before the conference demanding that it withdraw its sponsorship. He was fired a few days later."I can say that at that moment, something clicked within the company," Regev says. "The message was conveyed to all employees: You can express your opinion. You're against Nimbus? Write a post about it. But you cannot disrupt another employee. And if you do, you'll be fired. Once that was made clear, relative calm returned."So perhaps you can clarify this once and for all: Is Google helping the Israeli government, through the Nimbus cloud services project, conduct military operations in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon?