Sitting in a coffee shop in London with my wife and sister, we were trying to translate one of the ruder Hebrew sayings in a way that will rhyme in English. The one about the elephant and the chicken.

Following the sale of the care homes’ business that I founded in the UK, my team had asked me to prepare a list of my favourite Israeli and Jewish proverbs as they loved how well these had always hit the mark.

After a few tries, my wife, who is a natural copywriter, cracked it. We laughed and at that moment I realised that I had the perfect narrative for this proverb.

It took me a few more minutes to realise that using proverbs, as titles to essays is an amazing idea for a book and by the end of the sitting, I declared that I am going to write it.

This is how the book that wrote itself was born.

My career as an Israeli expert-observer began when I was hired as the first equity analyst to cover the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange by an international investment bank after I graduated from London Business School with a full time MBA degree. I was involved in writing a prospectus for a fund specialising in Israel, it read like a business plan for the country in the early 1990s. We described the country’s huge potential based on the high level of education, the large-scale wave of high-quality immigration from the former Soviet Union and, of course, the army as a hotbed for state-of-the-art technologies. In short, we portrayed the potential of the ‘Start-up Nation’ (as depicted in the 2009 book) years before it materialised. Since leaving the City, I have gained significant life experience by founding and managing the Future Care Group, a UK care homes’ operator.

As I was writing during 2025, dramatic events in Israel and around the world were unfolding and the narratives arrived quickly. My surprise was how easy it was to find punchy proverbs to serve as........

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