A startup founder who trains women engineers in Palestine wants Silicon Valley to remember that Gazans need the ‘ability to dream’

– Women in tech. In the fall of 2013, Iliana Montauk was in Gaza for the first time. She heard sonic booms overhead from warplanes and watched contractors install film on windows in case of bombings. Meanwhile, 60 startup founders pitched her their ideas. “Please don’t get distracted by that,” she remembers them telling her. “We’re used to that—it happens here all the time.”

The activity she heard outside turned out to be the leadup to the 2014 Gaza war. Over the next two years, Montauk went on to facilitate some of the first investments in Gaza startups as the director of the group Gaza Sky Geeks.

When she returned to the Bay Area and worked as a product manager at Upwork, she couldn’t forget the tech talent she’d met in Palestine. “What struck me other than that passion and entrepreneurship that I saw was the female talent,” she remembers. With Laila Abudahi, who she’d met in Gaza, Montauk cofounded Manara, a social impact startup that connects tech companies with tech talent in the Middle East and North Africa, with a special emphasis on women and Palestine. The startup was part of Y Combinator’s winter 2021 class.

Since war broke out between Israel and Hamas in October, Montauk has tried to balance two realities: supporting Manara’s community of engineers and running a startup in Silicon Valley, where many strongly believe in Israel’s right to defend itself and object to any criticism of Israel’s campaign in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which has killed more than 15,000 people.

Manara’s network of talent currently includes about 70 people currently in Gaza and 600 women throughout the Middle East and North Africa region, who make up 60% of its total talent pool. In Palestine, 52% of computer science graduates are women—but 83% of those grads are unemployed in a region with the highest youth unemployment in the world. Engineers and students who complete Manara’s training program receive help either securing a remote job with a tech company or relocating abroad for a job. Women are more likely to seek out remote jobs and stay in Gaza with family, while men are more likely to relocate. Companies that have hired through Manara include Google, Meta, Amazon, and Qualtrics.

Courtesy of Manara

Over the past two months, Manara has checked in weekly with its engineers. Montauk and her team have heard about their engineers being injured, losing their homes, living 40 people to an apartment, and losing access to the internet and communications outside of Gaza and the West Bank, which, Montauk points out, has also faced challenging conditions in recent weeks.

“For some reason, people lose sight of the fact that humans are humans everywhere,” Montauk says. “It’s been really disappointing to see people [in the investor community] who tend to be curious, to tend to try to understand the root cause of problems…haven’t seemed to be as thoughtful or nuanced in their responses to what has happened.”

But companies that have actually hired talent from Gaza, Montauk says, have reached out to those staffers to try to help them and their families. “People are disappointed to hear how little it’s possible to actually help and make a difference,” she says.

While the top priority is helping members of the Manara community who are directly affected by the conflict, Montauk also hopes that people take some time to think about the experiences of all Gaza civilians—including the women in tech her startup supports. “I want people to know how important it is to have stability and the ability to dream,” she says.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe

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