Guest post by Mark Gerson*
Around 20 years ago, Eli Beer identified a problem. A very young man, he had been volunteering for two years on an ambulance near his home in Jerusalem — and never saved anyone’s life. By the time that the ambulance arrived at the call, often pursuant to a heart attack, choking, an accident or stroke, the victim would be dead.
He arrived at one call in his neighbourhood for a boy who had been choking on a hot dog. When he arrived there on the ambulance, he and his fellow medics began treatment. A doctor passed by and entered the house. He told Eli and his colleagues what they probably knew: the boy was dead. And then the doctor said something haunting. He told them that he lived down the street, and was home at the time. Why didn’t anyone call him?
A light went off for Eli. He never saved anyone’s life because he always arrived too late. This was not the fault of the Jerusalem ambulance system or anyone in particular. There would never, and could never, be an ambulance near every victim. They were just too expensive. And they would never, and could never, be fast enough. They would always get stuck in traffic.
As a result, people died — all day, every day, everywhere in the world.
But Eli had a solution. He began to train people in his neighbourhood in the basics of life-saving. He got a scanner that had the emergency calls. He had a relative donate some rudimentary equipment. And he and his friends started getting to the emergency calls, minutes ahead of the ambulance, and saving lives.
I met Eli shortly thereafter, and we worked together to grow the system in Israel. In 2006, we established United Hatzalah — which he runs and I chair. We now have 6,000 volunteers throughout Israel, serving every community — Jews of all kinds, Muslims, Christians, Druze. They have all completed several hundred hours of classroom and practical training, and carry (in specially designed bags, and often in specially designed vehicles) all of the equipment necessary to save a life. All of these volunteers are connected through what is perhaps the most technologically modern dispatch center in the world. The dispatchers immediately identify the closest volunteers, and sends them to the scene equipped with specific knowledge of the case. United Hatzalah is now answering approximately 2,000 emergency calls a day, with a response time of below three minutes nationwide and below 90 seconds in cities. Consequently, the volunteers of United Hatzalah are able to save the lives of several hundred people a day who would otherwise die waiting for an ambulance.
Eli’s is one of the great entrepreneurial stories of this generation.
We have learned many things from Eli — and one of them is the absolutely critical role of philanthropic donations in life-saving work, and the genuine partnership that donors to worthy causes have with those who carry out the work. He never had to tell me that. He shows it. Eli spends hundreds of nights a year on the road, raising money. In a typical three week span from February to March, Eli was in India, London, New York, Los Angeles and Miami — raising money for the organization.
Eli was in Miami when he started to feel ill. Exactly one week ago today, he got himself to the hospital — with shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, a fever and a dry cough. He was in significant pain, and the test came back on Friday afternoon confirming what everyone knew: he had Covid-19. We spoke with him on Friday morning. Hearing Eli educated me as to what is meant by the term we had only heard and understood abstractly — difficulty breathing. Still, he told us that he was relieved that he did not have to be intubated — and put to sleep for an indefinite period of time.
On late Friday afternoon, he had to be intubated. Immediately before being sedated, he apparently recorded this video.
The context in which we viewed it was through the Book of Genesis. Jacob is on a journey to see his brother. An unnamed “man” appears and engages Jacob in a nightlong wrestling match. Jacob is injured but emerges victorious. Still, he tells his opponent: “I will not let you go until you bless me.”
One should always, we learn, emerge from a struggle with a blessing.
Eli is now in a struggle. He remains sedated, and will likely be for some time — under outstanding care at the University of Miami Hospital. There is not, as one might say in such a circumstance, “little that we can do.” There is a lot we can do — we can enable Eli to emerge from this struggle with a blessing.
His statement in this video shows how he would like to be blessed. We can imagine his smile, and indeed joy, if upon waking he sees this page filled with support and supporters: https://israelrescue.org/project/coronaresponse.
(Content might be disturbing for some users)
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Mark Gerson is a private investor, and Chairman of United Hatzalah.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
