The Israel Business Conference 2018

Robyn Curnow is a CNN anchor and host of CNN International's International Desk with Robyn Curnow, Previously, she served as a CNN correspondent in Johannesburg and London.

Curnow contributed to CNN International's daily coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and her show continues to provide detailed coverage on President Trump and his administration. She continues to report on world reaction to the new White House administration and the diplomatic and geopolitical implications for Russia, Europe and Asia.

Curnow also continues to cover the British exit from the European Union ('Brexit') extensively on her show as well as the migrant crisis and key elections taking place on the continent.

Recently, she anchored CNN's coverage of the truck terror attack in Sweden. Additionally, she's anchored CNN's coverage of multiple terror attacks across Paris, Brussels, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Tunisia. She's examined the rise of ISIS, the war in Syria and was on air when coalition forces launched the Mosul offensive in October 2016.

While based in South Africa as a correspondent, Curnow led CNN's coverage of Nelson Mandela's death and reported exclusively from his funeral at his homestead in Qunu. Mandela's family gave her unparalleled access to his final resting place and details on his last moments. Curnow had a long association with Mandela, interviewing him a number of times since his Presidency. Her conversation with him on his 90th birthday was the last official interview he gave.

Curnow sat down for an exclusive interview with former U.S. President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, while they were on a charity trip to Zambia in 2013. Separately, she also interviewed U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama when she travelled to Botswana and former U.S. President Bill Clinton when he visited South Africa. She's also interviewed Oprah Winfrey and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Before joining CNN, Curnow was a reporter for the BBC and for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Roger Ver became the world’s first investor in Bitcoin startups in 2011, seeding many of the most recognizable brands in cryptocurrency today. Roger is the founder and CEO of Bitcoin.com, an online portal for all things Bitcoin. Today, Roger promotes Bitcoin Cash as the original vision of Bitcoin and as a tool for people the world over to achieve economic freedom.

Paul Misener is Amazon.com’s Vice President for Global Innovation Policy and Communications. An Amazon veteran of more than 17 years, Paul explains and advocates Amazon’s culture and methods of sustained, customer-obsessed innovation, particularly in the context of Amazon’s Leadership Principles.

Paul founded Amazon’s public policy operations, and served as the company’s Vice President for Global Public Policy from February 2000 to May 2016. On behalf of Amazon and its customers, he has testified before the United States Congress over 30 times – on net neutrality, privacy, tax, cloud computing, and more – and on many dozens of occasions before other policymaking bodies around the world, and he has given hundreds of public speeches and media interviews.

Paul is both an engineer and attorney. Formerly a partner in the law firm of Wiley, Rein & Fielding.
Paul previously served as the Senior Legal Advisor to a commissioner of the US Federal Communications Commission, and as Intel’s Manager of Telecommunications and Computer Technology Policy. In the mid-1990s, he led the computer industry’s Internet Access Coalition, which included Intel, Microsoft, and IBM, and which successfully blocked the imposition of telecom access charges on Internet access. In the early 1990s, he was the assistant to the Chairman of the Emmy Award-winning FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service, which established the system that underlies all modern HDTV and computer displays.

In 2013, Paul chaired the technical subcommittee of the US Federal Aviation Administration’s advisory committee that recommended allowing commercial airline passengers to use portable electronics during taxi, takeoff, and landing. He is an inventor named in three patents.

In the late 1980s, after evaluating advanced government telecommunications systems at the Electromagnetic Compatibility Analysis Center, Paul was a public policy specialist for NTIA and a US delegate to several conferences of the United Nations International Telecommunication Union, including the 1988 ITU World Administrative Radio Conference, at which he chaired an international working group.

Paul had intended to become an astrophysicist and he conducted two senior research projects in Princeton’s Physics Department, both of which involved detectors he designed around joint field effect transistors, and one was conducted under the guidance of Dr. David Wilkinson, for whom the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe is named. He remains fascinated and awed by space and time, particularly as illuminated by the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.

Paul serves on the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council; the Board of the Public Affairs Council; the Advisory Board for Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy; and the Board of the Partnership Fund for the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where he also Chairs the Corporate Advisory Board.

Peter S. Canellos is editor at large at POLITICO, overseeing investigative journalism and major projects. He has also been POLITICO's executive editor, overseeing the newsroom during the 2016 presidential coverage, and the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe.

A native of Boston, Peter is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School. He spent most of his career at the Globe, where at various points he oversaw the paper's local news coverage and Washington, D.C., bureau. As the Globe's editorial page editor, he authored numerous editorials urging Bostonians to overcome their parochial divisions and embrace their status as a world-class
city.

He also edited the Globe's book, "Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy," which was a top-10 New York Times bestseller in 2009. The book also set the stage for much of the analysis of Kennedy's career following his death from cancer, and supplied most of the anecdotes for President Barack Obama's eulogy of Kennedy.

For the past 12 years, Peter has worked with the International Womens Media Foundation overseeing the Elizabeth Neuffer fellowship, given to a woman journalist from around the world to study human
rights at MIT and intern at the Globe and New York Times. He has also traveled overseas on human rights trips with the US Holocaust Museum, International Reporting Project, and Robert Bosch foundation, among
other groups.

Peter considers the many young journalists he's hired and mentored over the years to be his greatest accomplishment. As an editor, he has overseen two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects along with five others
that were Pulitzer finalists, among many other awards. As a writer, he was recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors award in 2011 for excellence in editorial writing

Dave Hilfman is senior vice president of worldwide sales for United. In this role, Dave is responsible for directing the efforts of a team of over 700 sales professionals who manage sales programs, relationships and revenue with corporations, travel management companies and distributors around the world.

Dave was previously senior vice president of worldwide sales for Continental Airlines from 2004 to 2010.

Dave started his airline career in 1981 with Eastern Airlines as a campus sales representative at the University of South Florida. He held sales positions of increasing responsibility with Eastern throughout the southeastern United States until joining Continental Airlines in 1986 where he served as regional sales manager in New York City and director of the western sales division based in Los Angeles. In 1992, Dave moved to the airline’s corporate headquarters in Houston, where he held the positions of senior director of U.S. field sales, vice president of multinational sales and revenue

Richard Wolffe is a best-selling author, journalist and digital media executive, withextensive experience covering politics and foreign policy across multiple platforms.He currently writes a weekly column for The Guardian, focusing on U.S. politics.An MSNBC political analyst for a decade, Wolffe was previously Vice-President and Executive Editor of MSNBC.com, launching the channel’s website and app in 2013 andits digital video channel in 2014. He grew MSNBC’s digital audience and revenues more than ten-fold in less than two years, winning a series of editorial, design and social impact awards.

Wolffe was previously Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Digital Officer at GlobalCitizen, a non-profit social action platform built to solve the world’s biggest challenges, and to end extreme poverty in our lifetime. In two years at Global Citizen, Wolffe grew its monthly audience twenty-fold to 40 million, more than doubled its registered users, and drove a ten-fold increase in political actions. He also led the organization’s international launch into India, and its expansion in Germany and Canada.

Wolffe covered the entire length of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign forNewsweek magazine. His book about the Obama campaign, Renegade: The Making of a President, was first published by Crown in June 2009 and became an instant New York Times bestseller. It was internationally published in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, the Netherlands, and China. His next book was Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House, which was published by Crown in November 2010. His latest book about the 2012 presidential campaign, The Message: The Re-Selling of President Obama, was published by Twelve in 2013.

Wolffe has appeared frequently across MSNBC’s dayside and primetime shows, fromMorning Joe to The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. On NBC, he has featured as a political commentator on Meet The Press and TODAY. He was featured prominently in the HBO documentary on the Obama campaign, By the People, and played a leading role in the HBO documentary of the 2000 Bush campaign, Journeys with George.

In April 2009, he joined Public Strategies as Senior Strategist at the communications and business advisory firm. He left the firm in December 2009 to work on Revival. Wolffe began writing about American politics as a senior journalist at the Financial Times, serving as its deputy bureau chief and U.S. diplomatic correspondent in Washington D.C. In that capacity, he managed coverage of business and political affairs in the nation’s capital, and reported on U.S. foreign policy at the State Department and National Security Council.

Myriam Fernandez de Heredia is Managing Director and Lead Analytical Manager for Sovereigns and International Public finance in Europe and West Africa at S&P Global Ratings. She also serves as Country Head for Spain.

Based in Madrid, Myriam leads a team of 49 analysts working out of 6 offices in Europe and West Africa and covering over 300 ratings including sovereigns, local and regional governments, government related entities, and supranational institutions. As Lead Analytical Manager, Myriam is responsible for ensuring the quality and consistency of these ratings.

Curt Hill is the Senior Vice President of Customer Assurance at Cisco, leading a global services organization that serves as the customer’s ultimate advocate. His teams resolve critical customer issues, analyze systemic product and service issues to provide learnings and improvement recommendations, and develop programs to enhance overall customer experience based on data, insights, and input from listening channels. Curt’s organization also plays a key role in leading company-wide initiatives in the areas of co-development between support and engineering and go-to-market service readiness. He is the executive sponsor for several of Cisco’s top customer accounts.

With more than 20 years of leadership experience and deep technical knowledge, Curt is adept at anticipating problems, averting crisis situations, and developing creative solutions to resolve issues and exceed customer expectations. He joined Cisco in 1995 as a customer support engineer and went on to lead several global technical support organizations across multiple geographies. Under his leadership, these teams developed and launched new support models and introduced new services to improve delivery performance for Cisco’s global service provider and enterprise customers.

As an active participant in inclusion and collaboration initiatives within Cisco and in the industry, Curt is a member of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Workforce Alliance program and has provided job shadowing opportunities through Cisco’s Connected Women program. Before joining Cisco, he held positions with Hewlett-Packard, Novell, and AT&T.

Cas Mudde is an Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at the University of Georgia (USA) and a Researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo (Norway). Born and raised in the Netherlands, his research addresses the question: how can liberal democracies defend themselves against political challenges without undermining their core values?

His recent publications include On Extremism and Democracy in Europe (Routledge, 2016), The Populist Radical Right: A Reader (Routledge, 2017), SYRIZA: The Failure of the Populist Promise (Palgrave, 2017), Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), and The Far Right in America (Routledge, 2018).

He is regularly consulted by a broad variety of state and non-state institutions and interviewed by media around the world, and is a frequent contributor to Guardian, HuffPo, Newsweek, New York Times, Vice News, and Washington Post. He tweets at @casmudde.