by Tracy Fernandez Rysavy
From Hope Magazine: Inspiring People. Encouraging Change.
Nov./Dec. 2002 Issue No. 34

Daniel Lubetzky gives “enemies” a reason to work together—and a way to show their communities the wages of peace.

Daniel Lubetzky has his own take on the Israel–Palestine conflict—one you’ll rarely see on the evening news. “The violence in the Middle East is perpetrated by a very small number of extremists on both sides,” he says, and the media actually are empowering these minorities by focusing so heavily on them. “The vast majority of people there disapprove of violence and want to live in peace,” says Lubetzky.
    He should know: Lubetzky has made it his business, literally, to help “enemies” work together. He is the founder of PeaceWorks, an innovative, “not-only-for-profit” company based in New York City that fosters business partnerships between groups in conflict and then markets their food products. The company has joined Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs; black and white residents of post-apartheid South Africa; Christians and Muslims in Indonesia; and other ethnic and cultural groups whose relations have been marked by persistent and often violent conflict. With help from PeaceWorks, these groups cooperate in culinary business ventures that turn a profit while fostering peace and understanding. “We are 100 percent committed to work together and must show that more can come from cooperation than killings,” says Abdullah Gonem, a Palestinian trader who provides olives and olive oil to a PeaceWorks endeavor in Um el Fahem, Israel.

But Lubetzky’s vision for this extraordinary set of partnerships nearly failed to materialize. In 1993 Lubetzky, just out of Stanford Law School, received a fellowship to travel to Israel and write a proposal for the U.S. Congress on how encouraging American companies to invest in joint economic ventures between Arabs and Israelis could improve relations in the Middle East. It was an idea that had floated around the State Department for some time—and was the subject of Lubetzky’s senior thesis at Trinity University. But his proposal for Congress was dismissed as being “a little too idealistic and theoretical,” he says.
    Disheartened and days away from returning to the U.S., where he planned to “just be a boring attorney,” he stopped in a small market in Israel and bought a jar of sun-dried tomato spread. It was love at first taste. He ate it all and returned to the market for more to bring home, only to find there was none. The company had gone out of business.
    “I was bummed,” Lubetzky says. “The spread was really tasty.” So tasty, in fact, that he felt certain it had international appeal and wondered if it might be the key to turning his dream of Arab-Israeli economic cooperation into reality. From his research, Lubetzky knew that the food industry was a fertile sector for this approach, because both Arabs and Israelis had the resources to play symmetrical roles.
    Lubetzky tracked down the spread’s distributor, who put him in touch with “the cousin of the brother of the great-grandson of the manufacturer.” When he finally met Yoel Benesh face-to-face, Lubetzky laid his plan on the table: he would market the spread throughout North America if Benesh, who is Jewish, would commit to purchasing ingredients from his Arab neighbors.
    “He loved the idea,” Lubetzky says. In fact, the appeal of economic cooperation with his Arab neighbors was why Benesh overcame his fear of working with the young American. “I had no clue what the food industry was about,” says Lubetzky. “I was an attorney with no experience. But he didn’t have much to lose, since he’d just closed his business.”
    Together Benesh and Lubetzky tracked down raw materials from Arab sources. Instead of purchasing jars from Portugal, as before, Benesh bought them from nearby Egypt. He replaced his Italian sun-dried tomatoes with Turkish ones. And rather than getting olives and olive oil from Italy, he started buying them from Palestinians, Turks, and Israeli Arabs. Not only did Benesh get to know his Arab neighbors, but he enjoyed financial rewards: the ingredients from nearby regions were cheaper, less expensive to transport, and fresher.
    With the partnership in place, twenty-five-year-old Lubetzky launched PeaceWorks. He maxed out his credit cards, borrowed from his parents, and put the resulting $10,000 into developing a brand and marketing the tomato spread. In less than eight months, Moshé and Ali’s Spratés (a combination of spread and paté) were on U.S. shelves. The venture turned profitable for both PeaceWorks and Benesh within a year.
    Today, the spratés are big sellers in North and South American natural foods stores, as well as in the Middle East. Benesh now employs more than a hundred people, and his product line has expanded to seventeen products and three brands—Moshé and Ali’s, the Meditalia line of pestos and sauces, and a food service line of spreads. His company continues to purchase raw ingredients from Arabs.

Perhaps part of Lubetzky’s desire to help bridge conflicting cultures comes from his mixed ethnic background. “My father is a Holocaust survivor, and he always stressed the importance of preventing future holocausts,” he says. “My mother is Mexican and Jewish, and she has lived in mixed communities, as well as an all-Jewish community that didn’t interact much with the outside world. She taught me that it’s important to build friendships with people who are different from you.” While growing up in Mexico and after moving to the U.S. at age fifteen, Lubetzky placed a priority on bringing people together. “I call PeaceWorks a ‘not-only-for-profit’ company because, yes, we’re about making money, but we’re always about building relationships,” he says.
    PeaceWorks has done just that through three more business ventures, in addition to Moshé and Ali’s/Meditalia. Its Wafa line of chocolates comes from an Israeli-Arab manufacturing group with operations in the Israeli-Arab village of Um el Fahem and the northern city of Tzafat; they have fully integrated Jews and Arabs in both their workforce and management. The La Bici line of semolina pasta snack chips is made in South Africa by a company with black, white, and Indian employees. And PeaceWorks is launching a new line of foods called The Bali Spice Company, which includes Indonesian pasta, sauces, crackers, and other ethnic foods. These are made in a factory owned and managed mainly by women—a rare find in Indonesia, one of the world’s largest Muslim countries. They employ workers from Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist backgrounds. These partnerships work well, says Lubetzky, who has never heard of a major conflict taking place in any of the factories.
    PeaceWorks ventures start much like Moshé and Ali’s began—Lubetzky has to fall in love with the product and see the potential for it to stand out. In addition, the manufacturers must be wholly committed to using their business to foster respectful relations among people of different backgrounds.
    After a manufacturer becomes a PeaceWorks “trading partner,” Lubetzky and his staff of twelve help find ways in which the business can support coexistence in the region. To appeal to multiple markets, PeaceWorks also encourages partners to make products all-natural, organic, kosher, and halal (the Muslim equivalent of kosher). Then PeaceWorks explores the market for at least six months, running feasibility studies, market research, and consumer focus groups to help them get the product on North and South American shelves, in addition to expanding sales locally. “We might change the labels, change the brand, or expand the product line,” says Lubetzky. “Maybe the formula is too hot or too salty for the Western palate, for example. Hopefully, once we’re finished developing the product, it’s the right price, the right quality, and has the right features to be a leader in its category.”
    Finally, PeaceWorks imports and warehouses the product. They make presentations throughout North and South America to get it into as many stores as possible. It can take six to twelve months from the handshake before a partner’s product reaches retail stores, but PeaceWorks does all of this initial work pro bono.
    “We don’t make a penny until the products start selling,” Lubetzky says. “Once a product is ready to sell, we purchase it from the manufacturer and sell it to the distributors at a slightly higher price. It’s enough for us to make money and enough to let the product remain competitive on grocery store shelves. It’s also enough for the trading partner to receive a healthy profit that provides a sustainable livelihood for all of its workers.” He won’t disclose PeaceWorks’ revenues but says the company grossed “several millions” in 2001. And the thirty stores that carried its products that first year have multiplied to more than five thousand in North and South America and a few other regions.
    The products and PeaceWorks have garnered numerous awards, including a gold medal from the American Taste Institute, a marketing award from Food Merchandise magazine, and a Socially Responsible Business Award, given by members of the green business community at the Natural Products Expo.
    “What really stood out for the judges of the Socially Responsible Business Award were PeaceWorks’ efforts to foster peace in the Middle East, the fact that its business model can be and has been replicated in other conflict areas, and its use of natural ingredients,” says Chris O’Brien, managing director of Co-op America’s green business network and one of the award judges. “PeaceWorks is an outstanding business—both in terms of the quality of its products and its commitment to social and environmental responsibility.”

Once a trading partnership is on its feet, PeaceWorks lets local management take over, while Lubetzky and crew focus on exports to and marketing in the Americas. This arrangement suits their trading partners, including Rohan Surridge, founder of Bicycle Foods, which makes La Bici pasta chips in Durban, South Africa. “Many Western businesses come in and impose Western ways on the African people,” says Surridge, a white South African who grew up among a Xhosa tribal community. “It results in cultural clashes and unhappy workers.”
    In addition, says Surridge, Western companies he’s observed hire mostly from the privileged portion of South African society—so the educated and financially stable benefit from the new jobs, while those disenfranchised during apartheid are left unemployed and hungry. Bicycle Foods, in contrast, hires those with a spark of talent and a desire to grow with the company, whether they’re black, white, or part of the country’s growing Indian community. “To optimize our lives and live with all people here, we need to give opportunity to everyone,” Surridge says.
    Unlike some of PeaceWorks’ trading partners, Bicycle Foods had an integrated management and workforce long before Daniel Lubetzky came along, but PeaceWorks has made possible a larger payroll. “We now export 25 percent of our pasta chips, and we’ve been able to hire more people who can now provide food for their families,” says Surridge.

The PeaceWorks model is intended to work in three ways. At the human level, Lubetzky believes that the more people from different backgrounds interact in these business ventures, the more impossible it is to be “absolute enemies,” and the more cultural stereotypes are shattered. At the business level, as workers make money, they want to preserve relationships with “the Other” because it makes good business sense. At the regional level, as the business prospers, others in the community see the benefits of cooperation and, ideally, are encouraged to work for peace.
    Does it work? The escalated tensions in Israel have certainly put PeaceWorks’ theories to the test. But as extremists on both sides of the conflict command media coverage with random violence, the PeaceWorks trading partners remain committed to their mission—and to each other.
    The integrated Wafa factories in Tzafat and Um el Fahem persevere, although “there’s definitely tension there,” Lubetzky says. “One of the Jewish exporters told me she was devastated to see people from Um el Fahem cheering on the news after one of the suicide bombings. But then she told me, ‘I don’t believe anyone in our factory was doing that. Everyone here knows killing civilians makes no sense.’”
    The Moshé and Ali’s and Meditalia Jewish manufacturers also continue their relationships with Arab sources. Everyone involved has expressed a desire to continue, according to Lubetzky. The only change is that they’re no longer buying olives from Arabs in the West Bank. “It’s not that they don’t want to; they’re just scared to go there,” says Lubetzky. “There have been sniper shootings in the area.”
    But will this kind of consciousness trickle down to the masses? PeaceWorks’ critics are skeptical, and many feel that cooperative ventures between groups in conflict can’t make a substantial difference. “It’s not these [PeaceWorks] sauces that will create peace,” Ahmed Maher El Sayed, then Egypt’s ambassador to the U.S. and now its foreign minister, told the Christian Science Monitor last year. “It’s the peace that will create the sauces.”
    Rohan Surridge disagrees. “I respond strongly that it’s the other way around,” he says. “Here in South Africa, we’re a group of haves and have-nots—and the privileged few have a lot. You can’t resolve that by sitting everyone down and saying, ‘Let’s be happy together first.’ You have to show that we’re all [interdependent]. Here, for example, that means you have to start by supplying basic needs to all South Africans.”

Lubetzky often travels to countries with current and potential PeaceWorks trading partners, and his interactions reinforce his conviction that most are moderates who want peace. “They just want to make money, and live in peace, and do better. They don’t want to be killing each other,” he says.
    So, for the first time, Lubetzky is working beyond his economic models to try to empower that “silent majority” of moderates. He and a cadre of volunteers recently launched the PeaceWorks Network, a nonprofit organization that will provide a platform for moderate Arabs and Jewish people to push for peace in Israel and Palestine at the grassroots level. The network will provide Internet and telephone forums for people from both sides of the conflict to create a series of declarations on how to move the peace process forward—helping, says Lubetzky, to achieve a broad-based consensus for conflict resolution. As the network raises money, it will also convene in-person forums.
    “People on both sides of this conflict need to educate each other,” says Lubetzky. “It’s surprising how so many Israelis and Palestinians know so little about the other side. We hope PeaceWorks Network will help them come to an understanding and begin to negotiate more effectively.”
    Even with the network and all he’s now juggling, Lubetzky has new ideas to make real. He’s searching for new trading partners to help cultivate understanding between Muslims and the West, and he’s arranged for a portion of Bali Spice Company profits to fund an initiative to increase understanding between Indonesians and Americans. And he has one more vision: “We’re working with grassroots leaders in Sri Lanka to establish a business venture between the Tamil rebels and the Sinhalese majority, the main groups in Sri Lanka’s civil war,” Lubetzky says.
    Lubetzky has rooted his life’s work in places where many might fear to go, but he’s not free of doubt. “There have been a few times where I’ve wondered if I should stop,” he admits. A few years ago, after a spate of terrorist bombings in Israel, he almost did.
    “I wondered how I could pursue this mission when one terrorist could cripple entire governments and disillusion millions,” he says. “I had a similar reaction after September 11. But when I asked my Jewish and Arab trading partners if they wanted to quit, they told me, ‘Are you crazy? This is not a game—these are our lives. We’re benefiting from each other, and we’re happy working together. We cannot let the terrorists derail us; instead, we need to redouble our efforts and work harder.’”