By Del Jones, USA TODAY

Yoel Benesh is an Israeli Jew who operates a gourmet food plant in Even Yehuda, a small city two miles from the Mediterranean Sea and about 25 miles north of Tel Aviv.

Daniel Lubetsky, center, backed products by Israeli Jew Yoel Benesh, left, who got supplies from Palestinian Abdullah Ganem.

Ten years ago, he decided to seek out Palestinian business partners and began buying olives and other food supplies in the nearby West Bank.

Over time, he forged a relationship with Palestinians like Abdullah Ganem, who has olive groves a few miles north of Even Yehuda in an area populated by Arab Muslims. Ganem not only sold olives to Benesh but, as clashes between Israelis and Palestinians worsened, acted as a broker with farmers along the West Bank.

Such a partnership is extremely rare, even though distances are short in this region — often less than 30 miles — and traveling to the West Bank is like going from Brooklyn to Queens in New York. Benesh had traveled throughout the region for years, as his father had before him.

Not anymore. Since the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, began three years ago, about 2,600 Palestinians and 850 Israelis have died. Palestinians say they are fighting for an independent state; Israelis say they are fighting for survival.

In January, Massoud Elon, a Jewish clothing dealer in his 70s, was calling on Palestinian customers. His family said he had done business for years with Arab villagers, who liked and trusted him. His body was found in a burned-out car near the settlement of Bekaot. This month, the Israeli government made it illegal to enter the West Bank without a permit.

Checkpoints have become maddening. Trips that once took 10 minutes now take hours. Since the latest conflict began, the annual purchases Benesh makes directly from farmers in the West Bank have fallen to $50,000 from $200,000.

The economy of the West Bank and Gaza has suffered during the years of conflict. Only foreign aid is preventing economic collapse, according to a report by the World Bank. Half the Palestinian population is unemployed, and 60% live on less than $2 a day.

Palestinian exports fell 35% in 2002 after a 13% drop in 2001, and the area’s gross domestic product dropped 25% from 2001 to 2002.

Israel has not gone unscathed. Its GDP contracted 1.1% in 2002 after shrinking 0.5% in 2001, the first negative years since 1953, according to the CIA World Factbook.

“All efforts big or small to build bridges make a difference,” says Nasser Beydoun, executive director of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce. “We should never give up, because there is no alternative but hope.”

But the hope that moderate business partners had wanted to inspire is shrinking instead of growing. The goal was for small, initial success, such as that between Benesh and Ganem, to spread by convincing others that relinquishing animosity leads to a higher standard of living.

“When more dollars cross borders, less bullets cross borders,” says Ben Cohen, the Jewish co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade.

That’s the theory, anyway. People and nations are reluctant to initiate conflict when their livelihoods are intertwined. But in the Middle East, the premise has met its match.

Partners, not employees

Daniel Lubetzky, the son of a Holocaust survivor, founded New York-based PeaceWorks a decade ago when he brought Benesh, bankrupt at the time, and Arab suppliers together.

PeaceWorks is a company that opens the lucrative North American market to importers by marketing and distributing food products that are produced from business partnerships between groups in conflict.

Benesh was PeaceWorks’ first client when Lubetzky said he would market Benesh’s gourmet food in the USA if Benesh would buy from Palestinians and other Arab suppliers.

Lubetzky didn’t want Arabs working for Benesh; that becomes adversarial. He wanted them to be business partners.

Benesh’s business was going under, and he says he agreed willingly. The Meditalia line of sauces and spreads owned by Benesh has become a commercial success and is sold in 5,000 North American specialty food stores. But the model of cooperation is failing. PeaceWorks’ second attempt in the region, a chocolate factory, has closed at least temporarily, and it has been four years since Lubetzky has considered a new venture in the Middle East.

Convinced that the Middle East is an aberration and that commerce plays a role in peace, Lubetzky has started business ventures between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia; blacks and whites in post-apartheid South Africa; and Tamil rebels and the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka.

He has found some success in these hot spots, but not in the Middle East.

“Sometimes I get really depressed that we’ve been working on this 10 years, and things are getting worse. It’s pretty depressing, really,” Lubetzky said.

Majority want peace

Yasser Abbas — the son of Mahmoud Abbas, who resigned this month as the Palestinian Authority’s first prime minister — is a leading Arab businessman in the region. He is chairman of the Falcon Group, which owns Falcon Telecom and Falcon Tobacco, and is a trustee of OneVoice, a group of Jewish and Arab business leaders.

He says the majorities on both sides want peace, and conflict is exacerbated by small groups of extremists. “I’m always optimistic; otherwise I would leave,” Abbas says.

He says he went to Tel Aviv in August to meet with the leaders of three Israeli corporations, but nothing came of it except “relationship building” that might pay dividends if there is progress toward peace.

At that meeting, no one mentioned regional politics — for obvious reasons: The topic is too divisive. Abbas, considered very moderate just for being in a room with Jewish businessmen, says the Israeli government does not want to give up any land for peace. “They don’t want any road map (the term for the U.S.-backed peace plan),” he says. He also says, “A suicide bomber here and there should not lock 3 million Palestinians inside.”

Many elected U.S. officials won’t meet with Arab-Americans unless they are assured there will be no publicity, says Ray Hanania, a Palestinian-American Christian columnist and comedian.

Hanania says he isn’t a fan of commercial efforts in the Middle East, because when they fail, they do more damage than no effort at all. It’s better not to have commerce, not to have hope, than to destroy it after it has been erected, he says.

“The threat of being undermined by one act of violence is so great, and the damage so enormous, it’s not worth the risk,” Hanania says. “Once you start laying brick and mortar, it becomes a target.”

Abandoned dreams for business

Stef Wertheimer, chairman of Iscar, a metal company based in Tefen, Israel, says he once dreamed of building a border industrial park where Egypt, Israel and Gaza meet. There would be plants built on each side of the border with a coffee shop in the middle. He now chuckles at his naiveté and says he abandoned plans of doing business with Palestinians four years ago.

Wertheimer’s four industrial parks generate $2 billion a year, or 7% of Israel’s exports, and he has close ties with Turkey, Jordan and the Arab sector of Israel. But the West Bank and Gaza are uniquely resistant to a business cure, he says.

Dov Lautman is the Jewish chairman of Delta Galil, an Israeli textile company that saw $567 million in revenue in 2002 and is traded on the Nasdaq exchange. It makes intimate apparel that is sold by retailers, including Wal-Mart and Victoria’s Secret, under brand names such as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.

Lautman manufactures in Jordan, Egypt and Turkey, and he says he has developed true friendships with business associates in those countries. “We discuss everything from personal problems to politics.”

“You’d be surprised how many Egyptians and Jordanians think both Israelis and Palestinians are wrong,” Lautman says.

Although commerce has helped pave the way for improved relations between the governments of Israel and those countries, Lautman says peace must precede commerce between Israelis and Palestinians.

Business ties do make a difference, says Farhad Mohit, co-founder and chairman of Internet comparison-shopping site Bizrate.com in Los Angeles. Mohit was born in Iran and says he is an atheist with a Muslim background. Bizrate.com’s CEO is Chuck Davis, who is an American Jew, as is board member David Reibstein. Mohit’s co-founder, Henri Asseily, is Lebanese and a Greek Orthodox Christian.

The company is a case study in diversity, and Mohit says Middle East politics never come up. It is the common goal — business — that ties such a group together and makes them friends, he says.

“It’s very simple. When people interact, they realize that people are people,” Mohit says. “Ideological barriers prevent you from seeing others as human beings.”

Mohit cites an example outside of the Middle East conflict that gives him hope: Farhad is a common name in Iran, so when Iranians stumble upon his Yahoo handle, they often send him instant messages. Mohit says he tells them the USA is not Hollywood, nor are the USA and Israel the land of Satan. Iranians, especially women, enjoy hearing about U.S. freedoms, he says.

Benesh, the Israeli owner of the gourmet food company, sometimes visits his former forklift operator, a Palestinian named Wagad, who had to quit because he could no longer cross the checkpoints and drive to his job 12 miles away. Benesh remembers giving Wagad hand-me-down clothes and videocassettes when Benesh traded in his VCR for a DVD player.

Wagad got a job at the Matola pickle plant in the West Bank. Benesh used to venture there for visits but says he hasn’t seen Wagad in more than a year. “I get a big hug and kisses,” Benesh says. “I wish he were here, but there is no way I can hire him. Everybody is hurt, both sides.”