It was perhaps an odd request to make of a man noted for his commitment to Israeli causes and his fierce criticism of the Palestinian Authority.
Please raise US$14 million to help buy the Jewish settlers' lucrative greenhouses in the Gaza Strip so that the Palestinians can take them over when the settlers are gone. Oh, and can you get it done by the weekend, before the pullout starts? If not, the settlers will destroy the greenhouses on their way out of Gaza to keep them out of Arab hands.
On Wednesday of last week, though, Mortimer Zuckerman, real estate magnate and publisher of the Daily News, received just such a pitch from his friend James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank, current Middle East envoy for the White House and would-be broker of the deal.
Zuckerman said he thought about the ironies. But not for too long.
"Despite my skepticism," Zuckerman said, "I thought to myself, `This is perhaps the only illustration or symbol of what could be the benefits of a co-operational, rather than a confrontational attitude."'
So he in turn picked up the phone and called a few of his friends and fellow billionaires, who also happened to be prominent Jewish philanthropists. Not all shared his enthusiasm. But Lester Crown, whose family owns General Dynamics, said yes, as did Leonard Stern, chairman of the Hartz Mountain real estate empire and a former Village Voice owner.
Within 48 hours, Zuckerman said, he had his US$14 million. And the Palestinians had a shot at inheriting quite intact greenhouses whose vegetables and flowers have been a major source of Israeli export income, and, not incidentally, about 3,500 desperately needed Palestinian jobs.
When the deal was announced last Friday, the donors were anonymous, apart from Wolfensohn, who put up US$500,000 of his own. But word about these things tends to leak out.
The purchase had been months in the making. The Israeli government is giving the settlers US$55 million for the greenhouses themselves, but Israeli law allows compensation only for buildings and land, not for movables like the greenhouses' computerized irrigation systems. Without them, the Palestinians could not run the greenhouses, Zuckerman said.
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