Daniel Lubetzky's "not-only-for-profit" business
has created profitable joint ventures with Palestinians and Israelis. His model
deserves attention
by Stacy Perman
I recently came across an article in The Jerusalem Post
about social entrepreneur Daniel Lubetzky. The Mexican-born son of a Holocaust
survivor, Lubetzky founded PeaceWorks, a successful global business that
promotes peace through commercial ventures among Israelis, Palestinians,
Egyptians, Turks, Indonesians, and Sri Lankans. The far-flung success of
PeaceWorks helped Lubetzky to found OneVoice, a global movement (with some
640,000 participants at last count) that seeks a comprehensive two-state
solution between the Israelis and Palestinians via a negotiated peace process.
Social entrepreneurship (BusinessWeek, 12/14/07) has become
a hot topic in recent years, attracting people filled with the loftiest of
intentions who want to do good by doing good. But it's the tricky feat of
running a sustainable operation that is the more elusive goal. So when I
learned that Lubetzky had created a viable business model (in operation since
1994) that brings Arabs and Israelis together while plowing profits into
peacemaking efforts, I rang up PeaceWorks' New York office and was invited down
for a visit.
Lubetzky is an energetic and pragmatic entrepreneur. The
walls of PeaceWorks' open office space are filled with the sayings of notable
thinkers ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Henry David Thoreau. Lubetzky pioneered
his "not-only-for-profit" business theory while on a fellowship in
Israel to write about legislative means to foster joint ventures between Arabs
and Israelis. It was a topic Lubetzky, who holds a law degree from Stanford,
was already passionate about. In college, his senior thesis was a 268-page
treatise on economic cooperation as a means for fostering peaceful relations.
Coexistence Test Case
While in Israel, Lubetzky discovered a tasty sundried tomato
spread but found out the company behind it was going out of business. "The
owner was getting their glass jars from Portugal and their tomatoes from
Italy," he told me. Fairly quickly he realized he had found a test case
for his fledgling theory: what if the company sourced the jars in Egypt, while
getting their raw products from Turkey and Palestine? Today, tapenades and
spreads under the labels Moshe & Ali's and Meditalia (both joint ventures
established by PeaceWorks between Israelis and Palestinians) are sold in stores
across the U.S., including Whole Foods (WFMI). More recently, PeaceWorks
introduced Bali Spice, a line of Asian sauces manufactured by women's
cooperatives made up of Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists in Indonesia and Sri
Lanka.
"We are using market forces to achieve the goal of
peace and coexistence," says Lubetzky. Having foes unite in business, he
explains, works on three levels: First, it helps break down stereotypes;
second, it creates an incentive to continue to work together; third, in doing
so, it helps puts an end to regional violence and fundamentalism that feeds off
despair.
Same End Goal
Getting entrenched enemies to set aside their animosities
and misunderstandings and set up shop together has not always been an easy
sell, he acknowledges. But over the past 15 years, Lubetzky's unconventional
vision has brought together a diverse group of individuals who find they are
all interested in the same end goal.
About five years ago, a mutual friend introduced Lubetzky to
Samer Hamadeh, a Palestinian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Vault.com, a
comprehensive job and career site. Initially, Hamadeh resisted getting
involved. "I'm not a political person," he told me. "I grew up
in Fresno, Calif., I went to Stanford, my parents left Palestine when they were
kids and never looked back.
I didn't realize that I was Palestinian until my teens and
not really what that meant until after 9/11.… I'm a red-blooded Republican
American interested in our security and I felt the conflict was harming our
interests. So I came at it from that perspective, as an American wanting to try
and solve that problem."
Now Hamadeh sits on the board of the PeaceWorks Foundation.
"There are Arabs and Jews working together and making money," he
says. "From my vantage point, it is working. They are not employing tens
of thousands of people but hundreds, but they are making the effort tangible.
They are showing that the other side doesn't have to be an enemy. They can be a
business partner."
Two-State Solution
When the Second Intifada broke out in 2000 after the Camp
David negotiations fell apart, Lubetzky realized that business alone could not
singularly push the ball uphill. He cited a survey of Israelis showing that
just two months before the Intifada, 90% believed peace was just around the
corner. Three months later, less than 44% thought peace would ever be possible.
"Business was not enough," says Lubetzky. "We needed a
grassroots movement to push government."
With both sides of the conflict drowning in brutal images of
the other, Lubetzky says the moderate voices of regular people were being
buried. So, in 2002, he launched OneVoice to give people a voice in driving the
agenda toward a workable two-state solution. "We needed a platform for
ordinary Israelis and Palestinians to seize back the agenda," he says.
Today, OneVoice has offices in Ramallah, Gaza, Tel Aviv, London, and youth
chapters at college campuses across Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Under a rather broad tent that includes those on the left, right, secular,
religious, Israeli, Palestinian, Jew, Christian, and Muslim, OneVoice is
actively involved in an array of efforts to find a way for people to work and
live together.
A Social Bottom Line
Lubetzky does not have a strictly utopian vision for his
not-only-for-profit philosophy. Three years ago he started Kind Fruit & Nut
Bars, a for-profit venture that channels 5% of its profits into the PeaceWorks
Foundation. The operation (it is one of the fastest growing healthy snack bars)
is much bigger than the Meditalia line and sold globally. The larger scale
for-profit enterprise gives Lubetzky another lucrative channel for his concept
of social entrepreneurship.
"At end of day," says Samer Khoury, the executive
vice-president of Consolidated Construction, one of the oldest Arab
construction firms in the Middle East, "even if politicians want to make
peace, they have to have the masses on board." As Khoury, who is also a OneVoice
board member, explained to me, "in order to get them on board, you have to
have a grassroots movement. And the movement has to convince both societies
that peaceful coexistence is the only way forward. I strongly believe that this
initiative is a valuable way to bring two societies closer together."
Lubetzky offers an enticing vision, one that combines
traditional profit-making models with a social bottom line, attacking an issue
from several angles. Moreover, he's created a space that has brought disparate
forces together for a common goal. It sounds good in theory, but it works even
better in practice.
Perman is a staff writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.
