JENNIFER FRIEDLIN
Jerusalem Post Service
Most people can't stand airplane food. But every time Sarah Kreimer takes a bite of the baklava that has become the staple dessert of El Al's meals, she sits back and savors the sweet taste of success.
As founder of the Center for Jewish-Arab Economic Development, an organization that promotes joint ventures between Jewish and Arab businesses, Kreimer in 1989 provided the conduit that helped the Nazareth-based, Arab-owned Mahroum Sweets factory, which makes the baklava, develop a business relationship with Israel's national airline.
"This was our first large partnership," says the understated Kreimer, a 40-year-old widowed mother of two who single-handedly founded the center in 1988 and now co-directs it with partner Helmi Kittani. "Mahroum came to us saying that they wanted to expand their business, and then we came up with the idea to approach El Al."
Today, Kreimer's nonprofit organization, which is sponsored primarily by the Joseph Meyerhoff and Konrad Adenauer foundations, has surpassed her original goal of assisting Israeli Arabs in establishing and expanding their businesses.
As the only Israeli organization to provide management training, conference services and project support for Arab entrepreneurs on either side of the Green Line, the center has become the hottest address for any country or company looking to harness or support local Arab business initiatives.
From flower growers in the windswept Bedouin town of Rahat in the Negev to high-tech businesspeople in the lower Galilee hills of Nazareth, Kreimer assists Arab entrepreneurs in getting financial support and offers a helping hand in guiding nascent companies through an often cumbersome Israeli bureaucracy.
"This organization is doing things in a very unique way," said Imad Younis, founder of the Arab sector's only high-tech company, Alpha Omega Engineering. It received financial assistance from the center to hire an economic advisor in 1993. "They are doing things so that the Arabs will need the Jews and the Jews will need the Arabs economically, and Sarah has dedicated all of her efforts to this cause."
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Kreimer began her involvement in Israel-based community work in 1980. After receiving her undergraduate degree in urban planning and Russian studies, her Zionist beliefs led her to Israel.
During a two-year stint with Interns for Peace, Kreimer, who had cultivated her community-organizing skills working in poor communities in the United States, split her time living and doing joint communal projects between the Arab village of Tamra and the Jewish village of Kiryat Ata. When the war in Lebanon broke out, Kreimer learned her work was not in vain.
"We were living in Tamra and Kiryat Ata during Sabra and Shatilla killings and trying to do cooperative activities. Everything was ekielui, normal, but when the war broke out, suddenly all the men in Kiryat Ata disappeared and a lot of people in Tamra had relatives living in Lebanon. It was like we were two worlds 10 kilometers apart.
"In June we were supposed to do our final projects with the community members. But the [Jewish] people who had not been involved in the project for very long said, 'Let's not push it,' and they decided to cancel the project. But the people who had been working together all year long said 'we have to continue.'
"The basic emotional and real message was that once people get to know each other, the relationships are difficult to break."
Following that experience, Kreimer returned to the United States and received her master's degree in policy planning from Carnegie Mellon University. She then immigrated to Israel and started an industry project through Interns for Peace, working with companies that employed both Arabs and Jews.
But in order to "level the playing field," Kreimer decided that it was not enough to better relations between Arab employees and their Jewish employers. So she set out to encourage cooperative efforts between Jewish and Arab businesspeople.
With a startup grant of $25,000 from Con Anima, a European foundation that supports projects in the Middle East, Kreimer got to work. While industrialists such as Koor Industries' Naftali Blumenthal and leading Arab businesspeople such as Ibrahim Boulous and Ali Kadamany were willing to sit on the board, the challenge came in trying to convince the then-Likud government of the need to make Arabs and small business owners part of the equation for economic development.
Kreimer persisted. With the 1993 Oslo agreements and a change in Jewish Israelis' attitude toward the opportunities the Arab world offered, the center's business began to thrive. Instead of hustling Israeli companies on behalf of little known Arab businesses, Kreimer found that international contingencies and Jewish industrialists began approaching her.
"Suddenly, paradoxically, Israelis began looking at Arabs as economically important," said Kreimer, noting that since 1994 Jewish Israeli requests for joint-venture partners have doubled to 200 per year.
Today, Kreimer has expanded her operation to Arab domains beyond Israel and the territories. She brought the first business delegation from Jordan in 1994 for a textile industry conference in Jerusalem and then went on to organize regional conferences for the software, plastics and food industries.
Looking toward the future, Kreimer says she hopes to create 100 new business partnerships over the next five years. She wants to work with the Arabs in helping them gain access to the government planning ministries that are determining what will happen in regions heavily populated by non-Jewish Israelis.
"It's important to take people into account, especially when they are 20 percent of the population," Kreimer said. "This is the only way to strengthen society."
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