Introduction

Welcome to Israel Win Win, the initiative to promote new and expanded business connections and networking opportunities between Israeli and North American business people. If you are interested in such business opportunities please join us and get actively involved in making this initiative successful. Follow this Blog or on twitter for more details.

Your probably asking - Why Israel Win Win?

The good: By way of introduction, as an American, Jewishly observant business person, I am simply in love with the Land of Israel and the people of Israel. Being born in Israel and immigrating to the USA at 5 yrs old, I not only have dual citizenship, I consider both my home. My Holocaust survivor parents both journeyed to Israel after being liberated from concentration camps. My father fought for the Israeli army in 1947, until an eye injury ended his military career. To this day some half a century after leaving, he loves the country and follows every bit of news as if he never left.

My wife and I have visited Israel dozens of times. Our nine children have studied and/or attended camps in Israel at different times and one of my sons even volunteered, serving in the IDF. We have had a second home in Jerusalem and a couple of years ago I invested in and became Chairman and CEO of a public Israeli company which has raised institutional money in Israel and invested in US real estate.

The bad: My father started a business in Israel but left in 1960 mainly because he couldn’t adjust to the Israeli way of doing business. Generally, our circle of friends are also orthodox Jews. They strongly identify with the land of Israel, visit Israel often, spend freely, send their kids to Israel to study and sometimes to live.

In my “American” way of looking at things – we are the kind of tourists and potential investors which the Israeli’s should be bending over backwards to attract. However, when I speak with many American Jewish business people about investing in Israel, pretty much each one has a story of how they were involved in a business deal in Israel which didn’t work out quite as they would have liked. No Loshon Harah (evil tongue) is intended here, it’s just the way that it is.


Defining the problem: Since my business now straddles the US and Israel, I have gained some new insight into this. Often business practices, philosophy and approaches have been very different in Israel, as a Middle Eastern country, then they are in the West. In recent decades, many Israeli’s have left Israel and come to the USA. Some, like my family, have stayed permanently while others have stayed for varying periods of time and then returned to Israel. A very large number of Israeli nationals continue to live in North America and many are coming all the time.

Some Israeli business people make the transition to an “American way of doing business” and many haven't. These differences are not only about business. Given Israel’s and the Jewish people’s always precarious position in the gentile world, these differences may eventually have long-term, significant political repercussions for Israel as a Jewish state and for relations between Israelis and the Jewish Diaspora, who are ever dependant on each other.

The Israel Win Win vision: The American approach to business is often referred to as “Win-Win”. In this approach, each side in a business transaction benefits from the “deal” and the best deals are those where both sides perceive that they are winners. In my experience, the Middle Eastern approach to business is often different (not worst - just different), let’s call it a “Win-Lose” approach, where every business deal by definition has one winner and one loser and the goal of negotiating a transaction is to be the winner – or to make sure that your counterpart is the “loser”. This approach works in Israel and elsewhere in the world, but in the US, a win-lose approach is really a guaranty of a long-term “lose-lose” result. Simply, American business people will usually take their business elsewhere if they believe that there is a chance of “losing” in a business transaction.

The consensus opinion in the US and in Israel is that great and historic opportunities are coming for investors in US real estate and other assets. Of course, the current economic woes started in the US, but now they are global. There is a general feeling that it is the US real estate market which will recover first (although there is definitely uncertainty about the exact timing for this.) More and more Israelis are looking to North America as the next investor frontier. To succeed financially, politically and for the entire Jewish nation these Israeli businessmen will need to adopt the “Win-Win” approach to doing business with Americans. The Israel Win-Win initiative is about helping them insure that they do.