Archive for October, 2022

Storyworth: How Did You Bring Peace to the Middle East – Chapter 2

Two years after our experience on Cyprus with the Palestinians and the Israelis described in a previous chapter, my friend Jay F. came back with a new project related to the earlier one. Jay was working for the Peres Center for Peace, named for Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shimon Peres, whose executive director was a man named Uri Savir. Uri was Israel’s chief negotiator for the Oslo Accords, a peace agreement from the early ‘90s between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He was portrayed in the movie “Oslo” as a slender, dashing, charismatic and irreverent diplomat, a characterization of him wildly at odds with the man I got to know on this project. He was in fact smart, irreverent, funny and charismatic. Other qualities in the portrayal in the movie seemed exaggerated for dramatic effect. But that’s another story for another time.

Jay came to me with a project called the Millennium Peace Calendar. It was a large poster-sized calendar that the Peres Center had created with young Israelis and Palestinians from the West Bank who drew pictures about their dreams for peace. Those pictures decorated each of the months in the 12 month calendar. The calendar was signed by the Pope, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and other world leaders. It was designed to be a fundraising vehicle that would provide financing for computer centers that the Peres center would establish both in the West Bank and in Israel that would allow young people from each community to communicate with one another and build relationships across the two communities. These relationships would break the chain of hostility by developing a generation of Palestinians and Israelis who had friends on the either side of the Jordan River.

I had been at FleishmanHillard for two years by that time. I was a little more established and so I had a little more ability to get the company to approve this project. Of course, unlike the previous project, this would have been a paying client. But payment was somewhat contingent on the success of the project. In other words, we had to sell calendars. All FH asked was that we don’t LOSE money on it. I only had to break even. In the end, we never came close.

The first meeting with Jay and a woman from the Peres Center was on a Monday in early September of 1999. Since the calendar was for the year 2000, there was no time to waste. Once my general manager at FH approved the project, we had to move quickly. In fact, I had to be in Tel Aviv by the following weekend for a meeting at the Peres Center for Peace that following Monday….with Shimon Peres, the former Prime Minister of Israel. Less than a week away. And, I had to have a plan for the project by then. Yikes.

I wrote a plan in my hotel room in Tel Aviv that forecast that we would raise $10 million dollars from the calendars. We would sell them for $100 a piece. Our chief targets would be the American Jewish community.

I presented the plan to Shimon Peres and the Chairman of the Board of the Peres Center, Dov Lautman, who was the head of the Sara Lee company in Israel. They approved the plan, but before I left the meeting (after getting the picture with Peres below), Lautman pulled me aside and said, “This project HAS to work. The Peres Center is struggling financially right now and if this effort fails, it could destroy the organization.”

Me and Shimon immediately after I told him I was going to raise $10 million for his non-profit with the Peace Calendar.

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Storyworth: Who has been one of the most important people in your life? Can you tell me about him or her?

So many people. I could write a book about the people who had major impacts on my life. For purposes of this question, I’m going to set family aside, since by definition, they have had the most impact on my life. But that’s all of our jobs, to positively impact members of our family. Non-family members who intervene positively on our lives are, I think, a special breed. So I’ll focus on that category. And I will start with a list and finish with the person who had the greatest impact.

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