Asheville Citizen-Times Editorial Page Editor Joy Franklin interviewed Israeli Consul General Reda Mansour during his visit to Asheville in late March. This is an edited transcript of that interview. Mansour, who is based in Atlanta, is consul general for six states: North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi.
Franklin: Please talk a bit about your responsibilities as the consul general.
Mansour: … We basically try to deepen the relationship between Israel and the local communities in the Southeast in many different fields. We try to stay in touch with elected officials. We also try to promote business…Another part would be cultural, artistic activities We bring speakers to universities, encourage student exchanges. ... The consulate is really a platform for a lot of kinds of grassroots relationships. In Israel we feel that what makes the U.S./Israeli relationship special is that we have these kinds of direct links between smaller communities in both countries. Our relationship is a grassroots relationship. It doesn’t start and end like many other international relations between governments… It is built by the people in many small places in many different fields. Hopefully, after this visit we will see more activities done by the city here and Israel.
Franklin: So that’s part of your goal in visiting Western North Carolina?
Mansour: Yes, I want to see this community connected to Israel in a business sense, in cultural activities and academic activities. Israel obviously also is an important spiritual center. Many people come to Israel to visit holy sites.
We have now more than 10 daily flights between the U.S. and Israel… One of them is from Atlanta. It’s amazing for such a tiny country far away like Israel to be so connected in a daily way to America. …
Franklin: Could you tell me a little about your own background, you are not Jewish, I understand.
Mansour: I come from the Druze community in Israel which is a religious community in existence for about 1,000 years. It’s a monotheistic belief that started about 1,000 years ago in Egypt and moved to the coast of Syria, Lebanon and Israel, where we have most of the community, which is about 1.5 million people now, with two small immigrant communities in the U.S. and Australia and some Druze immigrants in Latin America. It’s Arabic speaking community, but always having a very special relationship with the Jewish community in Israel, because the Druze community early on decided to integrate into the state of Israel and support the existence of the country. That is why we are the only non-Jewish community in the country that is drafted like the Jewish community to the military. Because of that intensive service – Israelis really have to serve between two and three years – it opened the doors for us for a very deep integration. You find today Druze in the government cabinet, parliament, generals in the military, ambassadors in the Foreign Service, any walks of life. We, I think, became in Israel kind of a symbol of a possible future relationship between Israel and neighboring countries. We always hope to play a role in bridging the gap between Israel and the Arab countries. And I think the fact that we have started to work in the Foreign Ministry as well is a bit of fulfillment of that mission.
Franklin: You speak Arabic?
Mansour: Yes, it’s my first language.
Franklin: And Hebrew and English?
Mansour: And Spanish and Portuguese... Now the sixth language is going to be Southern.
Franklin: Is this your first posting in America?
Mansour: It’s actually my third time that I lived in America. My first posting was San Francisco… I was the deputy consul general back then ... The second time came in a program to study for my master’s degree at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard…
Franklin: I understand that Israel has the second largest number of companies listed on the Nasdaq and that Israel is making significant medical and biotech contributions. Could you give me some examples?
Mansour: In terms of technology, Israel is one of the most intensive hubs of research in the world. You can’t be today a big technology company without having a research and development facility in Israel. It started with the U.S. Now it’s becoming even Chinese companies, Japanese companies. This whole notion of Israel as a hub of research and innovation became so powerful that now even companies like Coca-Cola out of Atlanta that’s beyond typical traditional technology are looking to Israel to start their own research and development….
The reason is that Israel has the highest number of scientists per capita in the world. This is a country that understood early on that we don’t have anything else to sell. We don’t have any natural resources. And our only way of survival is to focus on the people and the capacity of the people to be innovative and to invent things, produce this kind of know-how. That’s why you can find the highest number of engineers per capita, doctors per capita, scientists. …
I think the closest thing to the Israeli developing culture is the Internet, where you have to be smart, quick and find solutions to problems. This is exactly the Israeli mentality. That’s why you find kids in Israel who are 22 and 23 years old – it’s like the Silicon Valley of the ‘50s when companies like HP and others were started in garages by young graduates of Stanford or other universities. In Israel, this is happening in Tel Aviv and Haifa. In Haifa, we have Technion, which is our own MIT and it’s connected to MIT actually, one of the leading technological institutions in the world. It was an institution that was built initially by a group of German Jews who fled Germany before the Holocaust. This is the same generation of Einstein who came to Israel and built places like Technion, like Hebrew University in Jerusalem, like our symphonic orchestra. All of this happened in the 1930s. And today these are really top-of–the-class institutions.
Young people graduate from there, they rent a small apartment in the city, and their dream is really to find some Internet idea and to have a company and sell it after a year. And they do. The deals you hear about are just unbelievable. They run from $100 million to $1.5 billion, companies that are sold to bigger companies from small ideas that young people produce. Technology today is also becoming a very internationalized sector. We cooperate with many different communities and countries around the world, so if we can bring some of that cooperation here, it will be wonderful. Israelis now are working in North America, in South America, in Asia, in Europe. Companies cooperate, they work on the same projects together. They can find solutions to things that the local community needs or use the experience that (the local communities) have here to offer. This exchange is very important, technologically and business-wise.
Franklin: I’m not sure how much opportunity you’ve had to learn about our specific area, but do you see any specific connections?
Mansour: Not yet. The reason for this visit is really to have these first dialogues…
(Asheville attorney Bob Deutsch who hosted Mansour’s visit and accompanied him during the interview said one possible area of cooperation may be biotechnology.)
Mansour: (Agriculture) is a very developed field of research in Israel because we brought to Israel a lot of kinds of agricultural products from all around the world and had to make it possible for them to survive in the conditions of the Middle East. That produced a lot of research. I just recently gave a formal letter of announcement for a winner of a prize that we have in Israel that’s considered the most important agricultural prize for research in the world to a researcher in Tifton, Ga., where he actually works in this field. Scientists in Israel who are very advanced in this field thought that some of the things he managed to do are worthwhile emphasizing.
In the scientific community, everyone is so connected to the U.S. and to the world scientific community that we are aware of every breakthrough that is happening around the world. And we know the importance of cooperation and using each others’ breakthroughs, so we are encouraging scientists like that knowing that we will use his research and in the future some Israeli researcher will make the next breakthrough.
Franklin: They sort of feed on one another.
Mansour: And it can be done here as well. There is so much room, especially in the agricultural business, I think, there is so much room for cooperation. Israel has been doing a lot of this all around the world – North America, Latin America, Europe, innovating in different sectors of agriculture. We actually call agriculture in Israel to be agritech because, unlike many people think, agriculture now is a very sophisticated field… From my past experience, in my last mission I was in Ecuador, Israeli companies there helped some local producers start a floral sector out of nothing, which makes today about $400 million…
For the first time in its history, probably, Egypt is exporting now two kinds of fruits with the help of Israeli experts who helped develop especially for them types that can survive in the Egyptian climate. One is apples, which used to be considered in Egypt food for the kings, most people couldn’t afford it. Now, not only can they afford it, but they export it. Another is a kind of watermelon…
Deutsch: I was at a place in Israel, do you know the Arava Institute?
Mansour: Oh, Yes.
Deutsch: It was actually started by some guys from North Carolina who went to Camp Judea…
Franklin: In Hendersonville?
Deutsch: Yes. Three of them have moved over there. One of them has become the leading environmental lawyer in Israel… But anyway, it’s an environmental institute. The philosophy is to have students from all over the area, not just Israeli, so they’ve got Jordanian, they’ve got Moroccan, and the government of Morocco gave them a $500,000 grant to develop a product that they could grow in the desert. They came up with this ancient tree. I don’t remember what the name of it is, but they make oil out of the nuts. But they’re planting it all over the area now. And they can use the oil for energy…
Mansour: Arava is really an amazing institute. Arava is the southern, desert part of Israel. It’s literally the prairies, probably in English. We had a couple of years ago the Chinese president came to visit Israel. When they asked him what he wanted to see, he had two interesting request and two of them were in the Arava. He wanted to see where we were growing our watermelons in the desert. They are known to be the sweetest watermelon. We use brackish water, which was never used before because most people thought that it’s useless for agriculture. So they developed a type of watermelon that can actually use it and turn it around and become much sweeter. The other idea that they’ve been developing at the Arava is those fish farms that also use brackish water in the middle of the desert and produce an amazing quality of fish. …They wanted Israel to help bringing those ideas. We have now a couple of huge farms in China, in western China. The Chinese ambassador in Israel told me they are closer to Israel than they are to Beijing….
Franklin: Well, China is so big…
Mansour: …That kind of knowledge, it’s everywhere, in almost every region. I think here for many years, by the way, maybe not so much in the Southesast, but California, for example, has been having a historic agriculture relationship with Israel. The whole issue of drip irrigation was developed between Israeli and California institutions.
Franklin: Henderson County is a large apple farming county. This is not a desert climate, obviously, but that might be an opportunity for sharing information.
Mansour: Actually in Israel itself, where we grow apples is in the north in a much colder climate with much more water. It’s in the upper Galilee and the Golan. Talking about the Druze community, there’s a small Druze community in the Golan.… very poor area, buy because of the apple farms up there that were developed specifically for that mountain region, they are major exporters of apples to Europe for there and it became probably the wealthiest part of the Druze community in Israel.
Deutsch: I was there last summer….I also went to the wine industry up in that area. North Carolina has been moving into the wine industry.
Mansour: …For most of our time, up until probably the 1980s, we used to be producers of very traditional, sweet, bad quality, basically, wine. We only had two wineries. Then a company came and brought an entire winery, high-tech, fully computerized, from Napa Valley, with its team and started in the Golan Heights. As it happens in business usually, as soon as these guys hit the ground, all of the other old wineries understood that the game now is different. But, I have to say that they managed to change their industry so quickly that from a country of wineries that were producing for religious purposes, we became now a country of almost 100 wineries, including the peak wines. And to talk about that connection between high-tech and the wines, we even imported that culture from the Silicon Valley. All of these high-tech millionaires who decided to have their own wine label and their own winery. So in Israel today we have a lot of high-tech millionaires who also decided they have to have their own winery….
Franklin: I could talk to you about food the rest of the day, but I want to talk about a couple of other things. I heard a report on National Public Radio recently that Israeli officials are boycotting Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was the first Arab network that invited Israeli officials to give their side of the story and participate in their programs. Apparently, Israeli officials are now taking the position that Al Jazeera is unfairly covering the rocket exchange that’s going on with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and that they, the Israelis who comment for Al Jazeera, are being used. So they’ve decided to boycott them. I’m interested to know your thoughts about that.
Mansour: I’m in a way very close to this because actually it’s coming from my ministry. We’re leading this issue. Al Jazeera for us has been a very big dilemma in Israel. As you said, first of all, Israel in general does not boycott or censor any media communication. It got so weird for a while that we even had Hezbollah journalists in Israel. We’re so open and we let everybody who wants to be a reporter there work, for a while we had Hezbollah doing reports from Israel until somebody decided that really wasn’t smart to let somebody report almost like intelligence against you every day.
Al Jazeera has been for us a very big dilemma for a long time because, first of all, it’s a very powerful station. You are talking about a news network that its prime time can get up to 70 million people. It’s just unprecedented worldwide. There’s nothing like that anywhere else. And it was the first channel that really started to interview Israeli officials and Israelis and started to operate in Israel. We understand the value of that in terms of the dialogue and in terms of humanizing us in the face of Arabs in the region because before that Al Jazeera we used to have only government TV in Arab countries. And in government TV you only saw Israelis as soldiers. You never saw Israelis as civilians.
So what happened lately – and we always have these dilemmas – for example in the last war with Lebanon, Al Jazeera was reporting in Arabic from places where rockets were falling. Our dilemma was, in modern warfare, here you have a TV station that your enemy is watching that is telling exactly at which address on the street where the rocket fell, which means in a couple of seconds if you missed and we were lucky in many cases they did miss, they can correct their coordinates and get the right target. So at some point, and not just Al Jazeera, there were other stations who at some point we decided for example to have a perimeter where we closed the area to the media so we can prevent this kind of real life reporting because it became part of the war itself. And Al Jazeera was very mad about that. They started to say we are censoring them.
The second development which came lately was that when we had that operation in Gaza where Israel went in with the military again for another attempt to stop those daily rockets from falling on our southern towns and cities that we have been sustaining since Hamas came to power in Gaza. We’ve been sustaining an average of 20 to 30 rockets a day on some of these towns. And we’ve been looking for ways to solve this problem. And the last attempt by the military to enter Gaza and fight some of these terrorists groups. As usual in these kinds of settings, terrorists operate in civilian areas and innocent people get killed.
And Al Jazeera, they’re always biased against Israel. We expect that, it’s an Arabic station. But they went so far as to basically entirely ignore the security issue, entirely ignore that a big part of the casualties were armed and were fighting. I watched Al Jazeera here and I saw that. They were showing pictures of bodies of babies and civilians in these horrible close ups that you can’t see on any other TV station in the world. You know, bloody streets. And basically they carried the message to the Arab world that Israel is intentionally doing a massacre in Gaza and this is a genocide. It was a pure extreme incitement to the levels that we thought it’s too much even for Al Jazeera. So we started to think what can we do about that. We let them operate freely in Gaza, we let them operate freely in Israel. But there should be some kind of red lines here.
Deutsch: Don’t they have an office in Israel?
Mansour: They do. They have a very big office in Israel. Actually, a lot of their journalists are Israeli Arabs. They don’t have any problems to go anywhere they want, to interview anybody they want. But we felt that this last operation in Gaza, they really lost any kind of control and it just became three of four days of loop-like horrible pictures that were totally twisting the reality on the ground. So, actually we didn’t boycott Al Jazeera. We just started to speak about that and we told them we were considering that. It wasn’t a decision. Right now, what we’re looking for is to have some kind of dialogue with the management of the station, which is in Doha, Quitar, where we do have an interest office.
We’re hoping to have some kind of dialogue with network managers where we make them understand that there must be some limit, even if they want to cover the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with a favorable reporting to the Palestinians. Some of that could be understood. But for that to become really… TV where all you do is promote hatred and incitement and you brainwash people with these scenes of bodies and bloody streets, this is something no country really can accept.
Franklin: Does Al Jazeera broadcast any of the carnage in Israel from the rockets coming in?
Mansour: Very few…. They did it also during the Lebanon war. Their reporting, whenever we are in conflict with an Arab partner, it’s usually that Israel is the aggressor. It doesn’t show any side of the Israeli casualties. They might have for each 15 reports from the Palestinian perspective, they might have one Israeli, very short report. …. Al Jazeera is really a mixed blessing. It does an important role to educate people and they do interview Israeli politicians and Israeli civilians and so they give us a little bit more positive exposure and normally we can tolerate their style of reporting of the Palestinian issue, but at this point we felt that they really went too far with this incitement.
Franklin: Today (in late March), Ehud Olmert said he would participate in peace talks with moderate Palestinian leadership, but that he would not participate in peace talks with Hamas. President Bush had hoped that by the end of his term there would be some kind of peace plan. Is that possible without Hamas participating?
Mansour: I’ll tell you a great misconception that we keep repeating ourselves and we don’t pay attention to that. It’s not that Israel will not talk with Hamas, it’s that Hamas does not talk with Israel. When they say they want to talk to Israel, you have to go check what they mean. Talking to Israel for them means that they will never recognize Israel, will never recognize the agreements that Israel signed with the Palestinians, will tell us that they see us as some kind of political entity that they want to see disappearing in the near future.
They will talk to us about the cease fire where they will stop shooting rockets and then Israel will not be able to intervene, even if we see them training or bringing in rockets … so for them cease fire means they will not shoot missiles, but they will be able to continue their preparation operation. As you can imagine, there’s no country in the world that can operate in this kind of talk. I can tell you that if Hamas recognize Israel and if Hamas recognize the agreements Palestinians have with Israel, we might open talks tomorrow morning.
We’re not the party that doesn’t want to talk. But I don’t think any country around the world can live with somebody who tells you we’re not going to recognize you, we want to kill you, we want to annihilate you, and now let’s talk. So what’s there to talk about? That’s been our problem with Hamas. Another dilemma we have with Hamas is that the Palestinians themselves, that’s the leadership in the West Bank, is against Israel speaking with Hamas. President Mahmoud Abbas tells us, why would you speak with Hamas? I recognize you, I want to have peace with you, I want to negotiate with you and you’re going to negotiate with my enemy. So we are caught between these two parties and we need to maneuver there … We don’t want to undermine the moderate Palestinians.
With the initiative of President Bush, I would say, it’s understood that the president in his last year is not in an easy situation trying to promote such a major peace initiative. But what’s important about it, and that’s what we always have to remember, is that what can happen now is really a serious preparation of any future peace agreements, because unlike other situations between Israel and other Arab partners, the Israeli/Palestinian issue is very complicated. You are talking about a territory smaller than some of the counties here in the South that you are trying to separate two countries. You have to speak about everything from when there’s a car accident in the road, which police comes to take care of it, where do you take them … One of the best examples of that is that our peace agreement with Egypt is three pages and our interim agreement that we signed in 1993 with the Palestinians is 400 pages. It goes to daily life, everything. Talking about the Hamas situation, we are fighting Hamas, receiving 30 rockets a day from them, but we still are supplying them with electricity, water and food. I think it’s an almost unprecedented situation in modern history where you supply your enemy with our supplies. Every time we try to do something about it, there’s an understandable uproar from the international community… but what should we do then? How can we supply the same people who are making our life miserable and killing our people?
So, I think what we could benefit from with President Bush’s initiative is that this year could be used – and there is ongoing negotiation now, it’s an open table where we are talking about everything and it’s going to be very important because there are a lot of things to talk about. So if you can manage to have some environment of negotiations, you might not achieve one of those big break- throughs, but you can advance a lot of the issues to where when there is enough political capital and will maybe you will manage to wrap it up and have an agreement.
If you remember with Egypt (the peace agreement) happened at Camp David, you have the two prime ministers and the American president. The major issue was the Sinai, Israel gave back the Sinai, then you have a peace. There’s not much complications. You can’t have a peace agreement with the Palestinians in a summit. We tried that with President Clinton and Arafat and it didn’t work because the issues are very complicated. You need to do the ground work and then, if you get to a summit, 90 percent of the issues need to be already dealt with. So that’s what we’re hoping will happen this year with these negotiations.
http://atlanta.mfa.gov.il/mfm/web/main/missionhome.asp?MissionID=69...;
http://www.arava.org/new/
http://www.desertagriculture.org/
