By Avigayil Kadesh
A brand-new industrial park in the predominantly Christian-Arab city of Nazareth is the latest in a chain of employment clusters founded by Israeli industrialist Stef Wertheimer. His goal is to provide meaningful employment for Arab populations while fostering peaceful coexistence.
At the park’s grand opening in April 2013, Wertheimer and Nazareth Mayor Ramez Jeraisy explained that the industrial park is part of a unique model to promote the advancement of Arab-Jewish Israeli export companies. During his visit to Israel in 2009, Pope Benedict had met with both men at the site of the future park and gave his blessing to the project.
“About 20 years ago, I started looking for a way to influence the Arab population in Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian areas by developing industry,” Wertheimer says.
He has since established seven industrial parks – in Tefen, Tel-Hai, Dalton, Lavon and now Nazareth in the Galilee; in Omer in the Negev; and another in Turkey. Each is based on five principles: exports, education, coexistence, community and culture.
Built with an investment of some $22 million, the Nazareth Industrial Park comprises an 18,000-square-meter (193,750 sq. ft.) complex spread over 14 landscaped acres. With space for about 30 export-oriented firms, the park is expected to provide 500 to 1,000 jobs over the next decade and to play an active role in strengthening Nazareth’s economic base.
Wertheimer founded the multinational company ISCAR (now International Metalworking Companies, acquired in May by Berkshire Hathaway), headquartered in the Tefen Industrial Zone. He says he chose Nazareth because, with 70,000 inhabitants, it is the largest Arab city in northern Israel. His philanthropy aims to help shift the local economy from family agriculture, tourism and service businesses to export industries.
“The mayor and the people of Nazareth were very helpful,” he adds.
President Shimon Peres, Israeli industrialist Stef Wertheimer
and Nazareth Mayor Ramez Jeraisy inaugurating
Nazareth Industrial Park on April 23, 2013.
Photo by Ofer Blank
‘No politics, just exports’
The park opened with three tenants: a branch of Amdocs, a global leader in unified communications and network services solutions; a local medical devices company; and a metalwork company.
“We’re bringing in a school for jewelry-making from Germany,” Wertheimer reveals. “A lot of people in Nazareth are interested in this, and we want to bring what the people like. It’s always about bringing Jews and Arabs together -- no politics, just exports.”
The Nazareth Industrial Park is located at a meeting point of Israel's diverse populations, just beneath the Christian holy site of Mount Precipice and overlooking the Jewish agricultural communities and villages of the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee. Firms coming into the park will receive a package of benefits encouraging the employment of professionally educated Arabs.
Wertheimer says he had plans more than a decade ago to build industrial parks on Israel’s borders with the Gaza Strip and with Egypt, but political realities forced him to shift his focus away from that area to Turkey. The Turkish site, after 10 years, houses about 1,200 workers in 100 different enterprises that did not exist before.
As part of Wertheimer’s overall vision, Arab and Jewish entrepreneurs are being recruited to participate in a practical industrial entrepreneurship course to generate Arab-Jewish partnerships that can develop within the Nazareth Industrial Park.