Stef Wertheimer is probably most famous for having founded
ISCAR, an Israeli precision metalworking business, and then selling a big chunk to Warren Buffett, his first non-US deal. But as this Business Week article by Stacy Perman titled
An Entrepreneurial Path to Peace spotlights, Mr Wertheimer's Tefen business park -- and his ideas for a whole network of such
prosperity parks in the
vital Levant -- are what I find most inspiring. Writes Ms Perman...
"By providing small businesses with incubators, Israeli industrialist Stef Wertheimer hopes to give Israelis and Arabs economic opportunities that will lead to peace. [The first of these business parks is Tefen] 
Since Tefen, Wertheimer has established four additional industrial parks in Israel following the same model. To date, they have nurtured 175 companies, employ 5,000 people, and in 2007 produced collective sales of $750 million, 80% from exports. In 2003, Wertheimer established his sixth park, in Gebze, outside of Istanbul, Turkey. Today, Gebze has 70 companies employing 300 people. [...] In Werteheimer's grand scheme, a host of similar industrial parks would stretch across the Levant, the non-oil producing nations along the spine of the former Ottoman Empire, through Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. "There are 90 million to 100 million people quarreling about who's right," he explains. "Israel is more successful than the Arabs, and I believe peace will come if we have similar income levels. This we can have, but we have to change from an agricultural society to an industrial one. It can be done. We've done it here in the Galilee, which is 20% of Israel. It is made up of Arabs and Jews, and unemployment is 4% here compared to 7.5% in Israel."
This kind of
orchestrated development is exactly what many emerging regions of the world need, especially the Levant. Indeed, this is an essential element of the
Hummus 2050 project run by
Austrian architect-planners Sigi Atteneder and Lorenz Potocnik -- honorees in the Just Jerusalem initiative here at MIT -- where they envision a vibrant network of interconnected and prosperous cities throughout the region...
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