Business partnership between Michel Sommo and Zohar Etgar

Michel Sommo and Zohar Etgar’s partnership brought together political advocacy, commercial finance, and a program of acquiring or exchanging land. Its clearest institutional expression was Tentpeg, an investment company that linked Sommo’s Jewish Fellowship network with Etgar’s financial role and a group of religious investors. The arrangement turned Sommo’s ambitions for territorial expansion into a business operation, while making political access and religious language part of its practical machinery.

From political activism to a business alliance

The partnership grew out of Sommo’s long involvement in right-wing and religious-nationalist politics. He had intermittently belonged to the Herut Bloc and the National Religious Party, helped organize the North African intellectual and student group Moledet in Jerusalem in 1964, and campaigned before the Six-Day War for military action against Egypt and other Arab states. After the war he volunteered for the Greater Israel Movement, specializing in propaganda and demonstrations, but left it in 1971. In 1972 he helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement, whose executive committee he later served on.

Sommo’s activism increasingly centered on land. The Jewish Fellowship Movement took part in demonstrations against troop disengagements in the Sinai and Golan Heights after the Yom Kippur War, and in efforts to purchase land from Arabs near Bethlehem. A private-investigation report said Sommo had been interviewed by police twice in connection with the organization, but had not been charged and, as far as the investigators could determine, had not personally engaged in violent lawbreaking. The same report described his public advocacy for encouraging Arab residents to leave through financial inducements. This political record helps explain why a land-development company could serve, for Sommo, as more than a conventional commercial enterprise.

Zakheim’s introduction of Etgar

Manfred Zakheim brought Sommo and his son-in-law, the industrialist Zohar Etgar, together. In a letter to Sommo, Zakheim described Etgar as a young man similarly interested in moving into land development and predicted that the two could benefit from one another: Sommo had wealth and connections, while Etgar could contribute energy. Zakheim also anticipated that a change of government might open new commercial opportunities in the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

The prospective alliance was set against Sommo’s effort to establish himself as a substantial property owner. He and Ilana Sommo had asked Alexander Gideon for funds toward family expenses and the purchase and renovation of Alkalai House in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Hebron, describing it as a Jewish property they hoped to repossess by paying market price. Later, Sommo acquired a home in the restored Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and took up a new business whose nature was initially unclear to Ilana. Her account describes land dealers visiting after the Sabbath and Sommo explaining building plots, grants, property laws, loans, working capital, and securities. These details show the domestic and financial setting in which the partnership’s plans took shape, though they do not establish that every property discussed belonged to Tentpeg.

Tentpeg and the division of roles

Zakheim’s later report identified Tentpeg as an investment company Sommo and Etgar had established with a group of religious investors and discreet financial backing from Paris. It described the Jewish Fellowship Movement as having been converted into a kind of reconnaissance unit or security guard serving the company. In Zakheim’s account, Etgar held the joint financial handle, while the religious partners managed what he called the ethical side of the operation. They had persuaded the revenue authorities to recognize them as an orphanage for charitable-status purposes. These are claims made in Zakheim’s correspondence, not an independent account of Tentpeg’s formal structure or legal arrangements.

The division of labor depicted in that correspondence connected Etgar’s financial position with Sommo’s public and political work. Zakheim portrays Sommo lobbying party officials and government administrators, cultivating contacts in the Military Administration, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and the Israel Land Authority, and seeking permits and certificates. He presents this activity as a way of consolidating investments south of Jerusalem and advancing a vision of territorial redemption. The contrast is pointed: commercial aims were pursued through institutional access, while the company’s political constituency supplied religious and ethical justifications for the project.

Property exchanges and territorial aims

The partnership’s ambitions included deals extending beyond ordinary local development. Zakheim told Sommo that a Paris-based patron had financed a trip to Paris to negotiate on behalf of the organization with a Christian religious order headquartered in Toulouse. The proposed transaction concerned the order’s land west of Bethlehem in the West Bank. According to Zakheim, the order was unwilling to sell its land but might exchange it for a substantial building and associated land inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. He linked the negotiation to the proposed sale of Alexander Gideon’s property in Zikhron Yaakov and described the intended arrangement as a triangle connecting Bethlehem, Toulouse, and Zikhron.

Zakheim also questioned the financial and political assumptions behind Sommo’s plans. He summarized Sommo’s prospectus as proposing full payment to Arab landowners, together with one-way tickets, and challenged the scale of the cost if applied to two million people. His letter’s skepticism makes visible the gap between the language of voluntary compensation and the vast population transfer implied by the scheme. It also shows that the partnership’s territorial objectives depended on more than purchases: they involved exchanges, political forecasting, outside financing, and proposals for relocating people.

A later cable from Zakheim reported that Magdiel had been sold to Sommo, acting for a Paris millionaire described as his patron, with an intended exchange involving a French monastery and land in the West Bank. The message added that Etgar was also part of the deal and that they advised Alexander Gideon to invest available cash in purchases in the Territories. The report ties the partnership directly to a specific property maneuver, although it does not establish that every stage of the proposed exchange was completed.

Consequences and significance

Sommo’s partnership with Etgar altered the scale and presentation of his activity. What had been political organizing and advocacy became intertwined with an investment company, a network of religious investors, and efforts to cultivate officials and obtain property. A visit by the Etgars to Sommo’s home included discussion of private enterprise in the Sinai and West Bank; in the months that followed, Sommo’s life increasingly revolved around business meetings, land transactions, and political contacts. The partnership thus appears not as a separation of politics from commerce, but as their deliberate interdependence.

The financial relationship also carried risks and assumptions about who would ultimately control or benefit from Alexander Gideon’s resources. Ilana reported that Sommo regarded Gideon’s money and property as nearly available for the family’s use and believed that Gideon would atone through a significant contribution to land redemption. In a later letter, Gideon warned Sommo not to waste the money intended to secure the future of Boaz and Sommo’s daughter on messianic investments. That warning does not prove that Tentpeg received an inheritance, but it exposes the conflict between family provision and Sommo’s political-commercial ambitions. The partnership’s defining tension lies there: land was at once a financial asset, a religious mission, and a proposed instrument for changing who could inhabit and control a territory.