Longstanding friendship and partnership between Manfred Zakheim and Alexander Gideon

Manfred Zakheim and Alexander Gideon’s longstanding friendship is inseparable from their business partnership: Zakheim helps preserve the Gideon family fortune, while Gideon’s anger at his friend’s independent decisions repeatedly threatens their bond. Their relationship is neither simple trust nor a clean break. It is a durable alliance in which financial stewardship becomes the means of expressing loyalty, exercising control, and asking for reconciliation.

Origins in the Gideon Family Business

Zakheim’s account reaches back to Gideon’s childhood. He says he was already putting his abilities at the service of Alexander Gideon’s father when Gideon was seven or eight, and that together he and the elder Gideon built an empire beginning in the 1930s. In Zakheim’s telling, his connection to Alexander therefore begins as an extension of a long commitment to the family, not merely as a later commercial arrangement between two equals.

Zakheim presents himself as an active steward of the inheritance. He says he protected the elder Gideon’s properties and money from dissipation, including from the father’s plans for ambitious projects, and maneuvered assets past tax authorities. He describes the wealth as the product of both the father’s vision and his own labor. This history is central to his defense of later decisions: Zakheim regards himself not as a hired manager who should execute instructions mechanically, but as someone personally invested in keeping the family fortune intact.

That self-understanding makes the partnership intimate as well as practical. Zakheim recalls that he and Alexander had been friends, and invokes his years of service as evidence that he has earned the right to intervene. His narrative, however, is his own retrospective case for the defense; the letters show the claims and counterclaims of a relationship under strain, rather than offering an independent account of every earlier business decision.

Stewardship, Disagreement, and Gideon’s Estate

The sharpest dispute concerns whether to sell the Zikhron property. Zakheim argues that selling it would release funds for other investments and, in one message, says a purchaser is prepared to pay eleven for it and would employ Boaz Brandstetter on a monthly wage. He presents the arrangement as a way to secure Boaz’s position while advancing the sale. Gideon replies with an emphatic refusal, orders Zakheim to hand the papers to Roberto di Modena, and says Roberto will handle his affairs. He also warns Zakheim not to try to have him placed in a Mount Carmel institution and notes that his grandchildren remain in his will. The exchange makes clear that financial authority has become a proxy for Gideon’s fear of being managed or displaced.

Zakheim does not regard the sale proposal as a merely personal commission. In a later letter, he explains that he had sold another property to meet what he calls protection payments but had preserved Zikhron. He argues that this restraint mattered because Gideon changed his mind and became determined to keep the property. Zakheim’s version thus casts an apparent breach of instructions as a fortunate exercise of judgment: he claims that a literal execution of Gideon’s earlier wishes would have destroyed an asset Gideon later wanted to retain.

The disagreement also extends to Gideon’s possible use of his fortune and the future of Boaz. Zakheim warns that Boaz could go to jail, pointing to his suspended sentence, and urges Gideon to accept help rather than leave the young man exposed. He also says others are waiting for Gideon’s death and inheritance. These appeals combine practical concerns about Boaz and the estate with pressure on Gideon to trust the friend he has just tried to dismiss.

Betrayal, Dismissal, and Reconciliation

Gideon’s messages describe Zakheim as disloyal and direct him to surrender control of the papers. Zakheim recognizes the force of that accusation: he imagines Gideon casting him as a scheming betrayer who has successively turned against members of the Gideon and Sommo families. Rather than simply deny that he acted independently, Zakheim acknowledges that he cut corners and took initiative without permission. His defense is that these decisions protected the inheritance and served Gideon’s longer-term interests.

Zakheim recounts that Gideon fired him after the property maneuver. He says he accepted the dismissal and withdrew after thirty-eight years of devoted service, but that Gideon soon sent an urgent cable asking for forgiveness and emotional support. Zakheim then traveled to London and spent a night and a day with him. In Zakheim’s account, the sequence exposes the instability of their conflict: Gideon can cast his oldest associate out, then appeal to that same associate when anger gives way to need. Zakheim’s willingness to return is evidence of attachment, but it also restores him to a position of influence.

After the visit, Zakheim says Gideon gave him new instructions to separate a woman from her husband and acquire the husband’s cooperation at any price. Zakheim instead describes devising a plan to channel Michel Sommo’s zeal into land investment, linking him to Zakheim’s son-in-law, Zohar Etgar. He presents this intervention as a way to prevent Gideon’s inheritance from being spent on ideological projects and to direct it toward property. The episode shows that reconciliation does not resolve the underlying problem: Gideon again relies on Zakheim, while Zakheim again substitutes his judgment for the explicit terms of Gideon’s instructions.

Loyalty as Care and Control

Zakheim frames his choices as acts of loyalty rather than betrayal. He says he could have taken a commission and allowed Gideon to ruin himself, but did not want to hand over a friend or participate in exploiting orphans. He also stresses that he had invested much of his life in building the family’s wealth and could not watch it be squandered. These statements make his attachment tangible through financial labor and preservation, even as they expose how readily care becomes a claim to authority.

His proposed investment strategy is correspondingly personal. He urges Gideon to put dormant cash to work with him, argues that one million could advance several objectives at once, and imagines drawing Michel Sommo into their interests. In a subsequent account, Zakheim says he tied Sommo to Zohar Etgar and changed the direction of Sommo’s activities, with Gideon’s hundred thousand then expected to grow to two hundred thousand. The plan treats alliance, capital, and personal influence as parts of the same undertaking. Zakheim’s friendship is not separate from his business calculations; he presents the calculations as proof that he is protecting his friend.

The relationship’s defining contradiction is therefore its persistence without uncomplicated trust. Gideon’s accusations and orders show his capacity to reject Zakheim’s authority; his return to Zakheim for help shows how difficult it is to sever their dependence. Zakheim, for his part, accepts insult and dismissal but continues to act on the conviction that he understands what Gideon’s interests require. Their partnership endures through this cycle of intervention, resentment, and renewed appeal, with the preservation of the Gideon fortune serving both as its practical purpose and its most contested expression of care.