Michel’s entry into land development

Michel Sommo’s entry into land development turns a change in work and household circumstances into a wider political-commercial venture. After financial assistance from Alexander Gideon, Michel leaves teaching, sells the family flat, and enters a network linking investors, political advocacy, and proposed property transactions. The episode’s significance lies in that convergence: land is presented as a religious and national cause, but also handled through investment plans, private connections, lobbying, and the anticipated use of Gideon’s fortune.

Background and Political Commitments

Michel’s new direction grows out of political activity that predates his business. He held views described as close to the right and intermittently belonged to the Herut Bloc and the National Religious Party. In 1964 he helped organize Moledet, a group of North African intellectuals and students in Jerusalem, which dissolved the following year amid financial and ideological divisions. Before the Six-Day War, he campaigned against the government’s wait-and-see policy and for military initiative; afterward, he volunteered for work in the Greater Israel Movement, concentrating on propaganda and demonstrations.

In 1971 Michel abruptly left the Greater Israel Movement and made a public display of surrendering his National Religious Party membership card. The following year he helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement, whose membership was mainly young immigrants from America and Russia, and served on its executive committee. After the Yom Kippur War, the group demonstrated against troop disengagements in the Sinai and Golan Heights and pursued attempts to buy land illegally from Arabs near Bethlehem. Police interviewed Michel twice about the organization’s activities, but he was not charged. The report on him stated that it could not establish his personal involvement in violent lawbreaking; it also recorded his published calls for Arab residents to leave Israel and the occupied territories peacefully, with financial inducements.

From Teaching to Property

A decisive personal change followed Gideon’s financial intervention. At the end of the school year, Michel resigned from his French teaching post. He described the decision to Ilana as an escape from bondage into liberty and invoked an image of moss flourishing like a cedar in Lebanon. The language of release accompanied a material shift: the modest household’s financial position had changed, and Michel entrusted his new wealth to Manfred Zakheim and Zakheim’s son-in-law, Zohar Etgar.

The family’s housing changed as well. Michel sold the flat, including its unfinished extension, to a cousin and contracted to buy another home in the restored Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. He rejoined the National Religious Party and began a new business, though Ilana initially did not know its nature. He acquired a pale-blue summer suit, began leaving each morning and returning late, and took driving lessons with plans to buy a car. These details mark the transition not as an abstract change of vocation but as a reorganization of daily life around business, property, and political contacts.

The proposed property work also had a larger precedent in the family’s requests to Gideon. In a letter, Michel and Ilana’s side asked for $60,000 to pay off their mortgage and build an additional room and a half, another $60,000 to provide for their son and daughter, and a further $95,000 toward buying and renovating Alkalai House in Hebron. They described the house as Jewish property seized during the 1929 Palestine riots and presented its repossession as a purchase at full market price rather than an act of violence. The request makes plain how private financial support, family security, and the claimed redemption of land had already become intertwined.

Tentpeg and the Business Structure

Manfred Zakheim’s later account gives the venture a more definite shape. Michel and Zohar Etgar established Tentpeg with a group of religious investors and discreet backing from Paris. Michel’s Jewish Fellowship Movement, Zakheim reported, had been converted into a reconnaissance unit or security guard serving the investment company. Zohar held the joint financial control, while the pious partners managed the business’s ethical presentation; they had persuaded revenue authorities to recognize them as a charitable institution.

This arrangement places Michel between public religious advocacy and the practical machinery of development. Zakheim depicts him lobbying officials, circulating among party figures and government administrators, and working to secure permits and certificates while promoting investment south of Jerusalem. He characterizes Michel as combining appeals to Jewish love and redemption with scriptural argument, personal persuasion, and political influence. The description is Zakheim’s, written to Alexander Gideon while urging him to trust Zakheim’s judgment and put Gideon’s available wealth behind the project; it is therefore both an account of Michel’s activity and a pitch for further investment.

Land, Population, and Political Purpose

Michel’s land-development work was not presented solely as ordinary commercial investment. In a letter to him, Gideon questioned the financial and ethical implications of the organization’s proposal to pay Arabs for their land and property and provide one-way tickets for their departure. Gideon calculated that compensating two million people at roughly $20,000 each would cost a sum beyond the state’s means, and challenged the idea of selling Israel in order to buy the Territories. His alternative of exchanging the coastal plain for the mountains was framed as a pointed response to the proposal, not as an agreement reached by the parties.

Zakheim’s correspondence connects the venture to a proposed transaction involving land west of Bethlehem belonging to a Christian religious order headquartered in Toulouse. He said that a Paris contact had financed Michel’s earlier trip to Paris and arranged the restoration of Michel’s French nationality, giving him a legal basis for negotiations while keeping the financier out of a formal role. According to Zakheim, the religious order was unwilling to sell its land but might exchange it for a substantial building and adjoining land within the pre-1967 borders. He imagined this arrangement, Gideon’s Zikhron property, and the proposed Bethlehem transaction as parts of a larger deal. The correspondence describes negotiations and possibilities, not a completed exchange.

Consequences and Significance

For Ilana, Michel’s commercial turn is visible first through domestic absences and altered routines. Their Saturday evenings on the veranda and family play with Yifat give way to meetings with religious land dealers, long business discussions, and Michel’s assumption that Gideon’s money or property would soon be available to the family. Michel taught Ilana the vocabulary of plots, grants, property law, loans, working capital, securities, and infrastructure costs, presenting development as both technical business and a pious undertaking. She records his confidence that Gideon would atone through a substantial contribution to the rebuilding of the Land; that expectation was Michel’s, not a confirmed promise from Gideon.

Zakheim, meanwhile, tried to recruit Gideon’s fortune into the same enterprise. He argued that investing could bind Michel to their interests, advance Gideon’s plans concerning his property, and secure a role for Michel in what Zakheim represented as land redemption. His account treats political access, charitable status, family relationships, and capital as mutually useful resources. The episode thus shows Michel’s shift from schoolteacher and movement activist into a broker between ideological organizations and property development, while leaving both the proposed transactions and Gideon’s financial commitment unresolved.