Tentpeg

Tentpeg is a land-investment company founded by Michel Sommo and Zohar Etgar that brings together property development, religious-political organizing, and efforts to acquire land around Bethlehem. Its operations are described through reports and private correspondence rather than a full account of completed transactions. The resulting portrait is of an organization whose commercial ambitions are inseparable from a political project: land is treated at once as an investment, a religious mission, and a means of reshaping who lives within a contested territory.

Formation and Structure

Tentpeg was established by Michel Sommo and Zohar Etgar with a group of religious investors and discreet financial backing from Paris, according to Manfred Zakheim’s account to Alexander Gideon. Zakheim describes the company as the business vehicle into which Sommo’s Jewish Fellowship Movement was redirected. The movement, previously active in political demonstrations and efforts to purchase land, became a reconnaissance unit or security guard serving the investment company. This description suggests a close functional connection between political organization and commercial activity, though it does not establish the details of the group’s day-to-day work.

The company’s finances were not presented as evenly controlled by its partners. Zakheim says that Zohar held the joint financial handle, while he himself influenced the arrangement and sought to guide Sommo through his son-in-law. He portrays this relationship as a form of supervision: Sommo supplied political connections and a public-facing religious commitment, while Zohar provided business acumen and control over the money. These characterizations come from Zakheim, a participant with his own interests in Gideon’s capital and the proposed land ventures.

Political Background and Aims

Tentpeg emerged from Sommo’s sustained involvement in right-wing and religious-nationalist politics. He helped organize Moledet, a group of North African intellectuals and students in Jerusalem, in 1964; it dissolved the following year amid financial and ideological divisions. Before the Six-Day War, Sommo campaigned against the government’s wait-and-see policy and for military initiative. After the war he worked in the Greater Israel Movement, leaving it in 1971, and later joined the founders of the Jewish Fellowship Movement. Following the Yom Kippur War, that organization protested troop disengagements in the Sinai and Golan Heights and became involved in attempts to purchase land in the Bethlehem area. Police interviewed Sommo twice in connection with its activities, but he was not charged; the report states that it found no evidence that he personally took part in violent lawbreaking.

Sommo’s public positions also included advocating the peaceful departure of the Arab population through financial inducements. In a letter to Gideon, he described a proposal to pay Arabs in full for their land and property and provide one-way travel at the organizers’ expense. He acknowledged the enormous cost of such a plan, calculating it against a population of roughly two million. The proposal frames population movement as compensated and voluntary, while placing the transfer of land at the center of the political objective. It also makes clear that the company’s surrounding political environment was not simply a matter of buying property for ordinary development: the proposed purchases were tied to a broader vision of territorial control and resettlement.

Business Methods and Proposed Transactions

Zakheim depicts Sommo as using religious language, lobbying, and personal contacts to advance the company’s interests. He describes Sommo cultivating officials in the Military Administration, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and the Israel Land Authority, while seeking permits and certificates and consolidating investments south of Jerusalem. Zakheim’s account presents this political access as a practical business resource: Sommo’s public appeal to redemption and religious duty accompanied the work of obtaining authorization and securing land.

A proposed transaction linked Bethlehem, Toulouse, and Zikhron Yaakov. According to Zakheim, a Paris-based backer known to Sommo was financing the effort and had arranged the restoration of Sommo’s French nationality after he had relinquished it in 1963. Zakheim says that the restored citizenship would give Sommo a legal basis for negotiating with a Christian religious order headquartered in Toulouse. The order, he reports, was unwilling to sell its land west of Bethlehem but might exchange it for a substantial building and adjoining land within the pre-1967 borders. Zakheim sought to connect that arrangement to Gideon’s property in Zikhron Yaakov, whose possible sale would complete what he called a triangle of interests. These were proposed arrangements, not confirmed completed exchanges; Gideon’s changing intentions about selling his property remained an obstacle.

Another financial strand involved Gideon’s wealth. Zakheim argued that Gideon’s money could be joined to his own business judgment and Sommo’s political connections to acquire parcels at low prices and develop them later. He also says that Gideon had sent one hundred thousand dollars which, through Sommo’s new arrangements with Zohar, was expected to grow to two hundred thousand. That claim belongs to Zakheim’s advocacy for his plan, not to an independently verified account of Tentpeg’s assets or returns. A separate request by the Sommo family sought substantial funds for the purchase and renovation of Alkalai House in Hebron, a property they described as seized during the 1929 riots and then being reclaimed through a purchase at market price; the evidence does not establish that this request was a Tentpeg transaction.

Financing, Legitimacy, and Uncertainty

The company’s investors reportedly included religious partners who helped secure charitable status by presenting the venture to revenue authorities as a kind of orphanage. The account makes this status appear part of the company’s financial arrangements, while leaving unclear the precise legal structure, the extent of the claimed charitable activity, and the company’s actual financial performance. Likewise, the Paris backing is described as discreet, and the proposed land exchange depended on parties and property that Zakheim could not simply command.

The evidence therefore distinguishes stated aims from accomplished outcomes. Tentpeg is associated with plans for property acquisition and development, political lobbying, and a strategy that joined religious rhetoric to land investment. But the correspondence records negotiations, predictions, and efforts to enlist Gideon’s fortune; it does not document the completion of the Bethlehem exchange or establish the eventual scale of the company’s operations.

Significance

Tentpeg gives institutional form to the overlap between Sommo’s political activism and his ambitions in real estate. The company’s reported methods make that overlap particularly visible: a movement’s organizational capacity is redirected toward an investment business; religious investors and charitable status are enlisted in its financial structure; and public appeals to redemption accompany lobbying for land and permits. At the same time, the proposed purchase of land and the plan to induce Arab residents to leave expose the political stakes concealed by the language of ordinary property dealing. Tentpeg is thus significant not as a fully chronicled corporation with a known record of completed projects, but as the vehicle through which the novel connects capital, religious-nationalist mobilization, and contested territorial change.