Zakheim’s Tentpeg Land-Development Scheme

Manfred Zakheim’s Tentpeg Land-Development Scheme is a proposed alliance of property investment, political access, and religiously framed land acquisition. Zakheim tried to channel Michel Sommo’s organizing and lobbying into a business partnership with Zohar Etgar, while drawing on Alexander Gideon’s funds and property. The scheme’s significance lies both in its practical ambition and in the way it makes territorial expansion sound like investment, redemption, and orderly exchange; the correspondence documents a plan in motion, not a completed deal.

Political and Organizational Background

Michel Sommo’s political activity provided the network and public language on which the proposal depended. A private-investigation report describes his views as close to the political right and records intermittent membership in the Herut Bloc and the National Religious Party. In 1964, he helped organize Moledet, a group of North African intellectuals and students in Jerusalem; financial and ideological divisions brought it to an end the following year. On the eve of the Six-Day War, he campaigned against the government’s wait-and-see policy and for military initiative.

After the war, Sommo became active in what developed into the Greater Israel Movement, working on propaganda and demonstrations. He left in 1971 and subsequently made a public display of surrendering his National Religious Party membership card. In 1972, he helped found the Jewish Fellowship Movement, whose members were mostly young immigrants from America and Russia, and remained on its executive committee. After the Yom Kippur War, the organization demonstrated against troop disengagements in the Sinai and Golan Heights and pursued attempts to buy land illegally from Arabs near Bethlehem. The report says police interviewed Sommo twice in connection with the organization, but he was not charged; investigators found no evidence that he had personally taken part in violent lawbreaking. It also records his published advocacy of encouraging Arab residents to leave the country and the occupied territories peacefully through financial inducements. These details establish the political stakes behind the language of purchase and migration that recurs in the Tentpeg correspondence.

From Political Ally to Business Partner

Zakheim’s letters show him cultivating Sommo as both a useful intermediary and a prospective commercial associate. He congratulates Sommo on arranging a placement for Boaz Brandstetter at Kiryat Arba and says that the young man’s new police record has been closed through internal intervention. He then turns from that favor to the possibility of reciprocal cooperation, suggesting that Sommo’s contacts may be more valuable to him than Zakheim’s legal services would be to Sommo. The exchange makes personal assistance part of the groundwork for a business relationship.

Zakheim says that he will not formally manage Sommo’s private affairs or represent the Jewish Fellowship Movement, citing ethical and practical considerations, but offers advice without charge. He also arranges a meeting between Sommo and his son-in-law, Zohar Etgar, an industrialist who is likewise interested in land. Zakheim treats Etgar as a stabilizing partner: Sommo supplies political connections and a public-facing religious mission, while Etgar is positioned to bring business organization and financial oversight. In a later letter, Zakheim says he has tied Sommo to Etgar and redirected him, at least in part, from a more purely ideological course toward property development.

Tentpeg’s Organization and Methods

The Jewish Fellowship Movement becomes, in Zakheim’s account, a reconnaissance or security organization serving a new investment company called Tentpeg. Sommo and Etgar establish the company with a group of religious investors and discreet support from Paris. Zakheim says that Etgar controls the joint financial arrangements, while the investors handle what he ironically calls the ethical side of the enterprise. They have persuaded the revenue authorities to recognize the group as a charitable institution, described as an orphanage. The account thus places charitable status beside a commercial land venture without establishing that the business itself was an orphanage.

Sommo’s work for the venture is political brokerage. Zakheim describes him lobbying officials, cultivating party figures and senior administrators, seeking permits and certificates, and invoking religious language to build support for land investment south of Jerusalem. This activity links the company’s commercial aims to government access rather than presenting land development as a detached financial operation. Zakheim’s comparison of Sommo to a senior apostle makes the combination pointed: religious persuasion is not an alternative to the business plan but one of the instruments by which he expects it to advance.

The venture also depends on Alexander Gideon’s capital. Zakheim reports that Gideon’s hundred thousand is already being put to work and predicts that it will soon become two hundred thousand. He repeatedly asks Gideon to authorize the use of his money and to join the new investment project. These are Zakheim’s assertions and forecasts in letters seeking Gideon’s cooperation, not confirmation that the money doubled or that Gideon approved every proposed use.

The Bethlehem–Toulouse–Zikhron Proposal

Zakheim connects Tentpeg to a proposed property exchange involving land near Bethlehem, a religious order based in Toulouse, and Gideon’s property in Zikhron Yaakov. He says that a Paris-based financier, formerly connected to Sommo through the Betar youth movement and later successful in the women’s-clothing trade, financed Sommo’s trip to Paris and helped secure the restoration of his French nationality. A prior investigative report had noted the unusual speed of that restoration after Sommo’s brief Paris visit, while leaving the purpose of the trip unresolved. Zakheim’s later letter supplies his explanation: the passport was intended to provide a legal basis for a transaction in which the financier preferred not to appear formally.

According to Zakheim, Sommo negotiated with the Toulouse-based Christian religious order over its land west of Bethlehem in the West Bank. The order was reportedly unwilling to sell its land but might exchange it for a substantial building and adjoining land within the pre-1967 borders. Zakheim sees Gideon’s Zikhron Yaakov property as the other side of a possible three-way arrangement, describing a Bethlehem–Toulouse–Zikhron triangle. His plan depends on Gideon selling or exchanging a property he considers unproductive and expensive to maintain. But Gideon changes his mind about selling, and Zakheim acknowledges that his intentions are difficult to gauge. A buyer has made an offer of thirteen, with the unit unstated in the letter, and threatens to withdraw if no answer comes within a fortnight; this does not establish that a sale occurred.

The proposed acquisition also sits beside Sommo and his wife Ilana Brandstetter-Sommo’s separate request for financial help to buy and renovate Alkalai House in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Hebron. They describe it as a Jewish property taken during the 1929 Palestine riots and say they seek to repossess it by paying full market price rather than through violence. Their request identifies a specific property-recovery project; Zakheim’s Tentpeg letters extend the same broad language of land acquisition into a larger business and territorial strategy. The two undertakings should not be mistaken for a single completed transaction.

Zakheim’s Strategy and Its Limits

Zakheim’s own explanation makes clear that he sees the scheme as a way to redirect Gideon’s wealth. He fears that Gideon will spend it on messianic projects in the territories, while he hopes to use Sommo’s connections and Etgar’s commercial capacity to acquire land at low prices and develop it later. He anticipates political change and argues that land in the West Bank and the Sinai will become available for urban development. The proposal is therefore speculative as well as commercial: its expected value depends on future political conditions that Zakheim predicts but the letters do not show coming to pass.

The language of full payment, legal exchange, and charitable purpose coexists with a plan premised on moving Arab residents and acquiring territory. Zakheim’s account of Sommo’s organization includes a proposal to pay Arab landowners and provide one-way tickets, while his own letter questions the cost of compensating two million people and even imagines exchanging the coastal plain for the mountains. The correspondence exposes a tension between describing migration as voluntary and treating the relocation of a population as a manageable element of territorial planning.

Zakheim also presents himself as acting from loyalty as well as self-interest. He says he does not want to abandon Gideon to financial ruin or take part in exploiting orphans, and recalls his long friendship and business history with Gideon’s family. At the same time, he hopes the arrangement will make fortunes for himself and his associates. Tentpeg consequently remains a scheme of overlapping obligations: old friendship, financial stewardship, political partnership, religious justification, and anticipated profit. The evidence ends with persuasion still under way—Zakheim asking Gideon for permission to proceed—so the plan’s outcome remains unresolved.