CL
at
"" '
*36 month closed end lease
based on approved credit, plus
tax, title & plates.Lease allows
12,000 miles per year, 150
excess. 1st mo.pymt., ref. sec.
dep. equal to monthly pymt,
rounded to next S25 increment.
S400 acq. fee, S1700 cap cost
reduction. Lessee resp. for
excess wear and tear. Total of
pymts. is pymt. x term. Lessee
has option to purchase at a
price to be determined at lease
inception.
The new 10 shekel coins.
New Middle East
Still On Drawing Board
Oldsmobile Demand Better
On the eve of its second business summit with Arab
states, Israel is satisfied to bolster what it already
has.
Telegraph • At The Tel-12 Mall • Southfield
1-800-354-5558
810-354-3300
INA FRIEDMAN ISRAEL CORRESPONDENT
A
s Israel's business com-
munity prepares for a ma-
jor conference with the
Arab world — the Amman
Economic Conference at the end
of the month — it is trying to fig-
ure out why the high hopes of last
year's Casablanca Conference
have met a sad fate.
A year after that event in Mo-
rocco, for which government and
business leaders from through-
out the region gathered to begin
building the "New Middle East,"
little has come to fruition.
Joint projects on infrastructure
— whether roads and rails, dams
and canals, or transport, energy
and water — are still in the
dream stage. A surge of com-
merce between Israel and the
Gulf States remains as elusive as
ever. Even trade with Jordan —
considered the most amiable of
Israel's neighbors — remains
more fantasy than fact.
"For the time being," summed
up David Lipkin in a special
Ma'ariv supplement on the state
of commerce with Jordan, "every-
thing is talk ... No goods are pass-
ing between the [two] countries;
no joint ventures have reached
the implementation phase, and
a trade treaty has yet to be
signed."
Moreover, the Amman Con-
ference participants are being
reminded that the swarm of
Israeli businessmen in Casa-
blanca all but overwhelmed their
Arab counterparts, daunting
more than encouraging potential
partners.
With "hegemony" (code for the
suspicion that Israel's true aim
You won't
believe the
possibilities for
owning your
own home in
Oak Park and
Southfield
through the
Neighborhood
Project.
Sponsored by
the Jewish
Federation
of Metropolitan
Detroit
Advertising in The Jewish News Gets Results
Place Your Ad Today, Call 354-6060
41•111M
■
is to dominate the Middle East
economically) the unfortunate
buzz word in Casablanca, Israelis
are being cautioned to "cool it" in
Amman.
Still, dashed dreams and
skewed expectations are only half
the story. For if the hopes of a
prompt burst of business with the
Arab states have been consid-
erably tempered, another old
dream is materializing.
Israel's emerging market po-
tential is finally being recognized
by serious foreign investors and
is attracting capital at an un-
precedented rate. "We're seeing
a lot of new investors who return
here repeatedly to check things
out," says Dr. Nadine Baudot-
Trajtenberg, a senior economist
at Bank Hapoalim in Tel Aviv.
During the past year, in fact,
the result of these visits has been
something of a shopping spree by
foreign businessmen and com-
panies.
Some of the deals have been
high-profile purchases, such as
the 10 percent of Bezek (Israel's
government-owned phone mo-
nopoly) bought by Britain's Cable
and Wireless.
Others are more modest or still
in the works. Nestles, for exam-
ple, is looking to purchase a
chunk of Osem, one of Israel's
largest packaged-food producers.
Johnson & Johnson recently
zeroed in on Medinol, a small
company built around the man-
ufacture of a tiny spring used in
bypass operations (which was
patented by a new immigrant
from Russia), and bought it for a
cool $360 million.