What one powerful clothing chain can tell you about world peace.
I had never heard of Zara until I came to Israel, though the company currently has 102 stores in the US. Its owner, Amancio Ortega, has a net worth of over $140 billion and is currently listed as the tenth richest person in the world. Just as MySpace and Facebook are in the same internet space but cannot be compared ($1.44 trillion Facebook market cap versus MySpace sold in 2011 for $35 million), there are plenty of other clothing stores—but few that seem to connect with the consumer like Zara. When Princess Catherine Wales wears one of their items, it sells out online in the space of a few minutes.
Zara has a once-a-year sale in Israel. It was announced for both online and store purchases. My wife tried to buy items online but, due to the overwhelming demand, could not finish her purchase. So we went to their store in the Mamilla Mall. The mall itself is an interesting piece of history. It stood as No-Man’s-Land between the Jordanian Old City of Jerusalem and Israeli New Jerusalem. For years after Israel’s 1967 victory over Jordan, Israel didn’t really know what to do with the land. On the one side were the venerable walls of the ancient city, and on the other were the newer buildings pocked by years of Jordanian firing on the fledgling state of Israel. When I first walked through the area in 1989, it was a bunch of blue colored empty stalls that had not seen business in over two decades. In the 1990s, Israel decided that the time had come to develop the area. Today, it is a high-end mall with restaurants and hotels. It’s about as close as one can get to a US mall in Jerusalem with Tommy, Ralph, Adidas, Nike, and many Israeli brands. We went to Zara, and it looked like the McCallister home in the first Home Alone. People were running in every direction with goods in their hands. The line for the changing rooms was half a mile long. Fortunately, they had sold all of their discounted shirts, so a short table served as a temporary bench for husbands as their wives looked for bargains. As I had time on my hands, I could look around. Both store employees and customers represented every stripe of Israeli society: Jews, Arabs (both Christians and Muslims), young, old, orthodox, non-religious, ultra-orthodox, Israeli and tourists. It was quite a sight.
Before Richard Nixon made his famous trip to China, there was “ping-pong diplomacy”. The Chinese invited the Americans to play, and the games were considered a first for renewed relations between the countries. And while we look to the UN and official bodies for routes to peace, international commerce is often the bellwether as to the good relations between peoples. Seeing so many people trying to find clothes that fit was in some ways exhilarating. Jews and Arabs mingled and often helped one another to find the bargain of the century. I did not see any Jew or Arab refuse the aid of a store clerk because of his or her background. While the world makes endless noise about Israel being a racist apartheid state, it turns out that borders have consequences. Whereas Palestinian bloodlust has more or less shut down their access to the Israeli job market, Arabs living in Israel have full access to work opportunities as well as shopping options. There are many job sectors in Israel where Arabs are highly represented, including doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. In order to justify their hatred of Jews and Israel, the talking heads scream about a racist Israel that does not exist.
The mall itself can often be pricey. While Zara was packed and it seemed that everyone walking between stores had a shopping bag with the store’s name on it, other stores had virtually no one shopping. We went into Ralph Lauren, and a fairly simple men’s white dress shirt was listed for 664 shekels, which is over $220. I was told in the past that Mamilla was particularly popular with East Jerusalem Arabs who could not get visas to the US: they at least had access to American styles if they could not fly to New York and beyond. I once interviewed the son of the sitting Palestinian prime minister for his application to Harvard. I suggested that we meet at a cafe in the new city, but he didn’t sound too thrilled; when I mentioned Mamilla, he agreed immediately.
The success of Mamilla reveals a fact that leaders in the West simply refuse to accept. When Israel controls a piece of land, everyone has access to it. The Old City is filled with churches and, of course, two very famous mosques sitting directly on the Temple Mount. The Temple Mount is accepted in Jewish tradition as the site of the two Temples that stood for in excess of 800 years. Israel makes no effort to reclaim the land for Jewish use, and until recently, access to the location for Jews was significantly limited. Except during extreme security situations, Muslims can go to pray at the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aqsa mosques. When Jews want to go to the burial site of Joseph, the famous son of Jacob who was sold by his brothers to Egypt, an IDF convoy must coordinate the visit and bring the Jews in and escort them out of the Nablus area. Muslims and Christians have full rights in Israel and are not coerced into becoming Jews. In land controlled by Arabs in 1948, Jews were removed, and Jewish institutions were destroyed. Moshe Safdie designed the Porat Yosef Yeshiva in the Old City, when the original building was blown up by the Jordanians after 1948. The same Jordanians used Jewish headstones to pave a road. Where Israel rules, everyone benefits; where Arabs rule, Jews are excluded or have highly limited access. Jew haters in the West, both left and right, don’t see any discrepancy and are fine with Jews being excluded from Arab spaces.
About a decade ago, there were discussions about what a final peace might look like. A somewhat hawkish politician made a suggestion. As the Palestinians insist that “Palestine” must be absolutely Judenrein, meaning "free of Jews" (though Jews living in the “territories” offered to take Palestinian citizenship), he suggested population swaps: we’ll incorporate some of the Jewish towns over the 1948 armistice line and the new Palestinian state can take some Israeli-Arab towns. This put the Israeli Arab population in a bit of a pickle. They never praise Israel or speak highly of Jews. On the other hand, they know that their lives are far better living in Israel than they would be in a Palestinian state. They denounced the plan without specifically praising their lives in Israel, where they can go to university and become doctors, professors, and judges. Just as in Korea and East/West Germany, the Israeli Arabs and Palestinians are essentially the same people separated by borders and ideology. Look at the differences between North and South Korea and then appreciate that until 80 years ago, it was all just one land. Israeli Arabs can be found in every shop in Mamilla, both as employees and customers. Palestinians had access to Israel and then murdered 1,200 people, so they have plenty of time on their hands.
Zara is showing the world what can be, far more than the fat and lazy bureaucrats of the UN or the professionally clueless “leaders” of the EU. Zara doesn’t waste its time with slogans or politics and simply offers good clothes at great prices in size, shape, and type that appeal to everyone from a Jewish Israeli teenager to a religious Muslim grandmother.