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2	UPFRONT Ruben Navarrette, Jr. Columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. profiles a Mexican man of peace. read more...
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The Business of Peace

There are individuals who play the game above the rim. The game of life, that is. For these hyper-achievers, every goal they accomplish­—no matter how impressive—is a steppingstone to something bigger.

Introducing Daniel Lubetzky, a 38-year-old Mexican Jew who has already lived several lives and who is destined to live several more before he’s done with this world—a world that he is determined to change by resolving conflict, dispelling stereotypes, and bringing peace to a region that has known little of it.
His passion for bringing people together comes from his love of different cultures. Growing up in Mexico City, Lubetzky learned Hebrew, English, Spanish and Yiddish. When he moved to San Antonio as a teenager, he learned French. Years later, while working in Tokyo, he started the process of learning Japanese.
For Lubetzky, the fact that few Americans speak any language other than English is a tragedy and “one of our biggest weaknesses.”
“I’m not talking about nationalism, and respect, and pluralism,” he told me during an interview, “just about being competitive. To succeed in this world, you need to understand other cultures, and speaking another language is essential.”
So is being able to maintain what he calls “more than one identity”—the sense of where your ancestors come from and what their experiences may have been, in this country or another.
A successful businessman, Lubetzky attended Trinity University and Stanford Law School and initially thought he’d have a career working as a lawyer or consultant. But it was while he was traveling in Israel that he discovered a unique sun-dried tomato product that helped launch something called PeaceWorks, a gourmet and healthy food product company that channels some of its profits to fund peace efforts around the world.
Five years ago, Lubetzky —who is based in New York but joked to me that he lives on an airplane—went a step further and created the OneVoice Movement to, literally, give voice to moderates in the Middle East. The organization now boasts more than 500,000 members, roughly half of whom are Israeli and the other half Palestinian. In October, the group organized a pair of massive peace concerts in Israel and the West Bank, only to see them canceled amid threats of violence from extremists who, it would seem, have no interest in peace. Lubetzky insists the show will go on, and that the peace concerts have merely been postponed.
Some would call Lubetzky overly hopeful. Others use a word that he’s heard plenty of times before.
“We’re called naïve for the work we’re doing, and what we point out is that to be naïve is to think that two politicians can do this alone,” he said. “That’s what it means to be naïve.”
For Lubetzky, the only road to peace in the Middle East is through a two-state solution. There is no Plan B.
“Accepting a one-state solution that favors either Israelis or Palestinians is the equivalent of saying that we don’t want a solution, we’ll live in an eternal war,” he said. “Neither side is going to go away, you can’t just make the other side disappear. You have to understand that the only way out of this, unless you are prepared for a war to the finish, is to achieve a historic compromise.”
The most recent stab at compromise came in the form of the latest round of Mid-East peace talks in Annapolis, Maryland between representatives of the Israelis and the Palestinians. The event was optimistically billed as the best chance for peace in a generation.
Lubetzky remains hopeful that peace can be achieved, and that he can make a contribution. If he seems confident that he can bring together people of different cultures, blame it on his upbringing. Want to learn the art of reconciliation? Try growing up Jewish in a country that is almost entirely Catholic.
“In Mexico, I was Jewish because I was seen as Jewish,” he said. “I have a lot of friends who are Christian but they know me as their Jewish friend.”
In time, I suspect that people all over the world will know of Daniel Lubetzky as someone who used his gifts and opportunities to try to give others the chance to live in peace.

Ruben Navarette, Jr. is a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Tribune, a nationally syndicated columnist , a popular speaker and regular commentator for CNN.com .