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Losing streak By Gidi Weitz and Uri Blau Tags: Moshe Katsav, israel News The blue Buick stopped at the entrance to the cemetery on Mount Herzl and out stepped Reuven Gavrieli, a white skullcap on his bald pate and a cigar in his mouth. Next to him strode his younger brother Ezra (Shoni) Gavrieli, smoking a cigarette, and the brothers' attorney, Yoel Reshef. The trio had made the trip to Jerusalem for the annual memorial to their friend and ideological patron, Rehavam (Gandhi) Ze'evi, the former minister of tourism who was assassinated in 2001. Also at the cemetery was another friend, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who back in the 1970s accused Ze'evi of shadowy ties with organized crime, but now expressed wistful longing for "the lucid voice he represented." Reuven and Shoni Gavrieli go to the ceremony every year. They are among the founders (along with contractor Bezalel Mizrahi and businessman David Appel) of the Morag association, whose purpose is to commemorate Ze'evi's name and heritage. Shoni has personal ties to the Ze'evi family, his grandson is named Rehavam and he shares the political views of the man who advocated transfer for Israeli Arabs. Before the service on Mount Herzl, the Gavrieli brothers attended the memorial for Ze'evi held by the Knesset plenum. They watched from the visitors gallery as their friend, Tourism Minister Ruhama Avraham, lavished praise on the assassinated minister. After the Knesset ceremony, they chose to have lunch in a quiet corner of the employee cafeteria. They did not approach any MKs or shake any of their hands in the corridor. The only one who came over to exchange a few words with them was Silvan Shalom. Just five years ago, when Shoni's daughter Inbal Gavrieli became a Likud MK, the brothers' visits to the Knesset were always an occasion for pride, congratulations and success on a scale far beyond what most poor families from south Tel Aviv ever experience. This is the story in a nutshell: The Gavrieli family - considered for the past two decades to be one of the country's most influential clans, wielding power in the Likud Central Committee and enjoying exceptionally good ties with the top echelons of government and business throughout Israel and in Europe, too - is now out of the game. Even their close friends, Ehud Olmert and Moshe Katsav, won't find it easy to help. Advertisement Awkward moment On February 7, 2006, about two months before elections for the Knesset, while the Gavrieli brothers were busy with the Likud primaries, investigators from the Tel Aviv police central unit (known by the Hebrew acronym Yamar) knocked on the doors of their homes and placed them under arrest. When the detectives arrived at Shoni Gavrieli's home in Holon brandishing a search warrant, his daughter Inbal was there. The furious MK showed the police officers her Knesset ID, claimed that she lived in the apartment and demanded that they respect her immunity. The stunned officers left the place immediately, but this awkward moment - the daughter, in pajamas, exploiting the law in order to thwart its enforcers - signified the start of the downturn in the family's fortunes. It certainly spelled the end of Inbal Gavrieli's political career: A month after the arrest, elections were held for the Likud Knesset list and Gavrieli, who was the surprise of the previous round, came in 45th, without any realistic expectation of reaching the Knesset. Today, with new elections around the corner, there is no sign of a comeback in the making; nor are the other family members making appearances at the gatherings held by party politicians. "I'm done with politics, it really hurt my business," said Reuven Gavrieli a few months ago in a personal conversation. "He's not the same Reuven anymore," says his good friend, Ramle mayor Yoel Lavi. "Today he's not close to any political party." The Gavrielis have more pressing concerns at the moment. A few weeks ago, the State Prosecutor's Office announced that it plans to file a serious indictment against Reuven and Shoni, charging them with running an illegal Internet gambling network in Israel between 2000 and 2002. The covert investigation into the brothers began in 2004, after the State Prosecutor issued an indictment against four residents of Belarus, alleging that they attempted to assassinate Shoni in connection with rivalries in the illegal Internet gambling market. The Belorussians were accused of having attached a bomb to Gavrieli's Mercedes that fell off the car when he drove into the parking garage of the Azrieli Mall on his way to a meeting with crime kingpin Grigori Lerner and MK Sofa Landver. Several weeks ago, district court judge Saviona Roth-Levy acquitted the Belorussians due to insufficient evidence. But the extensive material collected in the course of the investigation, some of which was revealed in court in Tel Aviv, raised the suspicion that the brothers ran an illegal gambling operation throughout the country, and police began investigating. Now the two are expected to face charges of money laundering, tax evasion (to the tune of millions of shekels) and theft (of millions more). Another prospective defendant in the case is Shlomi Gavrieli, Shoni's eldest son, who is suspected of taking part in running the operation (Reuven also has a son named Shlomi, a familiar figure on the Tel Aviv nightlife scene). Shlomi left Israel a few months ago and now lives in Florida. People close to the case say that he does not intend to return for a preliminary hearing or trial. His father will not elaborate on the subject, except to say, "I don't think it's right to say he'll never come back again." Has he begun to establish a new life there? "Could be, but as far as the country is concerned, the education they got at home - We will remain here even if we're the last ones left. We're a family descended from Irgun [a pre-state Jewish underground militia] fighters." A few months after the start of the investigation, Shlomi divorced his wife, Limor, the mother of his three children, who worked as a senior secretary in Net Market, a company owned by Shlomi and his partners. According to the police investigation, this was the firm that marketed the outlawed program to the various gambling centers. Limor, 35, bore a great deal of responsibility for the enterprise; she handled various financial matters and knew the operation inside out. She cooperated with the police when questioned. "Shlomi got divorced because of these things," says Shoni. "They drove him mad, they interrogated his wife. Afterward, people complained, 'Why did she say such-and-such?' They interrogated her, they took her car. They acted like they'd just caught some killers red-handed." So the police are really to blame for the conflict between them - because she talked to them and then people thought she spilled the beans? Gavrieli: "Why did she talk to them at all? Why did she go to talk to them? It's not a question of 'Why did you tell them this or that?' Why did she need to cooperate with them at all?" Gavrieli adds that he himself had cooperated with the police, but then they leaked details from his investigation, so he preferred to keep quiet. Last Thursday afternoon, in the cafeteria of the College of Administration in Rishon Letzion, Limor Gavrieli looked like just another one of the many students enjoying the autumn sun. Ironically, she recently completed a course of study in tax consulting and is currently seeking a place to start her internship. She was lugging bags full of study materials, answering a continual stream of phone calls on her two cell phones and smoking nonstop. Her eldest son, 9, is named Shoni. His brother is called Rehavam. The youngest child is a daughter, Noa. The four of them now live in a rented apartment in Rishon Letzion. "When I started going to school," she says with a smile, "my professor laughed and asked if I was studying this in order 'to show' the police." Limor worked together with Shlomi on the family's Internet gambling project. "I was the head secretary and he was the marketing guy who was supposed to distribute it abroad, too." She is surprised to hear that some in the family connect her police interrogation to the divorce. The separation, she stresses, occurred prior to her arrest. "I was interrogated twice. The first arrest [Gavrieli was released to house arrest] was a few days after I got up from sitting shiva for my father, so I was not in a good state of mind. Besides that time, I was questioned again about seven or eight months later. Shoni and I have a very good relationship. He's a warm and loving person and I never received instructions from him to 'Say this or say that.' Even now, three years after the investigation, we don't talk about it. In the family, there's a total separation between life and business, and family ties come first." She has no hesitation revealing that the relentless investigations and the fact that neither she nor her husband were able to obtain an Israel police certificate affirming that they had no criminal record (teudat yosher), which they needed for different jobs, caused financial problems that led to problems in the marriage. "The investigation introduced a lot of tension and a big part of the crisis in my marriage had to do with financial issues. Because the investigation was pending for a year and a half, I couldn't find work. And Shlomi, too, who studied construction engineering, couldn't get a job with the big construction companies. This investigation took its toll." Family relations weren't the only thing to suffer. Several months after the highly publicized arrest, Reuven moved out of the huge villa in Herzliya Pituah and into a much more modest apartment in Holon. The opulent poolside parties became a thing of the past. "Where he lives now is a two-story, four-family building," Lavi reports. "You have no idea how badly hurt Reuven is. He lost money. Once, he used to handle sums that would fill a whole bank, but that's over. He's done with the whole gambling business, too." Have the politicians and other famous types who used to hang out at his villa deserted him, too? Lavi: "Unfortunately, they turned out to be self-interested. He's an amazing guy and a good friend. When you need Reuven, he's always right there for you." When friends of the Gavrielis are asked to put their finger on the turning point in the family's fortunes, there is general agreement: In retrospect, having Inbal Gavrieli, who was born in 1975, run for the previous Knesset in 2003 was a fatal mistake. "Of course, they regret having Inbal run for political office," says old family friend Bezalel Mizrahi. "It caused them all sorts of trouble everywhere. Whatever they tried to do, it was a problem. It made them a target." Shoni Gavrieli agrees. The spotlights that were turned on the family following his daughter's entry into the Knesset and the investigation that came later dealt them a grave blow. "It really screwed us up. I can show you every business that I have and what a number it did on our bank statements. We were destroyed. I have no doubt that Reuven and I are being wiretapped. It's interesting that every time we're about to close a deal with someone, suddenly there's a report in the paper or on television and people get cold feet and it all goes down the drain. Anyone who has an open case with the money laundering unit - the banks can't work with him, apart from a checking account. I say this because I've had projects that involved bank loans and in the end, the other partners were told: 'If Shoni remains in the company, you can't receive the loan.' They even put it in writing." Even the family banquet hall, the Ariana Club in Jaffa, which has hosted numerous gatherings for senior politicians, is dying. "It's on the verge of closing down now. It's completely falling apart," says Shoni. "They'd ask people why they don't do an event there and they'd say: 'Don't quote me, but what are we supposed to do? Come there with bulletproof vests on?' That's how bad it's gotten." Magic Reuven Reuven and Shoni grew up in the Shabazi neighborhood of Tel Aviv. Their father, Shlomo, immigrated to Israel from Iraq, while their mother Ahuva's family has been in the country for eight generations. The impoverished family of 11 children held firm right-wing political views. "My mother's brother fell in the Irgun, and my father's brother was put in prison for 20 years by the British," Reuven once said in describing his ideological roots. "And when Begin used to come to Tel Aviv, my grandmother would serve him tea." The police are quite familiar with the Gavrieli name. Two other brothers in the family, Haim and Aryeh, were convicted in the late 1980s of serious drug offenses and did time in prison. Today Aryeh runs a casino in Prague and is always surrounded by bodyguards. When suspicions arose of plots on his life, Shoni Gavrieli was questioned by the police and various documents, including telephone records, were taken from his office. The secret and magic of the Gavrieli's family's power is all contained therein: Shoni's telephone book had the numbers of Moshe Katsav, Roni Bar-On, Ruhama Avraham and Palmah Ze'evi (son of Rehavam), as well as those of Yaakov Alperon, Ofer Maximov and Shlomo (Sheli) Narkis. In transcripts of his interrogations that were submitted in court, Shoni admitted that he was the one who put together the partnership in the Internet gambling enterprise with crime boss Meir Abergil. He also confirmed that he was involved with Yaakov Alperon in trade in heating oil, and that he was well-acquainted with Ze'ev Rosenstein, now serving a lengthy prison term for drug trafficking. Reuven's connections with the underworld are less extensive than his brother's. He was a business partner of the late crime boss Yehezkel Aslan (gunned down in 1993), but he always preferred to spend his time at glamorous parties rather than with politicians and business people. Yoel Lavi: "Shoni and Reuven are completely different types of people. Reuven would never dare to do what Shoni does. Without a doubt, friendship is more important to Reuven than money. Shoni is much more introverted and aloof. If you say something hurtful to Reuven, he'll just smile and walk away. Shoni will always confront you." Reuven Gavrieli got his start in business at Lavi Metalworks. "He did well as a metalworker, and afterward he started working on open shelters for tanks, and larger shelters, for the Karni Terminal, for instance," Lavi says. He made his money in the mid-'80s when, together with his friend Motti Primor, he opened a casino in Antalya, Turkey - which was basically designed for Israelis who like to vacation there and are unable to gamble in Israel. Then came three more casinos in Istanbul, and later a few more in Eastern Europe. Lavi: "When he went into the casino business, the important thing he said was: 'If the basic idea is that a person is going to sit for hours by the roulette wheel, let's give him something to eat and drink.' This brought the best kind of people into his casino. He flew gamblers from Israel to Turkey. He told me he flew in 20,000 people each month." The casino business made tens of millions of shekels and turned Gavrieli into a local tycoon. The businesses were also run in a special way, as can be seen from the ruling handed down in Israel in 2006 regarding a dispute between two Israeli businessmen over a few percentages at the Paris Casino in downtown Bucharest, Romania. At the trial, the registered owners of the casino testified that the real boss was Reuven Gavrieli, even though he was not officially listed as an owner. The ruling also revealed that, in 2001, the Bucharest police raided the casino and confiscated a laptop computer. From the material stored on the computer, it was learned that the casino operators concealed about $30 million in income in order to evade paying taxes on it. The casino was shut down, but reopened not long afterward under a new name - Las Vegas. In those years, the Gavrielis became big players on the social scene and lots of people danced the nights away at the villa in Herzliya Pituah. A report by Rino Tzror on Channel 10 showed a huge party organized by Reuven's nightlife-loving son Shlomi at the Herzliya villa. Tales of a coat belonging to Reuven that was sent for dry cleaning with large wads of dollars in the pockets were whispered about among his friends. His power within the Likud was also substantial, and numerous institutions and organizations benefited from his and his brother's kindnesses. "He's a gentleman and people loved him. When he was doing well, he was the most generous guy in the world," says Lavi. Shoni remained more in the shadows during those years. Aside from some minor reports about him being questioned under caution on suspicion of operating illegal sports gambling, an investigation that led nowhere, Shoni managed to maintain a media silence even though his name appeared in police intelligence reports. He ran the Ariana Club, and had a hand in real estate deals and the fuel trade. Later, he joined the Moledet party, a result of the close relationship he developed with party chairman Rehavam Ze'evi. Most of the government connections came through Reuven. Besides Ehud Olmert, his gallery of friends includes Moshe Katsav, Ruhama Avraham, Tzachi Hanegbi, Omri Sharon, Avraham Hirschson, Avigdor Lieberman and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer. Former MK Avi Yehezkel and others stayed at Gavrieli's casino hotels in Turkey and received limousine service and meals; Raanan Cohen and Avigdor Kahalani sailed with Gavrieli on the gambling ship "Magic 1." Kahalani even wrote a song about him (Kahalani: "During my trial, he was right by my side and not for any ulterior purpose. I was no longer a minister then. I wrote a song about him called 'Magic Reuven' and also wrote some beautiful songs for his wife. What was done to him left him very hurt"). Minister Gideon Ezra was and remains a good friend (Ezra: "He certainly helped me and welcomed me very nicely in the Likud ... As Minister of Internal Security you don't take an interest in or take part in any investigation. You are completely disconnected from the subject of investigations and I never had a dilemma about this"). Kahalani maintains that Gavrieli never asked him for anything. Other politicians, though, were asked to help out: Lieberman promoted a leasing agreement for Gavrieli's fish farm in the Negev; Avraham did her best to help out with the farm's problems with the Mekorot water company; Ezra assisted Gavrieli in the mediation that took place regarding the casino in Jericho; Yehezkel and Cohen tried to push for the construction of a casino in Israel; Olmert did his bit to help Gavrieli's business in Georgia. The list goes on, and when it reaches former president Moshe Katsav, it goes beyond mere help. Katsav is a partner According to Reuven Gavrieli, Moshe Katsav was his best friend in politics. The two met in the early 1990s through the party, when Katsav asked Gavrieli if he could find jobs in his businesses for Likud people who had lost their jobs as a result of the party's poor showing in the elections. "The connection between us was formed when I saw that Gavrieli was supplying hot meals to soup kitchens," Katsav said in the past when he reported on his close relationship with the gambling titan. "I have respect and admiration for him. His owning a casino in Turkey doesn't make him unacceptable. Ted Arison also had a casino on his ships and I had a connection with him, too, and no one wrote about that." In 1997, Gavrieli sought to be appointed as Israeli Consul in Georgia, but Foreign Ministry bureaucrats objected because of Gavrieli's gambling concerns in Turkey at the time, and because of the fact that, close to the time of the appointment, his local partner in the roulette business was murdered in Turkey. Gavrieli appealed to Katsav and David Appel for assistance; they, in turn, approached Foreign Minister David Levy and the coveted appointment was approved. "Yes, I asked them to talk with David Levy," Gavrieli acknowledges. "Why did they hold up the paperwork for a year? You know what it is to hold on to the paperwork for a whole year and not to confirm an appointment? There was corruption here." After Katsav was elected president, the warm relationship between him and the Gavrielis continued. In 2001, Katsav went on an official visit to Georgia, where Gavrieli had a large variety of business concerns, including a winery and a mineral water plant. Gavrieli, as Yedioth Ahronoth writer Shosh Mula reported, even participated in a meeting between Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze and Katsav. "When Gavrieli ran into problems at one point with the Georgian bureaucracy regarding his mineral water plant, he ran to his good politician friends, Olmert and Katsav, to see what they could do," says someone who knows Gavrieli well. "In general, Reuven and Shoni boasted of their connections with Katsav and of the assistance he provided them when they needed it." Channel 2 reporter Guy Peleg recently revealed that, in a search conducted of Gavrieli's office as part of the police investigation against him, amnesty applications meant for the president were found. But even given this background, it's still surprising to discover that Katsav and his family were also business partners of Gavrieli, as a Haaretz investigation now reveals. Amid their varied business concerns, the Gavrieli brothers are partners in several investment and construction companies that control hundreds of dunams throughout the country. This business is built on taking a gamble: Over the years, the companies owned by the brothers have acquired much land, agricultural for the most part, at attractive prices, in the hope that one day it will be re-zoned for construction and thus worth a lot of money. Not long ago, when employees of the organizations working to advance the planning process for the Nahal Be'er Sheva park were preparing the list of the landowners affected by the plan, they discovered that dozens of dunams bordering the park are owned by a real estate company called Gavrieli E. Properties and Investments, which belongs to brothers Reuven and Ezra (Shoni) Gavrieli. Along with the Gavrieli brothers, it seems, some of their close associates are also owners of those plots of land, including businessman Eli Hakak, who used to fly Israeli gamblers to Reuven's casinos in Turkey and also ran an Internet gambling cafe near Hamasger Street in Tel Aviv; Likud Central Committee member Rami Hadad; David Shahrabani, a gray market lender with a substantial criminal past. But the most intriguing names on the list of the Gavrieli brothers' partners in the land holdings are those of former president Katsav and his wife, Gila, who according to the Tabu land registry, are owners of several dunams in Block No. 100400. The Katsavs were listed in the Tabu as owners of the land in May 2001, while Katsav was serving as president and long before charges of sexual harassment against him were made public. Within the framework of the deal to purchase the land, which preceded its registration in the Tabu by a number of years, Shoni Gavrieli reported that his and Reuven's company had purchased 57 dunams near Be'er Sheva, "part for [the company] and part in trust for Gila Katsav and Moshe Katsav from Kiryat Malakhi. The company acquired for the two of them together three unspecified dunams of property." The partnership between the families doesn't end there. One area in which land has been especially hot in recent years is Rehovot and its surroundings, following the change in designation of much of the land there for residential purposes. On May 8, 2001, the day before the lands in the south were registered in the name of Moshe and Gila Katsav, another interesting thing happened: The couple's children - Yisrael, then 21, and Boaz, then a soldier doing his compulsory service - were registered as owners of land within the jurisdiction of the Givat Brenner regional council. The land in which Yisrael and Boaz are partners, to the northeast of the kibbutz, covers 20 dunams and is largely held by a private company called A.R.E.S. Properties and Investments, whose owners - you guessed it - are the Gavrieli brothers, along with businessman and Likud Central Committee member Aryeh Shasha, who is close to Katsav. Is it proper for the president of the State of Israel and his family members to be partners in land deals of the Gavrieli brothers? In response (see box), Katsav called it a "matter of privacy" and noted that he paid for the land. In 2000, A.R.E.S. submitted to the local planning and building committee a detailed plan aimed at getting the designation of the land near Givat Brenner changed from agricultural to residential, to be followed by the construction of nearly 500 detached, country-style housing units. The committee rejected the plan. Its engineer, Anna German, said this week that at this stage there are no plans to rezone the agricultural land, but that "there's a construction boom in the region and everything is flexible." An incriminating disc The indictment on the Internet gambling affair, which will apparently be filed in court in early 2009 after the hearings are concluded, could spell the end of Shoni and Reuven Gavrielis' business career, and even send the two, for the first time ever, to prison. How did these brothers who are so careful come to be facing such a serious indictment? It's all because of one little disc-on-key. Early one morning in spring 2004, police officers from the Tel Aviv central unit knocked on the door of Yoram Zarfati's home in Jaffa. Zarfati is the son of Mordechai Zarfati, the trucking company owner known as an underworld mediator and was close to leaders of Mapai, the precursor of the Labor Party. The search of Zarfati's home turned up the most significant evidence in the case against the Gavrielis: In one room was hidden a disc-on-key containing a vast amount of information about the illegal gambling ring and the way in which, it's suspected, millions of shekels were laundered through it. The discovery of the disc-on-key that contained thousands of documents made Zarfati extremely anxious. "They'll hurt me," he moaned to his friends. A little over a year ago, when Zarfati flew to Greece, he was arrested there in the airport. The Greek police informed him that Polish authorities were requesting his extradition. He is currently serving time in Poland for defrauding the Polish telephone company. Zarfati met the Gavrieli brothers through his father. In his police interrogation, he said that he worked together with Reuven Gavrieli in Georgia on a deal to issue driving and vehicle licenses. "Reuven was the honorary consul of Georgia ... Through his ties, we got the project," he said. Gavrieli went into business in Georgia just as he was getting out of the Turkish market, after gambling was outlawed in the country. But Gavrieli still had the gambling bug. In 1998, he and a partner named Motti Menashe, a former star in the stock market, founded a company whose aim was to develop a gambling site on the Internet. When the site was launched, Shoni Gavrieli started Net Market, with the aim of marketing the gambling program to different Internet cafes in Israel. Shoni's partner in the company was Zarfati. Before his arrest, Zarfati had testified in district court in the case against the Belorussians, and revealed the identity of the third partner in the firm: "In the company there were three partners. There was Shoni, and myself - I was the one responsible for the technological side and the technical connection with the proprietors of the site - and the third party was actually Meir Abergil." Abergil is currently under arrest and awaiting a decision on his extradition to the United States, where he is wanted in connection with some serious drug offenses. The Internet project operated in dozens of locations throughout the country in Internet cafes or small kiosk stands. Its popularity derived, in part, from the fact that, at the time, not everyone had an Internet connection at home, as is more the case today. In some instances, these locations were run by local crime organizations. Yaakov Alperon was a partner in one such cafe in Kfar Sava, and so was the criminal Rafi Ohana. The method was simple: The customer would hand the cash to the cafe owner; the latter would enter a code on the computer with the requested amount of the bet and the customer would then sit down at the computer to gamble with his money. When he lost it all, as expected, the customer would put in more and more cash, and when his cash ran out, he would receive credit from the place. There was no fear of lost debts. The tens of millions of shekels received from the gamblers did not, so the police suspect, go into the bank accounts that were set up for the purpose of establishing the operation, but instead were concealed and laundered. People running the operation cashed the gamblers' checks with leaders of the gray market in the underworld - criminals Meir Hasson, Yaakov Jerbi and Benny Ravizada. Other fat checks, as can be seen from the list of possible charges sent to the attorneys of Meir Abergil and Shoni Gavrieli by Nadav Asahel of the State Prosecutor's Office, were also transferred to a company owned by brothers Danny and Avi Karadi, who, a few years later were blown up in their car in Netanya. Avi died and his brother was seriously injured. The document also indicates that the Gavrieli brothers are suspected of stealing millions from one of the companies they established for the purpose of the business project, and of defrauding the Haifa district court when they requested that it issue an order suspending legal procedures against the company, while aware that it was operating an illegal business. In spring 2002, the Internet business was stopped completely. The operation had brought in tens of millions of shekels, but the expenses were also significant and the losses were growing. "Reuven invested NIS 38 million, which he lost," says Bezalel Mizrahi. "A great injustice is being done to Reuven. They're being persecuted and harassed, and I know very well that Reuven has nothing to do with this story and that he's innocent. He had stocks in the company and he invested a fortune to create a software program for gambling, and it failed. He brought in a lot of technicians to create the program and invested NIS 600,000-700,000 each month in salaries. It went on like this for two years and then it failed." Shoni Gavrieli: "I think this case is going to have a very big funeral where the dead body is a little mouse. What's the big deal here? All they're really alleging is a tax offense and they want to use us to create a precedent. I don't think anything's going to come out of it." Bookmark to del.icio.us   A ringing endorsement Jimmy Carter says Obama will waste no time in pursuing Middle East peace. Peres' olive branch Israel's president says the Arab peace plan is an opening for progress.

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