Peace is Possible: Conversations with Arab and Israeli Leaders from 1988 to the Present

For more than fifteen years, entrepreneur Dan Abraham, founder and former chairman of Slim-Fast Foods, chose to utilize his considerable resources to facilitate Mideast peace. Together with Utah Congressman Wayne Owens, Abraham made more than sixty trips to the Middle East between 1988 and 2002, meeting with Arab leaders Hosni Mubarak, Hafez Assad, Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah of Jordan, Abu Mazen, and Yasser Arafat, and Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon.

Using his business experience with difficult negotiations, Abraham took an active behind-the-scenes role, setting up critical one-on-one meetings between key figures. He urged these leaders to articulate not what they wanted, but what they needed, to make peace, fostering significant advances in the peace process. Since Owens’ untimely death in 2002, Abraham has continued to arrange peacemaking meetings on his own.

Drawing from meeting transcripts, diary entries, and extensive handwritten notes, Abraham writes in the first person about these extraordinary, often private meetings, giving us rare “you are there” insight into historically significant events. In his pragmatic and hopeful book, he writes, “I am a great optimist, particularly about a region of the world that usually brings out people’s most pessimistic inclinations— Israel and its neighbors.”