The Influencer
Haim Saban. - Photograph by Martin Schoeller.
..........Saban is not given to modest ambitions. Sixty-five years old, with a broad, dynamic countenance and slicked-down wavy black hair, he is known in Los Angeles as the man who brought the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers from Japan to America; the chairman and part owner of Univision, the nation’s leading Spanish-language media company; a staunch supporter of Israel (he has dual citizenship); and one of the largest individual donors to the Democratic Party.
“Haim is a force of nature,” his friend Barry Meyer, the chairman and C.E.O. of Warner Bros., said...... when Rupert Murdoch and Saban sold their joint venture, Fox Family Worldwide, to Michael Eisner, the C.E.O. of Disney: Saban made one and a half billion dollars. It was—and still is, he points out—the biggest cash transaction by an individual in the history of Hollywood. In March, Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.3 billion.
......Although Saban has lived in the United States for nearly thirty years, he remains deeply connected to Israel......
He remains keenly interested in the world of business, but he is most proud of his role as political power broker. His greatest concern, he says, is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship.
At a conference last fall in Israel, Saban described his formula. His “three ways to be influential in American politics,” he said, were: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets. In 2002, he contributed seven million dollars toward the cost of a new building for the Democratic National Committee—one of the largest known donations ever made to an American political party. That year, he also founded the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. He considered buying The New Republic, but decided it wasn’t for him. He also tried to buy Time and Newsweek, but neither was available. He and his private-equity partners acquired Univision in 2007, and he has made repeated bids for the Los Angeles Times.
...By far his most important relationship is with Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2002, Saban donated five million dollars to Bill Clinton’s Presidential library, and he has given more than five million dollars to the Clinton Foundation. In February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a major policy address at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, co-sponsored by the Saban Center. And last November Bill Clinton was a featured speaker at the Saban Forum, an annual conference attended by many high-level Israeli and U.S. government officials, which was held in Jerusalem. Ynon Kreiz, an Israeli who was the chairman and chief executive of a Saban company and Saban’s closest associate for many years, attended the conference, and when I commented that his former boss appeared to be positively smitten with Bill Clinton, Kreiz replied, grinning broadly, “No! No! I remember once Haim was talking to me on the phone, and he said in Hebrew, without changing his tone so Clinton would have no idea he was speaking about him, ‘The President of the United States, wearing his boxers, is coming down the stairs, and I am going to have to stop talking and go have breakfast with him.’ ”
...... Saban’s eagerness to minimize his taxes provided an abundance of the confounding problems Krane loved. In one major project, in 1988, Krane set up a company in the Netherlands Antilles as a tax haven, to handle all of Saban’s foreign distribution of programming. As a result, Saban paid nothing in taxes on his profits in any foreign country. Krane estimated that over the years this strategy had saved Saban at least a hundred million dollars.
......Although Saban has lived in the United States for nearly thirty years, he remains deeply connected to Israel......
He remains keenly interested in the world of business, but he is most proud of his role as political power broker. His greatest concern, he says, is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship.
At a conference last fall in Israel, Saban described his formula. His “three ways to be influential in American politics,” he said, were: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets. In 2002, he contributed seven million dollars toward the cost of a new building for the Democratic National Committee—one of the largest known donations ever made to an American political party. That year, he also founded the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. He considered buying The New Republic, but decided it wasn’t for him. He also tried to buy Time and Newsweek, but neither was available. He and his private-equity partners acquired Univision in 2007, and he has made repeated bids for the Los Angeles Times.
...By far his most important relationship is with Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2002, Saban donated five million dollars to Bill Clinton’s Presidential library, and he has given more than five million dollars to the Clinton Foundation. In February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a major policy address at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, co-sponsored by the Saban Center. And last November Bill Clinton was a featured speaker at the Saban Forum, an annual conference attended by many high-level Israeli and U.S. government officials, which was held in Jerusalem. Ynon Kreiz, an Israeli who was the chairman and chief executive of a Saban company and Saban’s closest associate for many years, attended the conference, and when I commented that his former boss appeared to be positively smitten with Bill Clinton, Kreiz replied, grinning broadly, “No! No! I remember once Haim was talking to me on the phone, and he said in Hebrew, without changing his tone so Clinton would have no idea he was speaking about him, ‘The President of the United States, wearing his boxers, is coming down the stairs, and I am going to have to stop talking and go have breakfast with him.’ ”
...... Saban’s eagerness to minimize his taxes provided an abundance of the confounding problems Krane loved. In one major project, in 1988, Krane set up a company in the Netherlands Antilles as a tax haven, to handle all of Saban’s foreign distribution of programming. As a result, Saban paid nothing in taxes on his profits in any foreign country. Krane estimated that over the years this strategy had saved Saban at least a hundred million dollars.
...Stanley Shuman, a merchant banker at Allen & Co., was a member of News Corp.’s board of directors and a longtime adviser to Murdoch; here, however, with Murdoch’s permission, he was representing Saban. Shuman, a major contributor to the Democratic Party, also arranged for Saban to meet Bill Clinton at one of the famous White House coffees organized by the Democratic National Committee. Saban later said that he felt a visceral connection with the President. “When Haim first got to know Clinton, his issue was censorship as it affects TV, because there was a lot of outrage about ‘Power Rangers,’ ” Shuman said. “It was obviously helpful to Haim to have someone he could talk to in the White House.” Saban became a fervent Clinton supporter. In 1998, he hosted a dinner at his home that raised a million and a half dollars for the D.N.C, not long before Clinton was impeached. Referring to the Clinton prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, Saban told his guests, “Starr should be tried for treason!”
The turning point with Murdoch came when he asked Loesch if she could imitate Saban’s international-distribution structure, and Loesch said it would take her three to five years. Murdoch didn’t want to wait that long. But, just before signing the deal making Saban his partner, he summoned Loesch to his office in Beverly Hills. “Rupert said, ‘I have one question. Can I trust Haim Saban?’ ” Loesch recalled. “And I said, ‘He will never stab you in the back.’ ”
Months after the creation of the joint venture, Fox Kids Worldwide, Saban spoke with Loesch and Chase Carey, the C.E.O. and chairman of Fox Television, about the importance of acquiring a cable outlet in order to compete with stations like Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network. He thought that Pat Robertson, who along with shareholders owned the Family Channel, might be open to a partnership. When Carey volunteered that Murdoch was meeting with Robertson shortly, on another matter, Saban asked if he could join them. He imitated Carey’s response. “ ‘Oh, no,’ ” Saban said, laughing. “Cartoon salesman, cacka! O.K., no problem.”
After Murdoch and Robertson had several meetings, Carey told Saban the idea was dead. “I said, ‘Do me a favor, come to a dinner with Tim Robertson’—the son, who was running the channel on a day-to-day basis—‘and let me do the talking,’ ” Saban told me. “I give Tim a whole speech about a joint venture. ‘We will program daytime kids, you program prime time. You have difficulty accessing content—but Fox is going to give you gold! A truckload of beautiful movies, sitcoms, and dramas! You’ll kill everybody else, you’ll be No. 1!’ Chase looks at me, like, ‘What are you talking about our programs, who are you, you fucking piece of shit, you’re giving away our programming?’ ” Robertson agreed to start negotiating.
What started as a joint-venture negotiation ended with a proposed acquisition—Fox Kids Worldwide would buy Pat Robertson’s International Family Entertainment for about $1.9 billion. After the deal closed, Saban stripped Loesch of her operating authority, and she left the company. She had been excitedly planning the programming for the new network. “It was heartbreaking,” she said. Even today, more than a decade later, she still seems baffled by it. “I felt my role was to fight for what was right for Fox Kids,” she said. “I kept arguing with him, as I had before, and when he wanted to put some of his shows on I said no. Because the quality wasn’t there. It didn’t occur to me not to do that.”
Woods stated plainly why Saban pushed Loesch out: “If you have a choice between putting a program on the air that will get the best rating, and one that you own ninety per cent of, Haim—businessman that he is—is going to go with the one where he owns ninety per cent. Margaret always put the programming first, which is a wonderful thing and to her credit. But, in a power struggle, business is going to prevail.”
After Loesch’s departure, however, the Family Channel’s ratings plummeted. “We had expected that Haim would construct a schedule where it would have a bigger impact, bigger ratings,” Rupert Murdoch told me. In the fall of 1999, Fox had to lend Fox Family a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. And a year later, at Fox Entertainment’s annual shareholders’ meeting, Murdoch expressed his “frustration and disappointment” with Fox Family and its ratings.
......Terry McAuliffe, who was then the chairman of the D.N.C., says that Saban had first voiced his commitment at a party held at the Clintons’ Washington home in June of 2001, after McAuliffe made a presentation about the deplorable financial state of the Democratic Party. “Haim said, ‘I’ll commit up to ten million.’ ” It was not until January, 2002, that they met in a hotel room and negotiated the final amount. “He said four, I said I want the whole ten, then he got to six, then I said, ‘O.K., cut me a check for seven million in five days, and we got a deal.’ ” McAuliffe says that D.N.C. lawyers were not involved in any tax-benefit planning. “All I can tell you is there is no lawyer at the D.N.C. who would have that conversation,” he said. “That would be a felony.”
......Terry McAuliffe, who was then the chairman of the D.N.C., says that Saban had first voiced his commitment at a party held at the Clintons’ Washington home in June of 2001, after McAuliffe made a presentation about the deplorable financial state of the Democratic Party. “Haim said, ‘I’ll commit up to ten million.’ ” It was not until January, 2002, that they met in a hotel room and negotiated the final amount. “He said four, I said I want the whole ten, then he got to six, then I said, ‘O.K., cut me a check for seven million in five days, and we got a deal.’ ” McAuliffe says that D.N.C. lawyers were not involved in any tax-benefit planning. “All I can tell you is there is no lawyer at the D.N.C. who would have that conversation,” he said. “That would be a felony.”
In March, 2002, Democratic Party officials disclosed that Saban, who had been named chairman of the Party’s capital-expenditure campaign, had written a check for seven million dollars to the “DNC Building Fund.” He had become the Party’s largest single donor. In an interview in the New York Times on March 21st, Saban explained how he had arrived at the figure: “We have two numbers in the Jewish belief that are lucky numbers—one is 18, and the other is 7. I thought 18 was kind of too high, so I went with 7.” He added, “I just felt compelled to do what I can.”
....... he always took the lead in setting up structures that were absolutely legal and tax-efficient. And all I asked him to do was this time, too, please do the same.”
Krane said that he had previously solved every problem Saban had presented, carrying out “very aggressive” tax planning, but he had always tried to design transactions ahead of time to avoid taxes. Here the only recourse was a tax shelter.As Krane began to explore the tax-shelter world, he learned that major accounting and investment-banking firms—including K.P.M.G., Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and many others—were involved in creating tax-shelter products. He selected one that was developed by the Quellos Group, a financial boutique based in Seattle; he integrated this shelter with a tax plan of his own, and, with the combination, made it possible for Saban to pay no taxes on his $1.5-billion gain....
......Nelson and Saban teamed up again in their acquisition of Univision, in 2007.
........In targeting media properties, Saban frankly acknowledges his political agenda. He has tried repeatedly to buy the Los Angeles Times, because, he said, “I thought it was time that it turn from a pro-Palestinian paper into a balanced paper.” He went on, “During the period of the second intifada, Jews were being killed every day over there, and this paper was publishing images of a Palestinian woman sitting with her dead child, and, on the Israeli side, a destroyed house. I got sick of it.” Saban said he tried to buy the paper in 2007 but lost to Sam Zell, who purchased the Tribune Company, including the L.A. Times. In early 2008, he says that he tried to buy the paper from Zell but that Zell wanted more than he was willing to pay. After the Tribune Company went into bankruptcy, in 2009, Saban said he informed the creditors of his interest. “They’re not going to do anything until they get out of bankruptcy. So am I still interested in the L.A. Times? I am, yeah, I am,” he said. Saban also said that he asked the New York investor Steven Rattner to let the Sulzbergers know that he would like to buy the New York Times, but Rattner told him they weren’t interested. “What’s it worth now, the whole thing—a billion dollars?” Saban said dismissively. “But it’s a family legacy or something, I don’t know.” If the Sulzbergers were to change their minds, he said, “I would be jumping all over it.”
Indyk was at the Brookings Institution at the time, and he suggested that Saban set up a center there. “What’s Brookings?” Saban wanted to know. “We invited him here for lunch,” Indyk went on. “I showed him the wood-panelled rooms, the portrait of Robert Brookings. He turned and said to me, ‘We’ll do it here.’ ” Not all of the Brookings board members supported the idea. One told me that Brookings donors care about Brookings, and Saban seemed to care only about finding a location for his center. Moreover, Brookings is a non-ideological public-policy institute, dedicated to nurturing American democracy. Saban is unabashedly pro-Israel and, according to people who work with him, harbors a wariness of Arabs that may stem from growing up as a Jew in Egypt; he first returned to an Arab country in 2004, when he went to Qatar with Bill Clinton and the Secret Service. But Saban’s gift was then the largest in Brookings’s history: thirteen million dollars, distributed over seven years. And so, in 2002, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy was established.
Such a sizable gift was not out of character. Saban and his wife, who heads the Saban Family Foundation, have made many substantial charitable contributions to institutions and causes here and in Israel. Cheryl has said, “I can’t give it away fast enough.” Their initiatives include, in Israel, the Saban Children’s Hospital at the Soroka University Medical Center, in Be’er Sheva, where, Saban says, sixty per cent of the patients are Bedouin Arabs, and, in Los Angeles, the Saban Research Institute at Childrens Hospital; the Saban Center for Health and Wellness, on the Wasserman campus of the Motion Picture & Television Fund; the newly opened Saban Theatre, on Wilshire Boulevard; and the Saban Free Clinic, formerly known as the L.A. Free Clinic. “Many people in the community were offended about the name change,” a member of the clinic’s board of directors told me, adding that the clinic desperately needed the Sabans’ gift—two million dollars a year, for five years. “It would have been much better if we could have put the Saban name on part of the building,” the member said, but the board was told, “No.” (Saban says that the disagreement was never brought to his attention.)
A couple of years after the Saban Center was founded, Indyk, knowing that Saban was eager for more visibility, proposed creating a U.S.-Israel dialogue—to be known as the Saban Forum—which would attract high-level government officials and be held in Jerusalem one year, Washington the next. This dovetailed with the decision Saban had just made, in the spring of 2004, to start investing in Israel. “The Saban Forum provided him a very high profile in the business community, and an avenue for intercourse with high-level Israeli politicians,” an Israeli who has worked on the event for several years told me. “It gives Haim such an aura of power.”
At the conference in Jerusalem last November, at the King David Hotel, blue flags with “Saban Forum,” in English and in Hebrew, were ubiquitous. A huge display of Saban Forum logos was placed behind the podium, where Bibi Netanyahu, Bill Clinton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (a surprise guest, to add the “pizzazz” that Saban loves) were to speak on opening night; in the days before the event, Saban had examined all angles for the TV cameras, to be sure the logos would be prominent from any direction. He had plotted the logistics of the opening ceremony, he said, “like a military operation.” But Clinton arrived late, and then got into an extended conversation with Netanyahu, who was seated beside him. When Saban interrupted them to say that the program had to start, a Clinton aide told him that it was improper to disrupt a conversation between two heads of state. Saban laughed as he recounted this. “I said, ‘Oh! But this is the Saban Forum. I have to make it happen. It is my name on the door.’ ”
According to Saban, in June, 2008, after the primary battles finally ended, Barack Obama called and asked for his help. “I said to him, Let me coördinate a meeting between you and some of the people who supported Hillary through me. We have a few things we need to clarify.”
For example, Saban continued, “Obama was asked the same question Hillary was asked—‘If Iran nukes Israel, what would be your reaction?’ Hillary said, ‘We will obliterate them.’ We . . . will . . . obliterate . . . them. Four words, it’s simple to understand. Obama said only three words. He would ‘take appropriate action.’ I don’t know what that means. A rogue state that is supporting killing our men and women in Iraq; that is a supporter of Hezbollah, which killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization; that is a supporter of Hamas, which shot twelve thousand rockets at Israel—that rogue state nukes a member of the United Nations, and we’re going to ‘take appropriate action’! ” His voice grew louder. “I need to understand what that means. So I had a list of questions like that. And Chicago”—Obama campaign headquarters—“could not organize that meeting. ‘Schedule, heavy schedule.’ I was ready and willing to be helpful, but ‘helpful’ is not to write a check for two thousand three hundred dollars. It’s to raise millions, which I am fully capable of doing. But Chicago wasn’t able to deliver the meeting, so I couldn’t get on board.”
Saban offered to fly his group of Hillary supporters to meet with Obama anywhere in the country, but he was told that it couldn’t be arranged. “Haim understands message—Obama didn’t have time for him,” a close adviser said. “After that, he met with McCain. It went that far. But, ultimately, he felt he could not abandon the Democratic Party, even though he did not like its candidate.”
He has not spoken with Obama since he became President, Saban said, “because he has no need to speak to me—or, at least, he thinks he has no need to.” He has refused on two occasions to co-chair fund-raising dinners for the President.
Saban called Hillary’s defeat “my biggest loss—and not only mine. I’ll leave it at that.”
In public, Saban has been diplomatic about Obama. In one of the sessions at the Saban Forum last November, when Dan Gillerman, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, commented that President Obama, in effect, appeared weak and incompetent, Saban retorted that it was too early to make such judgments. Gillerman was initially surprised by the rebuke, since he knew that Saban agreed with him. Saban later said, laughing, “Danny stumbled! I had to straighten him! My name is on the door!” Still, he remains concerned that Obama is not fully committed to Israel. At the Forum, he repeated something that he had been saying, heatedly, for months—that Obama’s first call, after his Inauguration, was to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told Saban that was not the case. Later, when asked where he had got the misinformation, Saban said, “I thought I had read this somewhere. One thing is for sure—he called Abu Mazen before he called the Israelis.” (In fact, the White House says the order of calls was Hosni Mubarak, the President of Egypt; Ehud Olmert, who was then the Prime Minister of Israel; and Abbas.)
The crisis in U.S.-Israel relations that followed Biden’s trip, when Israel announced its construction plans in East Jerusalem, seems only to have hardened Saban’s view of Obama. “I don’t think Haim feels particularly positive about Bibi’s performance,” Saban’s close adviser said. “But he certainly isn’t happy about Obama’s.” “I’m hoping that the White House’s brilliance will surprise us all,” Saban told me. “But I believe in my heart of hearts that the chances of success are much bigger if they work with Israel rather than against it.” Saban pointed out that, in the late nineties, President Clinton had pushed Netanyahu very hard, but behind closed doors. “Bill Clinton somehow managed to be revered and adored by both the Palestinians and the Israelis,” he said. “Obama has managed to be looked at suspiciously by both. It’s not too late to fix that.”
He pointed to news reports that the Obama Administration is considering presenting a peace plan. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that both Netanyahu and Abbas were to sign it, he continued, Netanyahu might still have to bring it to a referendum for approval. “Any deal that is pushed by the U.S. with Obama at a nine-per-cent approval rating in Israel, at the moment, will not go through,” he said. Last August, when Saban was in Washington, he met with both Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel, and he argued that Obama should travel to Israel to speak to the Israeli people. That has been his continuing message. “I told friends of mine in the White House, ‘He goes to Saudi Arabia, he goes to Cairo, he doesn’t even make a stop in Jerusalem?’ If he thinks that having a Seder at the White House is going to mitigate that—no, it’s not.”
Hillary Clinton, in her role as Secretary of State, has taken a stern line “condemning” the construction plans, and upbraiding Netanyahu. But Saban—who likes to describe Hillary as a “team player”—remains protective of her. Before Hillary addressed the AIPAC conference on March 22nd, he urged the organization’s leaders to be sure that the convention crowd treated Hillary well. Dan Gillerman, who came from Israel to attend the AIPAC meeting, said that, at a Washington dinner for Netanyahu, following Hillary Clinton’s speech, “there were many people, including some prominent Jewish leaders, who were very surprised and even disappointed at the warm reception Hillary received, because they felt that after the way she treated the Prime Minister, and the way she admonished him for forty-three minutes on the phone, she should have felt the coldness in the room.”
Gillerman added, “No sooner had she said her last syllable than I got an e-mail from Haim, saying, ‘How was Hillary’s speech?’ ” Saban had listened to it in Los Angeles, and “it was very important to him what we felt about her.”
During the Forum, Noam Shalit, the father of the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held by Hamas since June, 2006, requested an audience with Saban. He said he had heard that the Obama Administration might view a deal with Hamas to release Gilad as something that would weaken Mahmoud Abbas; he wanted Saban to speak to Hillary Clinton, and persuade her otherwise.
Several days before the opening of the Forum, Saban appeared on the Israeli “Meet the Press,” on Channel 2, which is owned by Keshet. Until a year earlier, Saban had been one of the owners of Keshet. The interviewer, Dana Weiss, warmly told Saban, “You really are our rich uncle in America, and we can rely on you.” Still, she noted that he had wanted to become the largest donor to the Democratic Party, and pointed out that, in Israel, “businesspeople’s desire for access to the political system immediately raises our suspicions.” Surely, she said, there must be potential for abuse when capital and government are linked. “Didn’t you ever see a politician that you had to stop?” Weiss asked. “Who was in your pocket?”
“Let me give you an example of this access, and why it’s completely O.K.,” Saban responded. “I hosted the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, in my home. I was informed that he refused to sign a letter to Obama, which was signed by most of the senators, supporting Israel, before the speech in Cairo. . . . I got the message on Saturday and he was at my house on Sunday. I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you sign?’
“So he said, ‘Because I don’t sign other people’s initiatives,’ as the leader, as head of the Democratic Party.
“I said, ‘So send a letter of your own.’ ” And, Saban added, smiling, and with hesitation, as though he did not like to boast, “He did.”
He continued, “I won’t say that nobody abuses it. But I’ve been active in American politics for over fifteen years, and I’ve never abused it. No one ever wrote that I abused it. Everything is fine. We can look for something,” he added, laughing. “But we won’t find a thing.” ♦ Full story
As Saban has said, “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” When Bill Clinton was President and Ehud Barak was Israel’s Prime Minister, Saban, who was close to both men, says that occasionally he provided a back channel for communications.
In July of 2000, shortly before the start of the Camp David negotiations, Israel’s planned two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar sale of an airborne radar system to China—furiously opposed by many at the Pentagon and in Congress—threatened to derail congressional support for a peace deal. Saban said, “I just called Ehud and told him, ‘In the middle of this peace thing, it’s impossible for Israel to do things that are perceived in the U.S. as against the interests of the U.S. I understand the financial aspect, I understand that it may not be really a security concern for the U.S.—it doesn’t matter. There’s a much bigger picture here, and you really should seriously consider.’ ” Barak suspended the sale. “How much impact my call had, I have no idea,” Saban added. During Camp David, he continued, “I was involved, but only on the periphery. If Barak could not say some things to Clinton to his face, he would ask me to convey a message, and vice versa.” At one point during the negotiations, Clinton, accompanied by his national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, had to go to Japan. “When they came back, I spoke to Sandy Berger, and gave him my two cents about dealing with issues. ‘Is that really super-important?’ ‘Well, why can’t Arafat give up on that?’ ” He laughed. “The usual!”
Immediately after the Fox Family-Disney deal closed, in 2001, Saban called Martin Indyk, who had been a U.S. Ambassador to Israel during the Clinton Administration. When they met in New York about a week later, Indyk recalled, “Haim said, ‘I’ve made all this money; I’m giving ten million to the D.N.C., and I want to set up a think tank. I think we really have to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict. These terrorists give me a potch in the panim, but I still think it’s important for Israel’s future to achieve peace.’ ” Indyk advised him to make a donation to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but Saban said, “ ‘You don’t understand. I want my own.’ ” In July of 2000, shortly before the start of the Camp David negotiations, Israel’s planned two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar sale of an airborne radar system to China—furiously opposed by many at the Pentagon and in Congress—threatened to derail congressional support for a peace deal. Saban said, “I just called Ehud and told him, ‘In the middle of this peace thing, it’s impossible for Israel to do things that are perceived in the U.S. as against the interests of the U.S. I understand the financial aspect, I understand that it may not be really a security concern for the U.S.—it doesn’t matter. There’s a much bigger picture here, and you really should seriously consider.’ ” Barak suspended the sale. “How much impact my call had, I have no idea,” Saban added. During Camp David, he continued, “I was involved, but only on the periphery. If Barak could not say some things to Clinton to his face, he would ask me to convey a message, and vice versa.” At one point during the negotiations, Clinton, accompanied by his national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, had to go to Japan. “When they came back, I spoke to Sandy Berger, and gave him my two cents about dealing with issues. ‘Is that really super-important?’ ‘Well, why can’t Arafat give up on that?’ ” He laughed. “The usual!”
Indyk was at the Brookings Institution at the time, and he suggested that Saban set up a center there. “What’s Brookings?” Saban wanted to know. “We invited him here for lunch,” Indyk went on. “I showed him the wood-panelled rooms, the portrait of Robert Brookings. He turned and said to me, ‘We’ll do it here.’ ” Not all of the Brookings board members supported the idea. One told me that Brookings donors care about Brookings, and Saban seemed to care only about finding a location for his center. Moreover, Brookings is a non-ideological public-policy institute, dedicated to nurturing American democracy. Saban is unabashedly pro-Israel and, according to people who work with him, harbors a wariness of Arabs that may stem from growing up as a Jew in Egypt; he first returned to an Arab country in 2004, when he went to Qatar with Bill Clinton and the Secret Service. But Saban’s gift was then the largest in Brookings’s history: thirteen million dollars, distributed over seven years. And so, in 2002, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy was established.
Such a sizable gift was not out of character. Saban and his wife, who heads the Saban Family Foundation, have made many substantial charitable contributions to institutions and causes here and in Israel. Cheryl has said, “I can’t give it away fast enough.” Their initiatives include, in Israel, the Saban Children’s Hospital at the Soroka University Medical Center, in Be’er Sheva, where, Saban says, sixty per cent of the patients are Bedouin Arabs, and, in Los Angeles, the Saban Research Institute at Childrens Hospital; the Saban Center for Health and Wellness, on the Wasserman campus of the Motion Picture & Television Fund; the newly opened Saban Theatre, on Wilshire Boulevard; and the Saban Free Clinic, formerly known as the L.A. Free Clinic. “Many people in the community were offended about the name change,” a member of the clinic’s board of directors told me, adding that the clinic desperately needed the Sabans’ gift—two million dollars a year, for five years. “It would have been much better if we could have put the Saban name on part of the building,” the member said, but the board was told, “No.” (Saban says that the disagreement was never brought to his attention.)
A couple of years after the Saban Center was founded, Indyk, knowing that Saban was eager for more visibility, proposed creating a U.S.-Israel dialogue—to be known as the Saban Forum—which would attract high-level government officials and be held in Jerusalem one year, Washington the next. This dovetailed with the decision Saban had just made, in the spring of 2004, to start investing in Israel. “The Saban Forum provided him a very high profile in the business community, and an avenue for intercourse with high-level Israeli politicians,” an Israeli who has worked on the event for several years told me. “It gives Haim such an aura of power.”
At the conference in Jerusalem last November, at the King David Hotel, blue flags with “Saban Forum,” in English and in Hebrew, were ubiquitous. A huge display of Saban Forum logos was placed behind the podium, where Bibi Netanyahu, Bill Clinton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (a surprise guest, to add the “pizzazz” that Saban loves) were to speak on opening night; in the days before the event, Saban had examined all angles for the TV cameras, to be sure the logos would be prominent from any direction. He had plotted the logistics of the opening ceremony, he said, “like a military operation.” But Clinton arrived late, and then got into an extended conversation with Netanyahu, who was seated beside him. When Saban interrupted them to say that the program had to start, a Clinton aide told him that it was improper to disrupt a conversation between two heads of state. Saban laughed as he recounted this. “I said, ‘Oh! But this is the Saban Forum. I have to make it happen. It is my name on the door.’ ”
In recent years, Saban has approached the acquisition of social and political power as strategically as he had his business career. The Clintons have been essential to this pursuit. “For nearly two decades, Haim has been a good friend, a loyal supporter, and a trusted adviser to Hillary and me,” Bill Clinton said recently. “He made his riches the old-fashioned way—he earned them—and he’s devoted his life to sharing it with others and advancing good causes in America and around the world.” He added, “He is a fascinating, generous, and profoundly good man, and I’m glad to count him among my closest friends.” Saban said that he begged Hillary to run for President in 2004, and that he began making lists of prospective donors even before she declared her candidacy, in 2007. “I was so committed to Hillary becoming President, with my whole neshamah,” Saban said. “I put my heart and soul into this campaign.”
Bill Clinton stayed at Saban’s home during the primaries, and they sometimes travelled together to Hillary’s campaign events. On occasion, Saban offered advice. At the behest of his friend Roger Ailes, Saban tried to persuade Hillary to announce that she would debate any of the Democratic-primary contenders on Fox News. “Why? Because Fox News delivers more eyeballs than CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC combined,” Saban, who watches Fox regularly, said. “What is this about banning them?” But, he continued, “Hillary said, ‘No, I’m not going to do it.’ My own opinion is that she didn’t want to break the party line, because there was a consensus amongst everybody not to go on Fox News. I thought it was a mistake.”According to Saban, in June, 2008, after the primary battles finally ended, Barack Obama called and asked for his help. “I said to him, Let me coördinate a meeting between you and some of the people who supported Hillary through me. We have a few things we need to clarify.”
For example, Saban continued, “Obama was asked the same question Hillary was asked—‘If Iran nukes Israel, what would be your reaction?’ Hillary said, ‘We will obliterate them.’ We . . . will . . . obliterate . . . them. Four words, it’s simple to understand. Obama said only three words. He would ‘take appropriate action.’ I don’t know what that means. A rogue state that is supporting killing our men and women in Iraq; that is a supporter of Hezbollah, which killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization; that is a supporter of Hamas, which shot twelve thousand rockets at Israel—that rogue state nukes a member of the United Nations, and we’re going to ‘take appropriate action’! ” His voice grew louder. “I need to understand what that means. So I had a list of questions like that. And Chicago”—Obama campaign headquarters—“could not organize that meeting. ‘Schedule, heavy schedule.’ I was ready and willing to be helpful, but ‘helpful’ is not to write a check for two thousand three hundred dollars. It’s to raise millions, which I am fully capable of doing. But Chicago wasn’t able to deliver the meeting, so I couldn’t get on board.”
Saban offered to fly his group of Hillary supporters to meet with Obama anywhere in the country, but he was told that it couldn’t be arranged. “Haim understands message—Obama didn’t have time for him,” a close adviser said. “After that, he met with McCain. It went that far. But, ultimately, he felt he could not abandon the Democratic Party, even though he did not like its candidate.”
He has not spoken with Obama since he became President, Saban said, “because he has no need to speak to me—or, at least, he thinks he has no need to.” He has refused on two occasions to co-chair fund-raising dinners for the President.
Saban called Hillary’s defeat “my biggest loss—and not only mine. I’ll leave it at that.”
In early March, shortly before Vice-President Joe Biden visited Israel, he invited a group of prominent Jews to the Vice-President’s residence. Most were leaders of Jewish organizations or close Biden supporters—and then there was Saban. It was his first invitation from the Obama White House.
In the meeting, Saban said that the Administration “may want to consider the fact that their relationship with their Israeli wife is more valuable than their newfound relationship with their Arab mistresses.” (Later, he said, “Everybody laughed! No one says things like that in such meetings.”) He exhorted Biden to reassure the Israeli people that the Administration considers the bond between the two countries unbreakable—and he advised that Biden do so at about eight in the evening, on Channel 2, in order to reach the maximum number of Israelis. And, airing a grievance he had been nursing ever since the President’s Cairo speech, last June, Saban insisted that Biden correct what he considered to be Obama’s cardinal error—the implication that Israel’s creation was justified by the Holocaust, rather than by millennia of Jewish history. Dan Shapiro, a member of the White House Middle East team who had worked on the Cairo speech, interjected that the speech did not say that, but Saban disagreed. After the meeting broke up, one participant recalled, Saban animatedly told Shapiro that Obama had made his career—becoming President and a Nobel Prize winner—by the power of his speeches, so he ought to be aware of the importance of language.In public, Saban has been diplomatic about Obama. In one of the sessions at the Saban Forum last November, when Dan Gillerman, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, commented that President Obama, in effect, appeared weak and incompetent, Saban retorted that it was too early to make such judgments. Gillerman was initially surprised by the rebuke, since he knew that Saban agreed with him. Saban later said, laughing, “Danny stumbled! I had to straighten him! My name is on the door!” Still, he remains concerned that Obama is not fully committed to Israel. At the Forum, he repeated something that he had been saying, heatedly, for months—that Obama’s first call, after his Inauguration, was to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told Saban that was not the case. Later, when asked where he had got the misinformation, Saban said, “I thought I had read this somewhere. One thing is for sure—he called Abu Mazen before he called the Israelis.” (In fact, the White House says the order of calls was Hosni Mubarak, the President of Egypt; Ehud Olmert, who was then the Prime Minister of Israel; and Abbas.)
The crisis in U.S.-Israel relations that followed Biden’s trip, when Israel announced its construction plans in East Jerusalem, seems only to have hardened Saban’s view of Obama. “I don’t think Haim feels particularly positive about Bibi’s performance,” Saban’s close adviser said. “But he certainly isn’t happy about Obama’s.” “I’m hoping that the White House’s brilliance will surprise us all,” Saban told me. “But I believe in my heart of hearts that the chances of success are much bigger if they work with Israel rather than against it.” Saban pointed out that, in the late nineties, President Clinton had pushed Netanyahu very hard, but behind closed doors. “Bill Clinton somehow managed to be revered and adored by both the Palestinians and the Israelis,” he said. “Obama has managed to be looked at suspiciously by both. It’s not too late to fix that.”
He pointed to news reports that the Obama Administration is considering presenting a peace plan. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that both Netanyahu and Abbas were to sign it, he continued, Netanyahu might still have to bring it to a referendum for approval. “Any deal that is pushed by the U.S. with Obama at a nine-per-cent approval rating in Israel, at the moment, will not go through,” he said. Last August, when Saban was in Washington, he met with both Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel, and he argued that Obama should travel to Israel to speak to the Israeli people. That has been his continuing message. “I told friends of mine in the White House, ‘He goes to Saudi Arabia, he goes to Cairo, he doesn’t even make a stop in Jerusalem?’ If he thinks that having a Seder at the White House is going to mitigate that—no, it’s not.”
Hillary Clinton, in her role as Secretary of State, has taken a stern line “condemning” the construction plans, and upbraiding Netanyahu. But Saban—who likes to describe Hillary as a “team player”—remains protective of her. Before Hillary addressed the AIPAC conference on March 22nd, he urged the organization’s leaders to be sure that the convention crowd treated Hillary well. Dan Gillerman, who came from Israel to attend the AIPAC meeting, said that, at a Washington dinner for Netanyahu, following Hillary Clinton’s speech, “there were many people, including some prominent Jewish leaders, who were very surprised and even disappointed at the warm reception Hillary received, because they felt that after the way she treated the Prime Minister, and the way she admonished him for forty-three minutes on the phone, she should have felt the coldness in the room.”
Gillerman added, “No sooner had she said her last syllable than I got an e-mail from Haim, saying, ‘How was Hillary’s speech?’ ” Saban had listened to it in Los Angeles, and “it was very important to him what we felt about her.”
Many Israelis seem amazed at Saban’s many successes, most recently with Bezeq, the Israeli telecommunications company, which Saban and his partners won in a bidding process when the company was privatized, four and a half years ago, and reached an agreement to sell last fall. The sale, which closed in mid-April, was one of the most profitable transactions in recent Israeli history. “Bezeq was unbelievable,” Yehuda Talit said. “I don’t want to mention a specific situation. But let me just say that from time to time Haim wants to do something—and, say, seven on the board want to say no, and one wants to say yes. On the day they will sign the contract, eight will say yes. Haim knows how to reach each one and influence them his way.”
But, mostly, Israelis marvel at his perceived political power in the U.S. When Israeli government officials visit Los Angeles, they nearly always call on Saban. In February, Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., was in town, and Saban invited him over for dinner; Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, and Schwarzenegger came, too. Kobi Oshrat, who was Israel’s cultural attaché in Los Angeles from 2000 to 2004, was a frequent guest at Saban’s Shabbat dinners. “I met so many senators and congresspeople at Haim’s home,” Oshrat said. When Gray Davis, who was the governor of California at the time, said that he might be late for a planned appearance at Israel’s annual Independence Day celebration in Los Angeles, to sign an agreement creating a cultural exchange between Israel and the state of California, Oshrat called Saban. The next day, Saban told Oshrat, “The Governor is going to be there, and he will be there before the guests.” (Davis arrived on time, as promised.) According to an Israeli official, Saban also helped persuade Governor Schwarzenegger to produce a letter in support of Israel during its Gaza war last year.During the Forum, Noam Shalit, the father of the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held by Hamas since June, 2006, requested an audience with Saban. He said he had heard that the Obama Administration might view a deal with Hamas to release Gilad as something that would weaken Mahmoud Abbas; he wanted Saban to speak to Hillary Clinton, and persuade her otherwise.
Several days before the opening of the Forum, Saban appeared on the Israeli “Meet the Press,” on Channel 2, which is owned by Keshet. Until a year earlier, Saban had been one of the owners of Keshet. The interviewer, Dana Weiss, warmly told Saban, “You really are our rich uncle in America, and we can rely on you.” Still, she noted that he had wanted to become the largest donor to the Democratic Party, and pointed out that, in Israel, “businesspeople’s desire for access to the political system immediately raises our suspicions.” Surely, she said, there must be potential for abuse when capital and government are linked. “Didn’t you ever see a politician that you had to stop?” Weiss asked. “Who was in your pocket?”
“Let me give you an example of this access, and why it’s completely O.K.,” Saban responded. “I hosted the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, in my home. I was informed that he refused to sign a letter to Obama, which was signed by most of the senators, supporting Israel, before the speech in Cairo. . . . I got the message on Saturday and he was at my house on Sunday. I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you sign?’
“So he said, ‘Because I don’t sign other people’s initiatives,’ as the leader, as head of the Democratic Party.
“I said, ‘So send a letter of your own.’ ” And, Saban added, smiling, and with hesitation, as though he did not like to boast, “He did.”
He continued, “I won’t say that nobody abuses it. But I’ve been active in American politics for over fifteen years, and I’ve never abused it. No one ever wrote that I abused it. Everything is fine. We can look for something,” he added, laughing. “But we won’t find a thing.” ♦ Full story
Posts
