Summary
Oved Ben-Ami (1905-1988), chairman of Netanya and a liberal-Zionist entrepreneur with no diamond background, who from 1939 promoted Netanya as a diamond center and in spring 1940 won British and De Beers backing for a monopolistic diamond organization under his management (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.42-44, p.55).
Details
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Born in Palestine to an East European family, Ben-Ami rose in local Zionist circles in the 1920s, was active in Bnei Binyamin and the journal Doar Hayom, and in 1929 was one of the founders of Netanya (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.42-43).
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He envisioned Netanya as a model of capital-based nation building on private initiative and close relations with the British authorities, rejecting the Zionist-Socialist road and Jewish Agency intervention (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.43).
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In 1939 he established a municipal fund guaranteeing diamond manufacturers free land and factory space in return for building factories in Netanya and becoming its citizens (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.43).
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In March 1940 he traveled to London, Antwerp and Amsterdam; in Antwerp only fifteen manufacturers and some experts committed to settle in Netanya under his project (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.49-50).
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Frederick Mathias treated him as the local economic intermediary between the British colonial power, Antwerp experts and capital investors (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.51-52).
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In return for a monopoly over all Palestine diamond manufacturing, Ben-Ami committed to buy rough diamonds only from the Diamond Trading Company, accept British regulation, and export all polished product to the US (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.55).
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As president of the Palestine Diamond Manufacturers’ Association from 1940 he placed himself at the top of its hierarchy, was repeatedly reelected, ran the association from his Netanya town office, and led with Chaim Friedman what many considered a “dictatorship” (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.77-78).
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The arrangement with Hennig & Co. assured him, as PDMA president, 1 percent of all import orders, transferred to the President’s Fund, over which only he had full control (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.69, p.78).
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He told the British in October 1942 that new establishments were authorized on a fixed six-monthly quota with the complete accord of the Competent Authority (Diamonds), to check “mushroom growth” (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.76).
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He spent many months of the war in London attempting to secure rough supplies, and on 12 January 1944 wrote to John L. Fletcher asking for facilities to convince the Belgians that Palestine’s industry would not be a rival of theirs (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.139, p.127).
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After the August 1943 stone change, the PDMA opposition exploited it to blame him and the executive for lack of foresight, and the call to investigate his private share in the PDMA’s budget became ever more vocal (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.146).
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In January 1944 Ben-Ami renewed the PDMA’s application to send representatives to London, arguing postwar structures must not be decided without Palestine; the DCB inquiry of March-May 1944 then cleared him of the opposition’s mismanagement and profiteering allegations while recommending his “benevolent despotism” be replaced by a more democratic PDMA structure (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.150-151, p.158-159).
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On Belgium’s liberation he telegrammed Ernst Oppenheimer in September 1944 that it “has placed bulk of markets [for] our finished stones in state of suspense,” and warned the unions of a coming crisis, proposing work only three days a week until the situation clarified (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.200-201).
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At the Brussels convention of mid-October 1945 he signed an agreement with the Belgian manufacturers coordinating opposition to a German revival and similar wage structures, obliging Palestine not to accept new apprentices for training; De Vries notes he himself realized by then that the PDMA could not remain a state-backed monopoly forever (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.212-213).
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In the 1946-1947 crisis his leadership was questioned during the November 1946 lockout; on 5 August 1947 he was arrested with thirty-five other Zionist leaders, collapsing the web of relations he and Walsh had woven since the early 1940s, and from Latrun detention camp he compared his arrest with his father’s by the Turkish police some thirty years earlier; freed in October 1947, he contrasted the take-off of 1941-1945, “the fat years” in his expression, with the industry’s pale state in 1947-1948, and his power declined with the end of the manufacturers’ monopoly in late 1949, ending with his resignation from the presidency of the diamond manufacturers’ association in early 1950 (Diamonds and War — State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine, PDF p.237, p.247-248, p.260).