Israel doesn’t guard all its strategic assets with the same care. Nothing shows this more clearly than the different treatment two sales received, one a shipping company, the other a dairy cooperative.

Two Founding Companies

ZIM and Tnuva were both born before the State of Israel existed. ZIM was founded in 1945 by the Jewish Agency, the Israel Maritime League, and the Histadrut, serving as the country’s sole maritime connection during the 1948 war, carrying food, munitions, and cargo. Even the name itself is a signal, ZIM, Hebrew for a fleet of ships, a word, tzim, that appears in the twenty-fourth chapter of Bamidbar, the Torah portion known in English as Numbers. It’s part of one of Balaam’s prophecies, foretelling that ships would come from Kittim, present-day Cyprus, carrying power with them. I have no source for why the founders chose this specific verse, but the name itself, a people without a state yet carrying a sacred word evoking power arriving by sea onto the fleet it was about to build, strikes me as a meaningful choice on its own. Tnuva was founded in 1926, by kibbutzim and moshavim, originally as a dairy products cooperative, an offshoot of the Histadrut’s central wholesale arm, Hamashbir, becoming independent in 1927. It’s still, at heart, a dairy company today, though over time it expanded into meat, hummus, and chicken products too. Alongside names like Nir, Solel Boneh, and Hamashbir, Tnuva was one of the founding institutions through which the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement that wasn’t yet a state, built its own economy, the product of a movement that treated agriculture as “a supreme value in fulfilling the Zionist vision.” Both companies come from the same founding family. But the state doesn’t look at them the same way today.

What the Golden Share Is

ZIM carries a golden share, a special right written into the company’s own articles of association. This right was born in February 2004, the moment the Ofer family’s Israel Corporation bought the remaining 49 percent stake the state still held and became the company’s sole owner. On that day, as it let go of the company entirely, the state kept this special right for itself, requiring ZIM to keep 11 container vessels ready for state use in emergencies, to maintain a majority-Israeli board and an Israeli chairman, to keep its headquarters in Israel, and to bar any transfer of more than 24 percent of shares without state approval. One curious detail, the idea of splitting the company this way was first proposed back in 2003 by the then finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, but the proposal was never........

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