One Ship Gets Protected, One Cow Doesn’t

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 implemented at the time, and the state’s stake went directly to the Ofer family instead.

This right never stayed untouchable. In 2012, when ZIM faced collapse under $2 billion in loan debt, the state eased some of the golden share’s conditions to help the company survive, but when a court ruling proposed raising the transfer threshold to 35 percent, the state appealed, and the two sides eventually settled on stricter terms instead. So this right is a living mechanism, both protected and, at times, open to negotiation, renegotiated again and again over 22 years. The concept itself isn’t unique to Israel either, a tool Britain developed during its own privatizations in the 1980s, later spreading to many European countries, and even to Russia by 1992.

2026, A Deal and a Reaction

This year, when Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd and the Israeli fund FIMI agreed to buy ZIM for $4.2 billion, the state didn’t stay silent, and this is exactly where what international relations theory calls securitization played out in real time. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, founders of the Copenhagen School, argue that whether something counts as a security matter isn’t a measure of objective danger, it comes from a political actor successfully framing it as an existential threat through a speech act. Defense Minister Israel Katz built exactly this kind of speech act at a cabinet meeting, “We have a golden share, and if necessary, we will exercise the authority granted to us by law.” Part of the concern came from Hapag-Lloyd’s shareholders, which include state funds linked to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. MK Almog Cohen warned that selling to a Qatari-Saudi controlled fund would mean handing over the key to Israel’s maritime gateway, itself a securitizing move, a sentence that pulled the matter out of ordinary commerce and into existential threat. At the outset of the Gaza war, ZIM had already offered its own fleet to the state, carrying munitions, proof this speech act had a real referent, not just a rhetorical one. The deal remains unresolved as this piece is being written.
Tnuva, the Unprotected Side

Tnuva’s story went very differently. The cooperative once carried its own internal guardian, Nir Shittufi, representing the Histadrut, which held the right to reject membership candidates. But this was never anything like the state’s own golden share, it was only the cooperative’s own internal arrangement, and over time it eroded too.

Over the years, to help settle kibbutz debts, most of Tnuva’s shares were sold to private investors, first to Apax and Mivtach Shamir. Then, in 2014, China’s state-owned Bright Food took over that stake for $2.5 billion. Some Knesset members criticized the sale sharply, but nothing like ZIM’s golden share, no state veto, ever entered the picture, because no one framed this sale as a security matter. No minister stood up and said the country’s food security was under threat, no MK described it as handing over a key.

The cost of that neglect showed up a few years later, on supermarket shelves. Tnuva alone supplied roughly 80 percent of Israel’s domestic butter. In 2019, it sharply cut production, blaming the state’s milk quotas and price controls, while consumer groups accused the company of deliberately throttling supply to pressure the government. The result was a butter shortage that dragged on for months, ending only in early 2020 once import tariffs were lifted. Even this crisis, notably, was never dressed in the full language of security, the debate stayed framed around quotas and price controls.

But the butter shortage isn’t just a closed chapter, because the vulnerability underneath it is still there, and arguably growing. Israel looks self-sufficient in milk and poultry, but that image is misleading, because the cows and chickens producing them are fed almost entirely on imported grain. Israel grows no corn at all, importing everything it consumes, with poultry and egg production driving most of that demand, while the feed byproducts derived from corn go largely toward feeding dairy cattle specifically. So even the milk Tnuva markets as domestic is, in practice, the last link in an imported supply chain. In 2024, at the request of Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, the ministry’s own name was changed to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, based on the National Security Council’s decision that food security now counts as a matter of security policy, alongside preparation of a national food security law. It’s a sign that the state, a decade late, finally noticed the exact gap this piece has been describing.

Tnuva’s own late recognition hasn’t undone anything about the company itself, though. Today, a company holding nearly half the dairy market still sits under the ownership of a holding company tied to the Chinese state. If relations sour, if Beijing ever decided to use that stake as leverage, a significant share of Israel’s own milk supply would sit at the mercy of a foreign government, much the way the 2019 butter shortage showed how a far smaller dispute could already produce one. Today, Tnuva’s share of the dairy market sits around 50 percent, well below the dominant position it held before the sale, but still half a market gathered under a single company, under a single foreign owner.

One Ship, One Cow

Both cases faced the same pattern of foreign capital, a German company tied to the Gulf, a Chinese food giant tied to the state. But the state raised a legal shield for one through a speech act, and never raised it for the other, because no one ever built the sentence that would have justified it. The difference doesn’t lie in the scale of the risk, it lies in which asset gets named strategic, and who is recognized as having the authority to name it. A ship is a need visible in wartime, and that visibility easily produces the language that protects it. A cow is only noticed once the shelves run out of butter, years later, and by then, for a stake that can no longer be taken back.

ZIM’s fate is still undecided as these lines are being written. The government will decide, this time, whether to build that sentence, whether to actually use the golden share. But Tnuva’s story teaches something worth carrying into that decision, once that sentence goes unspoken, once that door is left open, closing it again turns out to be nearly impossible, the same way the month the butter disappeared from the shelves, the market share it cost never came back at all.

Sources
Statements by Defense Minister Israel Katz and MK Almog Cohen, Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/national-security-concerns-threaten-to-capsize-sale-of-israeli-shipping-giant-zim/
Current status of ZIM’s sale to Hapag-Lloyd, Globes: https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-zim-jumps-with-good-results-seen-but-sale-uncertain-1001552431
The international history of the golden share concept, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_share
Tnuva’s corporate history and ownership structure, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tnuva
Tnuva’s sale to Bright Food, Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/chinese-state-company-buys-controlling-stake-in-tnuva/
Israel’s butter shortage, Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/i-cant-believe-theres-no-butter-tois-sleuth-churns-a-spreading-israel-crisis/
Israel’s butter shortage, Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-great-butter-shortage-609574
The Agriculture Ministry’s name change, Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/government-derided-for-expensive-name-change-to-agriculture-ministry/
Israel’s dependence on food imports and imported feed in the dairy sector, USDA Gain Report: https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/gain-report/2026/03/Grain%20and%20Feed%20Annual_Tel%20Aviv_Israel_IS2026-0004.pdf
Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security, A New Framework for Analysis, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998.