Israel's Wealthiest Woman Says She Can See the Future

Israel's Wealthiest Woman Says She Can See the Future

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 31, 2009

TEL AVIV The office door has a steel vault veneer, and Shari Arison -- controlling stockholder in Israel's largest bank and its largest construction company, heiress to the Carnival Cruise Lines fortune and head of a long list of other undertakings -- has a lot to protect.

And as with any proper vault, this one is full of surprises.

Fairy figurines fill a knickknack shelf, and paintings of fairies hang from the soft-toned walls. Statues of dolphins leap from a cream-colored carpet, and goldfish gurgle in a tank just behind a chair. A yard-long see-through candleholder with a dozen flickering votives is angled across Arison's desk, looking like it connects to Kabbalah or the Upanishads or Area 51 or Something Larger Than Us, but which she says is there just because.

But the biggest jolt comes from the woman in the executive chair: Arison -- billionaire ($2.7 by Forbes's most recent estimate), perhaps the richest woman in the Middle East, a major force in Israeli philanthropy -- claims that she can see the future.

This is much bigger than a parlor trick. In her new book published this summer in Israel, the 51-year-old Miami native says she felt the Indonesian tsunami sweeping over the land two months before it happened and sensed Hurricane Katrina pummeling New Orleans. In an interview, Arison says she also "saw the writing on the wall" before the global economic crash.

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