AICC Mission

To increase economic development in Israel and the Southeast by fostering understanding, cooperation, and business relationships between Israel and the Southeast.

That single sentence was the Chamber's mission statement, and it is one of the more durable artefacts in this archive: it appears word for word on the organisation's site in 2007 and again in 2011, across a complete rebuild of the website and a change of underlying platform. Whatever else moved, the sentence did not.

Reading the Statement

It is worth taking the wording seriously, because it is more specific than it first appears.

"Economic development" — not trade volume, not membership growth. The Chamber measured itself by what happened in the two economies: jobs created, offices opened, transactions completed. Its own summary of results was framed the same way, in completed transactions and companies established, rather than in events held or members recruited.

"In Israel and the Southeast" — both, symmetrically. A great many trade promotion bodies are one-directional: they exist to bring inward investment, or to push exports out. AICC's statement commits to both ends, and the organisation was structured accordingly, with parallel service tracks for Israeli companies and American companies and an Israeli advisory board alongside its American board.

"Fostering understanding, cooperation, and business relationships" — three words in an escalating order, and that order describes the Chamber's actual method. Understanding came first, through briefings, seminars and published news about what was happening in the other market. Cooperation followed, through committees and delegations. Business relationships came last, and only because the first two had happened. The Business Exchange format is the clearest expression of this: a day of context and panels wrapped around the pre-arranged one-to-one meetings that were the actual point.

What the Mission Excluded

The statement is also notable for what it does not say. It contains no political content, no advocacy objective and no policy position. The Chamber was a business organisation, explicitly private, not-for-profit and non-governmental, and its published material stayed on commercial ground: markets, technologies, logistics, documentation, financing. That discipline is visible throughout the archive, and this restoration keeps to it.

The Mission in Practice

Applied consistently over two decades, the statement produced a fairly narrow and repeatable set of activities. The Chamber screened incoming Israeli companies through volunteer member teams. It ran sector-specific matchmaking events. It took delegations of Southeastern executives to Israel. It published a monthly newsletter of Southeast-Israel business news. It answered the practical documentary questions exporters actually had, such as the certificate of origin required for shipments to Israel under the US-Israel Free Trade Area Agreement.

None of that is glamorous, and all of it is downstream of the sentence at the top of this page. For the underlying trade framework the Chamber operated within, the US Commercial Service country commercial guide for Israel remains the standard official reference.

A Mission That Outlasted Its Platform

Mission statements are usually the first thing rewritten in a website rebuild, and this one was not. It survived a complete change of visual identity, a change of content management system and a change of leadership. Whoever ran the redesigns evidently decided the sentence was doing its job.

That durability is worth something in an archive. Where much of what a defunct organisation published is contingent — this year's programme, this year's board, this quarter's news — the mission statement is the one artefact that tells you what the organisation thought it was for across its whole life. In AICC's case that answer did not move between at least 2007 and 2015.

Measuring Against the Statement

A mission expressed as economic development invites an obvious question: did it happen? The Chamber's own answer, set out on its track record page, was that it had been involved in completed transactions valued at over a billion dollars, that the Atlanta area had become one of the top five North American centres for Israeli company activity, and that more than seventy Israeli companies were operating across its six states.

Those are self-reported figures and should be read as such. But the direction of travel they describe — a region moving from peripheral to mainstream in the eyes of Israeli companies over roughly two decades — is independently observable, and it is precisely what the sentence at the top of this page committed the organisation to producing.