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Hasib Sabbagh Passes: Construction Industry Entrepreneur and Philanthropist
Hasib Sabbagh was a Christian Palestinian businessman who co-founded one of the largest building companies in the Middle East and used his vast wealth to fund Palestinian and Arab charities and many causes dedicated to peace and reconciliation.
He was influential in urging Palestinian leaders to seek peace and justice through negotiation rather than armed struggle. As a member of the Palestine National Council and the Palestine Central Committee, he believed in a two-state solution to end the conflict with Israel and used his contacts to urge Western leaders to take the Palestinian case seriously.
He was one of those who persuaded Yassir Arafat, the former President of the Palestinian Authority, to maintain a dialogue with the US. And as a significant donor to the Carter Centre, founded in 1982 by the former President Jimmy Carter, he worked hard to promote respect for human rights and fight global poverty.
Hasib Sabbagh was born in Tiberias in 1920. He grew up in a Christian family in Safad in northern Palestine. After leaving the Arab College in Jersualem in 1938, he enrolled at the American University of Beirut (AUB), graduating as a civil engineer in 1941.
His education left a lasting influence: competition to enter the government-run Arab College was intense and the level of education was high. A boarding school with regimental discipline, it allowed only one day off from intense study for sports and recreation. But Sabbagh established friendships there that were to last a lifetime. AUB at the time was the premier university in the Middle East, a hotbed of Arab nationalism and discontent over the emerging crisis in Palestine and a vital meeting point for the intellectuals who would become leaders in the Palestinian resistance.
In 1943 he and four other contractors established the Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) in Haifa. Five years later, during the fighting between Jews and Arabs, he left Palestine and moved to Lebanon, re-establishing the company headquarters there. It swiftly became one of the region’s largest multinationals, and for 50 years has been the main Arab contractor undertaking the vast building and infrastructure works, especially in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, that accompanied the oil boom.
The company is now one of the largest contractors worldwide, employing more than 140,000 people and with annual sales of about $5 billion, and has expanded beyond the Middle East. Among other contracts, it built Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 1969, a terminal of Reagan National airport in Washington, the Azerbaijan section of the 1,100-mile oil pipeline from the Caspian to the Mediterranean, and a Dubai shopping mall.
Sabbagh became very rich — at the time of his death he was estimated to be worth $4.3 billion, ranked 16th among the world’s richest Arabs.
Sabbagh was a strong supporter of philanthropic causes, chairman of the Palestinian Student Fund and deputy chairman of the Health Care Organisation of the West Bank and Gaza. His giving was spurred by the early death of his wife in 1978, and in her name he set up the Diana Tamari Sabbagh Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in the Middle East. This has distributed millions of dollars for higher education in the Arab world and the West, with recipients including his alma mater AUB, Bethlehem University, Birzeit University on the West Bank, the Islamic University in Gaza and Georgetown University in Washington, where he set up the Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding. He also endowed a chair in Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
From the start he also supported the Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, in Texas, endowing a chair there that was most recently held by Dr Hanan Ashrawi, the first woman to hold a seat on the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). He has funded clinics, colleges and pro-Palestinian think-tanks in the US, Lebanon and Europe, and has given financial aid to the Welfare Association in Geneva and the Vatican. He was received by Pope John Paul II in 1981 and again in 1993.
His philanthropy and high business profile inevitably brought him into the various efforts to establish peace in the Middle East. His company suffered from the long Lebanese civil war that began in 1975, and the headquarters were moved to Athens in 1977. In 1970 he first met Yassir Arafat, then denounced widely in the West as a terrorist leader, and provided him with crucial international contacts in the 1970s and 1980s.
Controversially, he held talks with the right-wing Christian Phalangist party in Lebanon in 1978 soon after 26 Palestinians were shot dead by Phalangist forces in retaliation for the assassination of two of their bodyguards. He urged the Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon to effect a reconciliation between the PLO and the Phalangist party by inviting them for lunch, but Arafat declined to attend.
It was only one of many efforts to act as an intermediary to bring together the warring Lebanese factions who were destroying the country. After the Israeli bombardment of Beirut in 1982 he flew to Saudi Arabia to ask the King to intercede with the US, and he was then instrumental in arranging the conditions for the PLO’s departure from Lebanon. In 1988 he gave active support to Arafat as he steered the PLO towards a new peace initiative.
As the US role as a Middle East mediator grew, Sabbagh’s contacts with US policymakers became more frequent. He was consulted by presidents and secretaries of state. He established a warm relationship with President Carter, who said in 2005 that Sabbagh was “one of my earliest and strongest allies in pursuing peace in the Middle East which made him a successful businessman, also a trusted adviser”.
A shrewd, quietly spoken man, Sabbagh was generous in support for his extended family and for the small Palestinian Christian community. As well as houses in Athens and Washington, he maintained a residence in London — next door to the Israeli Embassy in Kensington. He leaves a daughter and two sons.
Hasib Sabbagh, construction industry entrepreneur and philanthropist, was born in 1920. He died on January 12, 2010, aged 90
The Sunday Times