Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1999, pages 33-34

Personality

Shafiq W. Kombargi

By Andrew I. Killgore

Shafiq Kombargi, who recently retired as director of public affairs of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) Service Company in Houston, Texas, is one of the hundreds of “1948” Palestinian refugees who have been major educational, cultural and economic bridge builders between the United States and the Arab world in the 20th century. Counting his 22 years in Houston, Mr. Kombargi worked a total of 50 years with various subsidiaries of Aramco in Lebanon, the Netherlands and the United States.

The Kombargi family was caught up in what Palestinians call “al-Nakbah” (the catastrophe) of 1947-1948 when 750,000 Muslim and Christian Palestinians were “ethnically cleansed” from their villages, homes and towns by Israel.

The Kombargi family were long-established shipping agents in Jaffa and Haifa, Palestine, before being forced by the Jewish militias that eventually became the Israel Defense Forces to leave their houses and businesses. None of the Kombargis ever received a cent in compensation for their losses.

While some family members were able to get a boat from Palestine to Lebanon during the mass exodus, young Shafiq went by car via Jerusalem, where he saw one of his friends killed by an armed Israeli band. Eventually he made it to Amman, Jordan, and from there continued on to Beirut.

There Mr. Kombargi earned his bachelor’s degree at the American University of Beirut. He also won his wife, Asma, a native of Lebanon, in that country.

The Kombargis have five grown children, all of whom are American citizens and graduates of American universities. And, over the past 37 years Asma Kombargi also found time to earn a Ph.D. degree at the University of Houston, where she is now a professor.

The older son, Amer, is an architect in Saudi Arabia with Saudi Aramco, the Saudi government-operated successor company to Aramco. Gradually Saudi nationals have taken over the management even as the company has expanded into one of the world’s oil-producing giants. The younger Kombargi son, Basil, and daughter Amina also are engineers. The other two Kombargi daughters, Alma and Aliyya, work for Aramco Services Company in Houston.

After Shafiq Kombargi’s graduation from AUB, one of his first assignments for Aramco in Beirut in the early 1950s was buying and shipping fresh fruits and vegetables to Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, where Americans were helping the Saudis develop their oil industry and good vegetables were then in short supply.

Later Mr. Kombargi also bought produce from the Arab Development Society in Jericho, a model farm and “Boys Town” established for Palestinian orphans by Musa Al-Alami, a visionary entrepreneur from one of the great Muslim families of Jerusalem. It was in this capacity that Mr. Kombargi first crossed paths with the writer, who was a member of an American group formed to help raise funds for the Society.

Since those early days, Mr. Kombargi has done everything he could to promote understanding between the Western and Arab worlds, and particularly to acquaint Westerners with the realities and to dispel the myths about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

He joined with Arab intellectuals and businessmen to establish the Fifth of June Society after the Six-Day Arab-Israel war, which began June 5, 1967 with what the Israelis called a “pre-emptive” Israeli attack on Egypt and Syria.

The Society, of which Shafiq Kombargi became the first president, developed information kits of articles and photographs, organized public lectures and invited American speakers to the Middle East, including a pioneer American anti-Zionist, the late Rabbi Elmer Berger. The Society coordinated with the Beirut-based Americans for Justice in the Middle East (AJME) and Friends of Jerusalem and the Arab Women’s Information Committee in Washington, DC.

Since Shafiq Kombargi and his family arrived in the U.S. in 1977, he has stayed active on the cultural/information front. He was on the board of the Arab-American Cultural Foundation of Washington, DC, and has been active with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the Jerusalem Fund, both based in Washington, DC.

He also was one of the leaders in launching a successful campaign to endow a chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston.

For many years Mr. Kombargi was also responsible for publishing Aramco World, the company’s award-winning English-language cultural magazine which is widely distributed throughout the U.S. and the world.

As an American-educated Muslim, Arab and a displaced Palestinian, Shafiq Kombargi has been both a reflection of and participant in relations between the Arab world and the United States, his adopted country. The first phase of that always intensive and influential relationship began nearly 150 years ago with the arrival of Protestant and, later, Catholic missionaries from the United States. While their religious activities were largely confined to the indigenous Christian Orthodox and Latin Catholic communities, they established institutions that laid the foundations for the modern educational and public health systems of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt.

The second phase brought American geologists, engineers and businessmen to find, extract and market oil. Mr. Kombargi remembers fondly such great Americans and good friends as Terry Duce, Tom Barger, Bill Eltiste and Frank Jungers, who not only helped bring oil and the resulting prosperity to Saudi Arabia, but also helped with the establishment of schools, clinics, modern agriculture and mass housing.

Many of the first generation of young Saudis who worked with the Americans, and who were sent abroad for further education, became talented executives. Now the successor generation of Saudis has taken over Aramco management at all levels and runs the biggest oil company in the world.

The third and less happy phase of U.S.-Arab relations, however, began in the 1990s with the assumption of political appointments by a new generation of U.S. policymakers whose first-hand knowledge of Middle Eastern languages and cultures is almost totally confined to whatever could be gleaned from limited periods of study or work in Israel.

Under their direction, Mr. Kombargi sees the positive U.S. legacy built up over a long period being squandered, even destroyed, by such “Israelists,” whose first toeholds in Israeli-funded or influenced Washington “think tanks” became springboards into White House, State Department, Capitol Hill and other political appointments. This pessimistic view is shared by most of the tens of thousands of Americans who have worked in the Middle East for virtually their entire careers, and who know the region well.

Shafiq Kombargi is representative of the thousands of Palestinian Americans who have succeeded in the professions and business in the United States, and some of whom served as the educators, linguists and translators who made the 20th century;s mass interaction between Americans and Arabs so productive. The “Palestinian professor” became almost a cliché in American universities.

Both sides gained from a kind of two-way brain drain in which some of the Middle East’s best and brightest, often uprooted by political instability or economic deprivation at home, settled into towns all over North America, and some of the most energetic and adventuresome American technicians and educators helped create the modern educational and technical infrastructure in the Middle East.

But the pioneering achievements of the 19th century, and the phenomenal accomplishments of the 20th, are now jeopardized by a new agenda, imposed from Washington on relations between Arabs and Americans that are in the interests of neither. The cultural bridge builders like Shafiq Kombargi can only watch in despair as American ingenuity increasingly seems harnessed not to raising educational, medical and economic standards throughout the Arab world, but instead to “containment” of all of the above in the interest of the tiny Zionist state that seems determined to defy and dominate rather than to settle in and live in peace with its Arab neighbors.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.