The Arab Bank

The Amman-based Arab Bank recently made a decision that amounts to, for all intents and purposes, to complicity and active support for the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip; a collective punishment of 1.5million Palestinians:

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This is a shame and a reflection that, as one recent Arab editorial put it, rigor mortis has taken hold in Arab politics. Gone are of the days of Arab unity and solidarity with the Palestinians.

Today, corrupt Arab tyrants - all but one are clients, not allies but clients, of the United State - only seek to maintain their power and will do anything - sell their own people and the Palestinians - in order to receive U.S. support. And if that means siding with Israel in the oppression of the Palestinians, then that is a price the tyrant will pay.

It is sad that Arab Bank has fallen to his low, it once was an inspiring institution founded by a Palestinian that upheld Arab brotherhood above all. This is what Time wrote on Friday, Apr. 26, 1963, on the Arab Bank:

The wealth of the Arab world glitters in Beirut, but the citadel of Arab finance is an undistinguished grey-walled building in Amman on the edge of the Jordan desert. It is the Arab Bank, the first as well as the largest Arab-owned bank. Its bluff, barrel-chested founder and chairman is Abdul Hameed Shoman, 75, a onetime haberdashery peddler who ranged the U.S. before returning home to open a bank dedicated as much to helping Arabs as it is to making profits.

Shoman's bank has 2,000 employees and 43 branches that cover the Arab world, but Shoman is not content with being merely a banker to the Arabs; he recently opened branches in Zurich and

Nigeria, and is now planning to expand into the U.S. and Latin America.

Born and raised in a stone hut in a primitive village four miles north of Jerusalem, Shoman at 23 emigrated to the U.S. and became a door-to-door salesman of dry-goods products. "I only knew how to say 'cheap, cheap' and then make finger signs to show the price," he says. What he lacked in English he more than made up in hard work. He soon opened a dressmaking factory in Manhattan's garment district, where an Arab was bound to get a small hello. He was homesick. Seeing how U.S. banks helped small businesses to get on their feet, Shoman decided that what the Arabs needed was their own bank—an enterprise that no Moslem had so far undertaken because of the Koran's injunction against usury. Devout Shoman felt certain that the Prophet had not meant to forbid honest commercial banking, and in 1929, taking the considerable money he had earned in the U.S., he returned to Palestine.

By carefully investing in a wide range of new industries and public works from Casablanca to Baghdad, Shoman's new Arab Bank acted as a catalyst for Arab economic development in the days when no one was willing to bet on it. Says Shoman: "There would not be any industry here if we had not helped finance it." Arab Bank loans created jobs for more than 100,000 workers, and in Jordan the bank's loans for new cement, textile, and food-processing plants have given the country a growth rate in the Middle East second only to oil-rich Kuwait. Aside from commercial loans, Shoman gave millions of his own and the bank's money to Arab charities, has sent hundreds of Arab students to Western universities. Sentimentally, unschooled Shoman has built a $600,000 teachers training college in his native village, Beit Hanina.

Despite his wealth, he shuns luxuries, has no hobbies, and usually reads himself to sleep over bank reports. So strict a Moslem is he that he prays toward Mecca five times a day, allows none of his employees to drink, smoke or eat pork in his presence. Unimpressed by pomp, he treats peddlers, peasants and princes alike. He knows almost every Arab ruler from Ben Bella to King Saud, royally says of Jordan's King Hussein: "He is like one of my sons, but I tell him when he is wrong."

Two years ago, when Nasser nationalized all the banks in the United Arab Republic, Shoman lost six branches. When Syria and Iraq recently announced their intention to merge with Egypt, the threat of losing twelve more branches would have driven most bankers to despair. But Shoman believes that any step toward Arab unity is worth some losses. "If the Arab world could be joined together and Arabs could trade freely, they would prosper like Americans," he says. "For the sake of Arab unity, I'll give it all away." He may not have to: aside from his family's 37% ownings, 2,040 Arab investors in 15 nations have a stake in the Arab world's leading bank.

And now look at what it is doing? If there ever was a sign that the Arabs need a revolution.