In 1970, Sabbagh met
Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO, at the house of a mutual friend, Abdul Majid Shoman, in Beirut. Since that time, he developed a close relationship with Arafat and other members of the PLO leadership. Sabbagh, Basel Aql, and Walid Khalidi became intermediaries between the PLO and the Lebanese government, trying to inform and explain the complexity of Lebanese confessional politics to Arafat and his colleagues and interceding on behalf of Palestinian refugees with the Lebanese authorities. It was the Lebanese civil war, however, that made Sabbagh an activist — an activist for peace and reconciliation between the various Lebanese parties and between the Palestinians and the Lebanese. Sabbagh recognized the danger of the situation in Lebanon when, in April 1975, twenty-six Palestinians were shot to death by Phalangist forces in
‘Ayn al-Rumanah, in retaliation for the assassination of two of their bodyguards. The next day, he met with
Abu Iyad, the PLO's second in command, at
Walid Khalidi’s house. The Palestinian leadership had also understood the potential threat to Lebanese — Palestinian relations this incident portended. Abu Iyad asked Sabbagh to convince the Maronite patriarch,
Antonius Butrus Khraysh, to condemn the killing publicly in order to preempt a further deterioration of the situation. Sabbagh, accompanied by a member of the Phalangist party, visited the patriarch, who agreed to make a statement on the radio that same evening condemning the killings. Sabbagh also asked the patriarch to invite both
Pierre Gemayel, the leader of the Phalangist party, and Arafat for lunch at the patriarchate to effect a reconciliation between them and their communities. The invitation was accepted by Gemayel, but Arafat declined, saying that it was too soon after the ‘Ayn al-Rumanah killings to meet with Gemayel. Sabbagh strongly believed that had that meeting occurred between the two leaders at the onset of the conflict, it may have prevented much of the bloodshed and disaster that took place in the following days, months, and even years. Sabbagh was involved in many other efforts to bring leaders of the various factions together in order to resolve conflicts or prevent their escalation. Throughout the war, Sabbagh acted as intermediary and mediator, trying to find solutions to the conflict that was destroying the country. He passed messages from the PLO to the United States administration and back to the PLO (although he was not the only channel that Arafat used to communicate with the United States). In 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Sabbagh accompanied by
Munib al-Masri and
Abdul Majid Shoman, went to Saudi Arabia to ask
King Khalid to intercede with the United States in an effort to stop Israel's bombing of Beirut, to allow the PLO to leave the city. When the bombing stopped, Sabbagh was instrumental in passing information from the PLO to the United States about the PLO's conditions for its peaceful departure from Beirut. A longtime member of both the
Palestine National Council and of its central council, Sabbagh provided crucial international contacts for Arafat during the 1970s and 1980s. Most controversially, his 1978 meeting with the Phalange, first agreed to and then denounced by Arafat, provoked condemnation from the Lebanese and Syrian governments as well as from Palestinian opposition groups. In 1988, his active support encouraged Arafat to steer the
Palestine Liberation Organization firmly toward a renewed peace initiative. == Consolidated Contractors Company ==