Canadian Philanthropist Focusing Efforts On Darfur

Arbib declined to reveal how much he donated for the Darfur initiative, but this is not likely to be the last time he's involved in it. According to Arbib, having 200 of his employees in Sudan on a U.N. mission "means we have firsthand information, which pushes us to take some action." He has underwritten a previous shipment to Darfur and plans to fund another "at a later stage." The multilingual Arbib was born in Tunisia, as his parents had gone there to escape the Nazis during World War II. He grew up in Libya, but fled Tripoli at age 26 during the Six Day War, when anti-Jewish rioters set his home aflame. Arriving in Italy, he worked as part of a team helping other Libyan Jews find their way into refugee camps and then to Israel. From Italy, Arbib himself immigrated, penniless, to Israel, where he worked for a travel agency. He later organized the first regular tours from Israel to Egypt following the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1979. As Arbib saw his travel business flourish in Israel, he organized tours and transportation for the 6,000 U.S. 6th Fleet troops that would dock in Israel. He then realized that there was a potentially lucrative market in providing troop transport for the military. Arbib moved to Canada in 1988 so that he could fully exploit the opportunity. "Doing this work from Israel would have been problematic," he said, "because its relations were tense with many countries." http://www.forward.com/articles/7915

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