For about 20 years, Joseph (Joe) J. Sitt, the chairman and CEO of the New York real estate firm Thor Equities, has been paying to restore Jewish graves in Syria, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey, along with ancient synagogues in those countries old enough to predate the destruction of the Second Temple. He rarely talks about it publicly. When I asked him why he does it, he answered with a question of his own.
“People always have respect for their parents’ grave and their grandparents’ grave,” he said. “But why should their great-grandparents’ grave be nothing to them? And why should the ruins of the Second Temple be more important than the synagogues of the same period or older?”
That work, spread across two decades and half a dozen countries, has given Sitt something most American Jewish businessmen do not have: a working relationship with the people who run those countries. He has decided what he wants to do with it. He wants the Abraham Accords to stop being a set of agreements and start being an actual institution, with a building, a staff, and an address in Jerusalem.
“Why can’t we have a Brussels-like headquarters of an alliance organization, an Abraham Accords organization, that’s that unifier in the Middle East and be based in Jerusalem?” he asked me over Teams last week.
I asked whether he meant that as an image or as a construction project.
“Actually and physically,” he said.
He calls it the Abraham Organization, and he is deliberate about dropping the word "Accord." “It’s not just a piece of Accord,” he said. “It’s the next evolution.” The name itself is the point. Abraham, he said, is the forefather of both the Muslim and Arab world and of the Jewish and Israeli one.
When I pointed out that Christians claim him too, he agreed immediately.
The kid from the racetrack parking lot
Sitt, decades later, is married and the father of four. He grew up in Brooklyn near Coney Island. His first job in business was working flea market booths in the parking lots of the Aqueduct and Roosevelt racetracks.
His first property was bought at a tax auction on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, in a stretch of the city that national chains had given up on. He raised the money from family and friends, put up a one-story retail building, and talked Rite Aid and Payless into signing leases.
He was still an undergraduate at New York University’s Stern School of Business when he founded Thor Equities in 1986. Somewhere in there, he also built a string of consumer brands, among them Ashley Stewart, a plus-size clothing chain aimed primarily at Black women in neighborhoods the mall retailers ignored, and staffed its senior management almost entirely with Black executives.
Thor today runs about $20 billion for sovereign wealth funds, government agencies, and private investors, with more than 50 million square feet in its development pipeline and offices in New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Mexico City, San Francisco, and Miami.
It has owned London’s Burlington Arcade and Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton. Its Mexico-focused Latin American arm, Thor Urbana, calls itself the largest developer in that country.
In 2012, Sitt put millions of dollars of his own money into founding the Global Gateway Alliance, a nonprofit set up to draw a development plan and push New York and the US federal government into fixing the city’s airports.
None of which explains why he thinks he should be the one to lead the effort to house the Abraham Accords. His answer to that is about who he is, and it is more complicated than his last name suggests.
Not exactly a Syrian Jew
In Israel, and increasingly in the United States, the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn is treated as a bloc, wealthy, cohesive, and politically confident. Sitt’s name gets attached to it automatically. He pushed back on that before I could ask about it.
“I don’t want to overposition myself as purely a Syrian Jew,” he said. “I’m a little bit of a hybrid. I straddle. I’m also part of that community, but I’m also part of the global Jewish community.”
Half of his Jewish friends, he said, are Ashkenazi. Part of his family came from Spain and the Canary Islands. His parents sent him to Yeshiva of Flatbush, an Ashkenazi school, rather than to one of the Syrian community’s own institutions, a choice he says was meant to give him that diversity at a young age.
He has spent his life half inside and half outside, which is more or less the qualification for the side job he has created for himself.
“If there was a country called Jewish, I would be honored to be the ambassador from that country to the Arab world,” he said.
What the Emiratis tell him
The Middle East, and specifically the Gulf, is where Sitt’s relationships are most concrete. He is closest to the Emiratis. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the UAE’s deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs and a brother of President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is a personal friend.
Sitt calls him a mentor and describes him as a fine, loving, wise man he wishes he could see more often.
He knows the argument against taking any of this at face value. Abu Dhabi keeps its channels open to Iran, to China, to Russia. It is a small country, and it needs to balance.
“I think that they’ve been a real friend of Israel,” he said anyway. The Emiratis, in his account, are genuinely comfortable with other religions and genuinely want the region calm. He is close to people in Oman, Bahrain, Syria, and Saudi Arabia as well, and less so in Iran.
Why do they take his calls? He says it is because he never asks them for anything. He does charity in the Arab world the same way he does it in the Jewish one. “People see that I’m sincere.”
The plot of land
What Sitt actually wants from Israel is real estate, which is at least on brand. He thinks the government could donate a plot in Jerusalem for the headquarters.
His original plan put the building in Tel Aviv. Then someone inside the Israeli government, whom he would not name, came to him with a modification of his idea and argued for Jerusalem. Sitt was persuaded. “Jerusalem is the answer for an Abraham organization,” he said.
The organization he sketches is meant for the neighborhood, not for its sponsors. “The goal for the organization is not to necessarily be an organization for the French or necessarily for the Americans. It’s for the Middle East region,” he said. The Americans hold everyone’s hands at the start and then let go. “At a certain point, have America then step back and let them stand on their own two feet.”
I asked whether he wants to run it, fund it, or both. He would not say. What he offered instead was a pitch built on everything he is not.
“I’m not a politician. The fact that I have no politics, no connection to a politician, no family member that’s a politician, it makes me that independent arbiter,” he said. “Sometimes it takes somebody from the outside that’s motivated, that cares, that’s more independent.”
Betting on the businessmen
Sitt is one of the few people willing to go on record predicting that the businessmen now doing Middle East diplomacy will succeed at it.
Two of them sit on the Gaza Executive Board under US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace: Yakir Gabay, the Israeli-Cypriot founder and chairman of the property group Aroundtown, and Marc Rowan, the co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management.
“I think that Yakir Gabay and Marc Rowan, which you can quote me on, are going to be incredibly successful with the Board of Peace,” he said. “I know everybody’s saying no, and there’s the naysayers, but I think they’re going to be incredibly successful. I think because they think as business people.”
The Carlyle Group and Blackstone have been hiring former officials for years, he pointed out. Nobody has seriously tried it the other way. “You could have the same success in the reverse, but it’s never been tested before.”
He once asked Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and the White House adviser who brokered the original accords, how he had done it. Kushner told him it was listening. Sitt believes him.
Israel as the next theme
Thor does not pick buildings; it picks themes, and it holds them for 10 or 15 years before switching. Not asset classes, and not bargains.
“Most people buy because the deal is cheap, or based upon an asset class they do, maybe because their father did or their grandfather did,” Sitt said. “We’re much more thematic investors, and we pick themes globally that we believe in.” The themes come out of politics and demographics.
The current one is data centers. Thor moved its investors’ money out of office buildings and into them well before anyone was saying "artificial intelligence" on an earnings call. The first was in Madrid. Now there is Texas, Ohio, Georgia, and a European pipeline.
He would like Israel to be one of the next themes. He is having trouble getting in.
‘It’s like a club’
Here is where Sitt got sharp, and it was not about Iran or Gaza. It was about Israeli businessmen.
“Israelis at the highest level often live in a little bit of a bubble,” he said. “It’s like a club. Why? You should want to connect with the outside world. It’s an opportunity to do business, help Israel go global as well. And I find it surprising that they really don’t.”
He says the wealthiest Jews outside Israel have almost no real relationship with the wealthiest people inside it, and that the gap genuinely surprised him when he first noticed it. He first helped a friend who runs forums in Israel that put religious and secular business figures in the same room, and went on from there to connect Israeli and non-Israeli Jewish CEOs.
He gets a steady stream of requests from Israelis wanting introductions abroad. He has a long list of Israeli names he has connected to global networks, but asked me not to print them.
He has a stake in this, and he said so without being asked. Thor’s investor base includes sovereign funds and family fortunes from most of the developed world and almost nothing from Israel.
“I’m a little bit embarrassed that we don’t have the investor base from Israel also yet,” he said. “One of the things I’d love to see is more Israeli investors also be our partner.”
About Israel, he had no hesitation at all. “Israel just went through hell and back,” he said. “But I’m bullish. No industrialized Western nation has better future demographics than Israel does. I’m very bullish on Israel.”