Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Arif Al-Arif (1891 - July 30, 1973), Palestinian journalist,
author, historian, and politician, from a Jerusalemite family. Born in
Jerusalem in 1891, he studied in Istanbul and joined the Literary Forum until
he joined the Ottoman army in World War I. He was captured and spent three
years in a prisoner of war prison in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, where he escaped
after the Russian Revolution and returned to Palestine.
Aref Al-Aref edited the first Palestinian national newspaper
published after World War I, which is the Southern Syria newspaper, which was
published in Jerusalem since 1919. Al-Aref and the pages of the newspaper
proposed a military confrontation, but not violent or bloody, against Zionism,
and a mixture of political tendencies for Levantine (Syrian) unity and Arab
unity and Palestinian nationalism. He was arrested by the British in 1920 after
the violence that year. He and his companion, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, fled to
Syria. He was sentenced in absentia to ten years for incitement to violence.
The Southern Syria newspaper was closed by the British in 1920. Al-Arif
returned to Palestine in 1929, where he became a mayor under the British
Mandate between 1933 and 1948.
After the division of Palestine in 1948, he served as a
ministerial officer in the Jordanian government and became mayor of Jerusalem
between 1950 and 1955, and in 1963 he was appointed director of the Rockefeller
Museum in Jerusalem.
his writings
History of Beersheba and its tribes (a copy of it bears the
author's signature dated August 27, 1941 in the private library of Dr. Akram
Hamdan in his house in London),
Al-Mufassal in the history of Jerusalem
History of the Temple Mount
Gaza history
Judgment among the Bedouins
Christianity in Jerusalem
Brief History of Ashkelon
The Nakba of Palestine and Paradise Lost in five volumes, and
other publications and translations.
Death
Aref Al-Aref died on July 30, 1973 in Ramallah.
source
Achievements and Awards
- Years in active
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