Aref al-Aref

Aref al-Aref was a Palestinian journalist, historian and politician. Born in Jerusalem in 1891, he studied in Constantinople (Istanbul) and joined Al-Muntada al-Adabi until he joined the Ottoman army during World War I. He was captured and spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, from where he escaped after the Russian Revolution and returned to Palestine. He served as mayor of East Jerusalem in the 1950s during the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank.