Rafiq al-Tamimi

Al-Tamimi was born in Nablus to a Sunni Arab landowning family in 1889. He attended elementary and secondary school in the city and then at the Marjan Preparatory School in Istanbul, Turkey. Because of his well-rated performance at Marjan, he entered and won an academic contest. He enrolled at the Mulkiyya College in Istanbul as a result. He was consequently recognized by the Ottoman Education Ministry and given a grant to learn at the Sorbonne in Paris. There he received a degree in literature and education.[2]

Al-Tamimi served in the local administration of the Ottoman Empire as a principal of a government-run school in Beirut.[2] Despite working for the Ottoman government, in 1911, while in Paris, he and his colleague Awni Abd al-Hadi founded the underground organization, al-Fatat, which called for Arab independence from the empire.[3] In 1916, during World War I, Ottoman officials ordered al-Tamimi to gather information for a general "guide book" on the southern half of the Beirut Province, namely Jabal Nablus.[4]

He was elected to the central committee of al-Fatat in December 1918. In July 1919, following the Arab Revolt (1916–18) which succeeded in gaining Arab independence, al-Tamimi along with Izzat Darwaza, Sa'id Haydar and other members of al-Fatat's inner circle formed a group in the Syrian National Congress that rejected the establishment of any foreign mandate (British or French) in Greater Syria, claiming it would only be a "disguised form of imperialist penetration."[5]

In the early 1940s, he joined the Palestine Arab Party and represented the party on the Arab Higher Committee in 1945.[6] He also became chairman of the Jaffa branch of the National Committee. Al-Tamimi was known to be a close associate of Amin al-Husayni, the chairman of the AHC.[7] He led efforts to merge the al-Najjada and al-Futuwa youth movements in Palestine in 1946. In May 1946, the Arab League dissolved the AHC and al-Tamimi was not part of the replacement Arab Higher Executive, under Amin al-Husayni's chairmanship, which was based in Cairo. After the Bloudan Conference of 1947, he was reappointed to the reformed AHC by Jamal al-Husayni on January 5, 1947.[8] He was part of the Palestinian delegation to the Arab League in February 1948 aimed at obtaining military, political, and moral support for the Palestinian cause from the Arab states.[9]

• Abu-Ghazaleh, Adnan (1973), Arab cultural nationalism in Palestine during the British Mandate, Volume 34, Institute of Palestine Studies
• Doumani, Beshara (1995), Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-20370-4
• Khalaf, Issa (1991), Politics in Palestine: Arab factionalism and social disintegration, 1939-1948, SUNY Press, ISBN 0-7914-0708-X
• Levenberg, Haim (1993), Military Preparations of the Arab Community in Palestine, 1945-1948, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-7146-3439-5
• Muslih, Muhammad Y. (1989), The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism, Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-06509-2