Aref al-Aref (1891 – July 30, 1973) was a Palestinian journalist, author, historian, and politician of Jerusalemite origin. Born in Jerusalem in 1891, he studied in Istanbul and joined the literary forum before enlisting in the Ottoman army during World War I. He was captured and spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, from which he escaped after the Russian Revolution and returned to Palestine.

Aref al-Aref edited the first Palestinian national newspaper published after World War I, the Southern Syria Gazette, which was published in Jerusalem starting in 1919. Al-Aref and the newspaper advocated a military, but not violent or bloody, confrontation with Zionism, along with a blend of political views promoting Levantine (Syrian) unity, Arab unity, and Palestinian nationalism. He was arrested by the British in 1920 following the violence of that year. He and his companion, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, fled to Syria. He was sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison for inciting violence. The newspaper “Southern Syria” was shut down by the British in 1920. Al-Aref returned to Palestine in 1929, where he served as district governor under the British Mandate from 1933 to 1948.

After the partition of Palestine in 1948, he served as a ministerial officer in the Jordanian government and became mayor of Jerusalem from 1950 to 1955. In 1963, he was appointed director of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.