ABD AL-HADI, AWNI (1889–1970)

Palestinian political figure. Awni Abd al-Hadi was born in Nablus into a prominent landowning family and educated in Beirut, Istanbul, and Paris, where he attended the Sor-bonne. A pan-Arab nationalist in Ottoman Palestine and Syria, he was a member of the Decentralization Party and helped organize the secret nationalist society al-Fatat (al-Jamiʿya al-Arabiyya al-Fatat, the Young Arab Society, which later evolved into the Istiqlal [Independence] Party) in 1911 and the Arab Nationalist Congress in Paris in 1913. He was secretary to Amir Faysal ibn Hussein al-Hashem, who was then ruling Syria, at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I and worked as an adviser to Faysal's short-lived government, and then after the French expelled Faysal to that of his brother Abdullah I in Transjordan. He was elected to the Arab Executive, the leading Palestinian nationalist organization until 1934, at its congresses in 1922, 1923, and 1928. He favored dialogue with the British and was a member of the Palestinian delegation to the London Conference of 1930. In 1932, his attitude toward the British hardening, he helped to revive the Istiqlal Party as a Palestinian political party opposing British rule and Zionism. Abd al-Hadi became secretary general of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), formed in 1936 to coordinate the activities of the general strike called that spring, which developed into the Arab Revolt of 1936 through 1939. Deported in 1937 because of his work for the AHC, he remained in exile until 1941, although he was allowed to participate in the London Conference that produced the white paper of 1939. He was given a ministry in the All-Palestine Government formed in the Gaza Strip during the 1948 War but never served in the short-lived and hopeless enterprise. He was the Jordanian ambassador to Egypt from 1951 to 1955 and later a Jordanian government minister and a member of the Jordanian senate. He died in Cairo.

SEE ALSO Abdullah I ibn Hussein;All-Palestine Government;Arab Executive;Arab Higher Committee;Gaza Strip;Istiqlal, al-;Palestine Arab Revolt (1936–1939);White Papers on Palestine.