Rashid al-Haj Ibrahim

Rashid al-Haj Ibrahim رشيد الحاج إبراهيم
Portrait of al-Haj Ibrahim
Personal details
Born	1889 or 1891 Haifa, Ottoman Empire
Died	1953 Amman, Jordan
Nationality	Palestinian
Political party	al-Istiqlal
Occupation	Head of Haifa's Trade Office (1913-30) Head of Arab Bank in Haifa (1931-47) al-Istiqlal Leadership Committee member (1932-48) National Committee of Haifa (1947-48)

Rashid al-Haj Ibrahim (Arabic: رشيد الحاج إبراهيم‎) (1889–1953) was a Palestinian Arab banker and a leader of the Independence Party of Palestine (al-Istiqlal). He was one of the most influential Arab leaders of Haifa in the first half of the 20th century and played a leading role in both the 1936–39 Arab revolt and the 1948 Battle of Haifa.

Al-Haj Ibrahim was born in Haifa in 1889 in the Ottoman Empire to a middle-class mercantile family, al-Haj Ibrahim. The al-Haj Ibrahim family immigrated to Palestine from western North Africa and had a military past. They gained a reputation in trade and commerce and held considerable influence in Haifa. Rashid was mostly self-educated, but he enrolled in Haifa's government-run secondary school and the Alliance School. He learned the Turkish language in addition to Arabic and initially worked in a public debt department, heading the city's trade office in 1913.

Al-Haj Ibrahim would later occupy a post as an official on the Haifa zone of the Hejaz Railway. He gradually became the head of his entire family and gained considerable influence in the city; a common phrase that evolved in the area was "One cannot talk of Haifa without mentioning Rashid's name."

After World War I, when the British occupied and took control of Palestine from the Ottomans and established the British Mandate in 1922, al-Haj Ibrahim worked both in commerce and journalism in Haifa. He led the city's Islamic Society, a charitable organization, in 1927, and the local Young Men's Muslim Association (YMMA). In order to compete with Local labor parties, by August 1928, al-Haj Ibrahim was in charge of registering Arab laborers and tradesmen to work for employers in government-run building projects, particularly the port expansion scheme in Haifa.