Birth: NULL/NULL/1934 Death:NULL/NULL/2002
Born in the Wadi Salib neighborhood of Haifa, to a family originally from the village of Tirat Haifa south of the city; in 1948 forced to leave Palestine for Lebanon and subsequently resided in Damascus, Syria, where he completed secondary education; received a scholarship to study at the Technical University of Delft and moved to the Netherlands in 1956; discontinued his studies in 1958 and established the Middle East Bureau for the Promotion of Economic Relations (MEPER EXPORT), a private company which mediated the export of agricultural and foodstuffs from the Netherlands to the Arab states of the MENA region; was a guest of honor at Algeria’s independence celebrations in 1962 in recognition of his services to the Algerian independence movement, whose camps along the Algerian-Tunisian border he helped provision with foodstuffs; was appointed Honorary Consul of the State of Kuwait to the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1966 and soon became the leading spokesperson for the Palestinian and Arab points of view in The Netherlands; was also affiliated with Fateh; established himself as someone who fostered an increased mutual understanding between the Netherlands and the Arab world and played a key role during the Arab oil boycott of the Netherlands in 1973; established the Lutfia Rabbani Foundation in 1979 in honor of his late mother, dedicated to promoting improved Euro-Arab relations and educational exchange; left the Kuwaiti diplomatic corps in 1985, and accepted an appointment to serve as Honorary Consul-General to the Netherlands for Jordan (until 1989); served as a member of the PNC from 1991-96; died of illness in 2002.
