Qasim al-Rimawi

Qasim al-Rimawi, the son of Mohammad al-Rimawi, was born in the village of Beit Rima near Ramallah on 11 January 1918. He had two sons, Hatim and Hussein.

He received his primary, preparatory, and high school education in Jerusalem, first at the Rashidiyya School and then at the Arab College.

Rimawi became politically active in the struggle for national liberation while still a teenager. He and his classmates led a demonstration on 2 November 1935, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The British Mandate authorities arrested him along with his classmate Farid Ahmad al-Aouri on the charge of organizing the demonstration. However, Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, who was working at the time as an official in the Land Settlement Department in Palestine, interceded with the authorities and succeeded in releasing them through his good offices. A close relationship developed from then onwards between Husseini, who was secretly making preparations to revive an armed organization, and Rimawi, who began training at Husseini’s residence on how to manufacture explosives.

After obtaining his high school diploma in 1936, Rimawi started working as an accountant in the General Postal Service. On 12 June 1936, two Palestinians, Sami Ibrahim al-Ansari and Bahjat Alayan Abu Gharbiya, attempted to assassinate Alan Sigrist, the British Mandate’s assistant superintendent of police in Jerusalem. Rimawi happened to be passing by at the site of the incident. When he saw that Ansari had been wounded, he helped him escape and took him to the hospital. As a result, the British authorities charged Rimawi with being an accessory to the assassination attempt and arrested him. Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, who in the meantime had become the head of the Palestine Arab Party’s Jerusalem bureau, recruited attorneys for Rimawi’s legal defense, and ultimately he was released for lack of evidence to support the charge.

As World War II drew to a close, Rimawi, who had himself become a member of the Palestine Arab Party, was chosen as the head of the party’s Jerusalem office. He also became part of the editorial staff of the newspaper al-Wihda, considered an unofficial mouthpiece of the party, and which remained in circulation from 1945 to 1947.

After Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini moved to Cairo in February 1946 and began to work on reviving the armed organization in Palestine, especially after Hajj Amin al-Husseini joined him there, Rimawi began to work to actively recruit fighters from the Ramallah area and send them weapons that had been allocated for Jerusalem by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine and by the Military Committee set up by the Arab League in Damascus. This continued until Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini returned to Palestine and founded the Holy War Army (Jaysh al-jihad al-muqaddas). Rimawi participated in Husseini’s recruitment campaigns and traveled throughout the country to enlist fighters. He also accompanied Husseini on his travels outside the country, for example to Damascus to request further military aid from the Arab League’s Military Committee. While Husseini and Rimawi were still in Damascus, the village of al-Qastal, overlooking the main road between Jerusalem and Jaffa, fell into the hands of Zionist forces on 4 April 1948. Husseini rushed back to Jerusalem to launch the battle to retake the village, and it was on the lands of this village that he fell on 8 April.

After Husseini was killed, Rimawi took command of the Holy War Army in the Birzeit region. From there, he worked to unite the forces led by commander Hassan Salameh. Rimawi also led and fought in a number of memorable battles himself, such as the battle of Ras al-Ain, in which Salameh was killed, and the major battle of Bab al-Wad, which was the largest of the decisive battles that were fought in 1948.

While Rimawi managed to coordinate with the Iraqi forces that entered Palestine on 15 May 1948, his relations became strained with the Jordanian forces that took over the Holy War Army headquarters in Birzeit in January 1949. In the meanwhile, he had also tried to thwart the Jericho Conference (held on 1 December 1948) that called for the annexation of the Palestinian territory west of the Jordan River under the control of the Jordanian army (thereafter known as the West Bank) to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. However, he was unsuccessful in his efforts.

Rimawi relocated to Cairo in 1949, and the head of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, appointed him secretary of the All-Palestine Government, which had been established in the Gaza Strip under the leadership of Ahmad Hilmi Abd al-Baqi. Rimawi also submitted a lengthy report to Husseini on his experience with the Holy War Army. He also drew up a preliminary outline for a biography of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, and by the early 1950s he had completed a draft .

During his stay in Cairo, Rimawi decided to pursue his university studies, so he enrolled in the American University in Cairo, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1952. He then traveled to the United States, where he worked as an observer for the All-Palestine Government at the United Nations in New York. While there, he decided to pursue his postgraduate studies and enrolled at Columbia University in 1953; he earned a master’s degree in administration and sociology in 1954 and a Ph.D. from Columbia’s Teachers College in 1956. While living in the United States, he published a series of articles in the newspaper al-Bayan, owned by Raji al-Zahir. He also took part in the founding of the Federation of Islamic Associations in the United States and Canada in 1952 and was elected as its vice president. This federation held week-long annual general conventions that were attended by intellectuals, literary writers, and scientists.

Rimawi returned to Cairo in early 1957 and then moved to Amman a few months later, where he took up the position of General Manager of the Jordanian Phosphate Mines Company, a public limited corporation; he remained there from 1957 until the beginning of 1960. Then, in 1961, he was elected as a representative from the Ramallah district in the sixth Jordanian House of Representatives, the kingdom’s lower house of parliament. He served as cabinet Minister of Agriculture, Construction and Development in Prime Minister Wasfi al-Tall’s first government from 28 January to 13 October 1962; he resigned from his position to run for election in the seventh parliament and won his second term as member of parliament from Ramallah, garnering the highest tally of votes. He then rejoined the government as Minister of Agriculture in Wasfi al-Tall’s second government from 2 December 1962 until the government was dissolved on 27 March 1963.

Rimawi retained his seat as an incumbent unopposed in the election for the eight Jordanian House of Representatives, held on 6 July 1963. In May 1964, he was elected as a member of the first Palestine National Council and then as a member of the first Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), serving as the director of its Department of Arab Affairs. He led the PLO delegation that toured Latin America in 1965, making stops in Honduras, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.

After the PLO’s first Executive Committee was dissolved on 31 May 1965, Rimawi returned to work in the Jordanian government. He was appointed Minister of Interior for Urban and Rural Affairs in Wasfi al-Tall’s third government from 31  July 1965 until 22 December 1966. He won his seat again in the election for the ninth Jordanian House of Representatives, held on 15 April 1967, and was also elected Speaker of the House. That year, he headed the Jordanian parliamentary delegation that attended the Inter-Parliamentary Union assembly held in Geneva.

After the June 1967 defeat, Rimawi joined the higher advisory council formed to support King Hussein’s decision-making, in his capacity as Speaker of the House of Parliament. During his time on the council, he submitted a memorandum conveying the sentiments of common people on the streets. As a result, certain centers of power turned against him, which led to his dismissal from the position of Speaker.

In 1969, Rimawi was part of a Palestinian delegation that visited London, Paris, Geneva, and Rome to promote the Palestinian cause. On the Rome leg of the delegation’s tour, he and  Ruhi al-Khatib were given an audience with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican.

Rimawi was appointed Minister of the Interior for Urban and Rural Affairs and as Minister of Agriculture in the cabinet of Abd al-Munim al-Rifai, whose government was formed on 27 June 1970; he was dismissed on 15 September, after clashes between Palestinian organizations and the Jordanian army began. On 9 September 1971, he was appointed a member of the king’s Royal Committee for Jerusalem.

On 12 December 1971, soon after the assassination of his close friend Wasfi al-Tall in Cairo, Rimawi attended a meeting held at the home of former PLO Chairman Ahmad al-Shuqairi. The aim of the meeting was to orchestrate a coup against the PLO leadership headed by Yasir Arafat. As a result of that meeting, a statement was issued on behalf of the Grassroots Oversight Committee in the Arab Republic of Egypt about the necessity for correcting the course of Palestinian action within the PLO and the convening of a national conference for this purpose. The statement also resolved to form a five-member committee—of which al-Rimawi was to be a member—whose mission would be to contact various Palestinian communities and consult with their representatives. This initiative was not successful, but it prompted some Palestinian organizations to launch a fierce attack against Rimawi, which had a damaging psychological impact on him.

During the 1970s, Rimawi worked as a part-time professor at the University of Jordan, where he taught a course on social institutions and two foundational courses in the graduate program in education: one on the economics of education and another on the sociology of education. During that period, he also published a series of articles in the newspaper al-Dustur about the Holy War Army and his time with Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini.

Rimawi returned to working in government in the late 1970s, serving once again as Minister of Agriculture in the cabinet headed by Sharif Abd al-Hamid Sharaf, from 19 December 1979 to 3 July 1980. After the death of Sharaf, King Hussein charged Rimawi himself with forming a new government. This government, in which Rimawi also held the post of Minister of Defense, did not last long, because Rimawi resigned as Prime Minister on 28 August 1980.

Rimawi died in Amman on 29 April 1982 and was buried there.

Qasim al-Rimawi was a Palestinian-Jordanian politician whose nationalist spirit was awakened at an early age. He had close ties with Palestinian leader Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini and was one of the most prominent commanders of the Holy War Army during the battles in the war fought between Palestinian and Arab forces and Zionist forces from December 1947 to May 1948. After returning from the United States to Jordan in 1957, he worked for several decades in public service, serving as a member of the Jordanian Parliament, a cabinet minister, and prime minister. He remained active in Palestinian affairs.

Rimawi was awarded the Order of the Star of Jordan (First Class) and the International Scientific Award from Columbia University in New York. Several landmarks in Jordan and Palestine bear his name, including Qasim al-Rimawi street in Amman and the Qasim al-Rimawi Girls’ Secondary School in Beit Rima, the village of his birth.

Selected Works

"ناقوس الخطر". رواية، لندن، 1951.

[Alarm Signal, a novel. London, 1951]

"الدولة والعمل"، 1952.

[The State and Labor, 1952.]

"التحدي الصناعي في مصر"، 1956.

[The Challenge of Industrialization in Egypt, 1956.]

Rimawi also wrote many articles in various fields and composed several poems that were not collected in a single volume.

Sources

Abdul Hadi, Mahdi, ed. Palestinian Personalities: A Biographic Dictionary. 2nd ed., rev. and updated. Jerusalem: Passia Publication, 2006.

البراري، هزاع. "قاسم الريماوي.. سياسي اتكأ على النضال وحب العلم". "الرأي"، 19 تشرين الأول/ أكتوبر 2009.

https://alrai.com/article/358991/أبواب/صحافة/قاسم-الريماوي-سياسي-اتكأ-على-النضال-وحب-العلم

الديوان الملكي الهاشمي، مركز التوثيق الملكي الأردني الهاشمي. "دولة الدكتور قاسم الريماوي"، 1980.

https://wp-rhdc.toreed.com/ar/primeministers/

شلش، بلال محمد. "داخل السور القديم: نصوص قاسم الريماوي عن الجهاد المقدس". بيروت: المركز العربي للأبحاث ودراسة السياسات، 2020.

شلش، بلال محمد. " إثبات وإسكات: عن إنهاء المقاتل الفلسطيني سعياً لـ ’الضم’ (15 أيار/ مايو 1948-كانون الثاني/ يناير 1949) في نصوص قاسم الريماوي عن ’الجهاد المقدس’". مجلة "أسطور"، العدد 11 (كانون الثاني/ يناير 2020).

العودات، يعقوب. "من أعلام الفكر والأدب في فلسطين". عمان: د.ن.، 1976.

عودة، جهشام. "بورتريه: قاسم الريماوي.. حياة متعددة المسارات". "الدستور"، 21 شباط / فبراير 2010.

https://www.addustour.com/articles/882759-بورتريه-قاسم-الريماوي-حياة-متعددة-المسارات

مركز رؤية للتنمية السياسية. "قاسم الريماوي". 14 كانون الأول/ ديسمبر 2020.

https://vision-pd.org/قاسم-الريماوي

مركز المعلومات الوطني الفلسطيني، وكالة وفا. "قاسم الريماوي" (الرواد).

https://info.wafa.ps/Home/PersonDetails/196

منير، محمود. "قاسم الريماوي.. قراءة في نصوص مغيّبة". "العربي الجديد"، 14 شباط/ فبراير 2021.

الموسوعة الفلسطينية”. القسم العام، المجلد الثالث. دمشق: هيئة الموسوعة الفلسطينية، 1984.