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Wednesday 18 April 2018

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1968: Karameh and the Palestinian revolt

The patent failure of Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism, which had mesmerised a generation of Arabs, transformed Palestinian politics. No longer would Palestinian exiles wait for the Arab armies to liberate Jerusalem; they would launch their own war.

In 1959 Yasser Arafat, then working as a civil engineer in Kuwait, and a group of fellow Palestinian exiles formed an underground group called Fatah (an acronym meaning Conquest derived by reversing the initials of Palestine Liberation Movement).

Already in 1953, as a Palestinian student activist in Cairo, Arafat had made one of his first tentative steps on the political stage with a theatrical petition, written in blood, telling Egypt's leadership: "Don't Forget Palestine".

Fatah established a small publication, Filastinuna (Our Palestine) that demanded the liberation of Palestine, criticised Arab regimes for their failure to act and called on Palestinians to take up arms. Fatah believed that the lessons of the armed struggle that evicted the French from Algeria in 1962 could be applied to Palestine.

Fatah's first cross-border attacks in 1965 were puny affairs. The first raid was stopped by the Lebanese authorities, notwithstanding a portentous leaflet announcing that "our revolutionary vanguard has issued forth".

The group's first "martyr" was killed not by the Israelis but by Jordanian border guards. The Palestinian armed campaign drew a hostile response from many Arab governments. After the Arab defeat in the Six Day War, all this would change.

Arafat and his followers slipped through Israeli lines and infiltrated the occupied West Bank, seeking to set up secret guerrilla cells along the lines of Maoist doctrine that a revolutionary should be able to operate among his people "like a fish in water". Most of the West Bank, however, was too dazed by the occupation to consider rising up in arms against the Israelis.

After about a year marked mainly by failures, Fatah changed tactics and tried instead to mount hit-and-run attacks from outside Israel's borders. Its defiant action had a galvanising effect on demoralised Palestinians.

Volunteers and funds began to flow into the proliferating Palestinian groups, each vying with the other to announce heroic military deeds, whether real, inflated or fictitious. Arab governments were gradually sucked into the conflict, opening their borders and purses to the Palestinian revolutionaries.

The turning point came in 1968. On March 18, an Israeli bus struck a mine left by Palestinian fighters in the south of the country. A doctor and instructor accompanying the party of high school students were killed, while several teenagers were injured. It was the 38th Fatah operation in little more than three months.

The Israelis decided it was time to teach the Palestinians a lesson and to strike at Fatah in Jordan.

The Palestinians were tipped-off and decided to make a stand at their main headquarters in Jordan, Karameh. At dawn on March 21, the Israelis invaded. But quickly ran into trouble. Paratroopers unexpectedly came under fire from gunmen hiding in caves outside the town, while the main Israeli force faced heavy fire from Jordanian units nearby.

The Palestinian fighters forced the Israelis to take Karameh street by street. In the end, the Israelis destroyed the town, killed 120 Fatah men and took a similar number prisoner. But the Israelis suffered 28 dead before finally extricating themselves, abandoning some casualties and equipment in the field.

Karameh immediately became a by-word for valour in Palestinian mythology. Less than a year after the combined Arab armies were overwhelmed by the Israelis in the Six Day War, the Palestinian fighters had inflicted painful losses on a superior enemy. Karameh was not a victory in battle, but survival against overwhelming odds. It placed Palestinians back on the political map.

The burst of enthusiasm for the new Palestinian revolutionaries swept the militant groups into power in the by now semi-dormant Palestine Liberation Organisation, which had been set up in 1964 by the Arab League at the behest of Egypt. Arafat was named chairman, and the organisation's charter was rewritten to declare that "armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine".

The governments of a hitherto demoralised Arab world bestowed their patronage and largesse on the new heroes.

King Hussein of Jordan declared after Karameh "we are all fedayyin (fighters)". But two years later, power began to slip from the monarch into the hands of the myriad of Palestinian fighters who swaggered with their weapons through the streets of Amman, hung Marxist banners on mosques and began a campaign of hijackings and kidnappings.

Palestinians spoke openly of taking over the country as part of Palestine.

The inevitable confrontation came in September 1970. King Hussein ordered his army to crush the Palestinians and thousands of people died in the civil war that became known as "Black September".

Syrian forces threatened to intervene on the side of the Palestinians, but they were stopped by Jordanian tanks while Israel mobilised its troops to warn Damascus off the adventure.

As the defeated Palestinians regrouped in Lebanon, they vented their fury on the whole world with a wave of international terrorism under the code-name of "Black September".

Its first targets were King Hussein and those surrounding him, but the operations spread to include the hostage-taking of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

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