Battle of Karameh, 1968: the raid that made the Palestinian fedayeen

After the war of June 1967 Israel held the West Bank, and the cease-fire line ran along the Jordan River. A few kilometers east of it lay the town of Karama and a refugee camp. Lawrence Tal, in the Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, writes that 25,000 to 35,000 refugees were still there in 1968, although Israeli shelling had driven many others away from the valley.²

Karama became the main base of the fedayeen, the Palestinian guerrilla groups, among them Yasser Arafat's Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In the account of Michael Fischbach in the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, they wanted to take the initiative in the armed struggle against Israel back from the Arab states. Their raids across the river brought Israeli reprisals and clashes with the Jordanian army, notably on 15 February 1968.³

A raid that everyone saw coming

The last straw for Israel came on 18 March, when an Israeli school bus hit a mine near Eilat. Walt Rostow told President Lyndon Johnson that after this and the deaths of two Israeli soldiers in similar attacks, the pressure for retaliation had become all but irresistible. Washington warned Israel repeatedly that a reprisal against Jordan would be a major miscalculation.⁴

The build-up across the river was not hidden. Fischbach writes that the Israeli army, overconfident after June 1967, made no attempt to conceal it, giving Jordan and the fedayeen time to prepare. Tal adds that Arafat's agents and Jordanian intelligence both learned of the coming attack in early March, and that King Hussein turned down an Egyptian offer of air support for fear of another disaster like 1967.⁵

The fedayeen argued over what to do. The PFLP commanders favored the usual guerrilla tactic of falling back before a much stronger enemy, and the PFLP did withdraw. Arafat insisted on standing and fighting, to show that some Arabs would stand up to Israel. About 200 fighters from Fatah, the Popular Liberation Forces and the Palestine Liberation Army stayed in Karama.⁶

21 March

At 5:30 in the morning of 21 March, according to the State Department's historians, Israeli units crossed the Damiya and Allenby bridges to attack the guerrilla bases around Karama, north of the Dead Sea, and around Safi, south of it, with air support. Johnson's last personal appeal to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol reached Tel Aviv three hours after the attack had begun.⁷

The plan was a pincer: columns from the bridges north and south of the town, and paratroopers dropped east of it to cut off retreat. Fischbach puts the Israeli force at about 15,000 men. The Jordanian army, expecting a deeper invasion, had moved its tanks and artillery into the hills above the valley, and some 15,000 troops of the 1st Infantry Division and other units poured fire on the attackers. Tal writes that Jordanian artillery stopped an Israeli tank column at the Allenby Bridge road and that the fedayeen knocked out several tanks and armored cars.⁸

Inside Karama the fighting was fierce, and the town was destroyed. Israeli paratroopers took and wrecked the fedayeen base; about half of the Palestinian fighters in the town and camp were killed, and Arafat escaped. Israeli aircraft struck Jordanian tanks that tried to move up. By the evening the Israelis had withdrawn across the river, and Eshkol told the American ambassador he had done all he could to limit the operation.⁹

Counting the cost

The figures depend on the source. Tal writes that Israel admitted 21 dead, while the Palestinians claimed more than 200. Fischbach gives 28 Israelis killed and 69 wounded, with four tanks and four other heavy vehicles destroyed and a jet shot down, and puts Jordanian losses at some 80 tanks destroyed and more than 80 soldiers killed.¹⁰

A week later an Israeli diplomat, Ephraim Evron, told a White House aide that Israel was not necessarily satisfied that such raids were the best answer to guerrilla attacks, and would try other tactics. The aide noted signs of second thoughts about the effectiveness of Israel's current use of force.¹¹

A legend for Fatah

Militarily Israel had done what it set out to do. Politically, Karama went the other way. Fischbach calls it a moral victory for the Arab world, the first time a large Israeli force had crossed the 1967 lines and paid so heavily. Although, as Tal notes, Jordanian sources say Jordan's army did most of the fighting, King Hussein let Arafat and Fatah take the credit. Thousands of young Palestinians volunteered for the guerrilla groups, and in July 1968 Fatah took more than a third of the seats in the Palestine National Council.¹²

The victory also sowed the next conflict. The swollen guerrilla movement in Jordan increasingly acted outside the king's authority, and in September 1970 the Jordanian army and the fedayeen fought the war remembered as Black September. Fischbach's verdict is that Karama changed the course of history for the fedayeen, the PLO and the Palestinian national movement.¹³