The results of the 1967 War reach far beyond the physical defeat of the Arab armies and the governments behind them. It is the defeat’s devastating psychological and sociological effects which elevate it to one of the most dramatic events in Arab history, a turning point in Arab thinking in the twentieth century and the single shock which more than any other changed the nature and future of the Arab–Israeli conflict. But for Arafat and Fatah, the war provided an opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of Arab defeat.
The overwhelming nature of the military defeat is encapsulated in the name the Israelis gave it and its adoption by the rest of the world. The Six-Day War which began on 5 June 1967 was just that – the total defeat by Israel of the combined forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the Palestine Liberation Army and elements of the Iraqi and Kuwaiti armies in a matter of six days. Israel heeded the UN call to cease hostilities after its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, all of Sinai and the strategic parts of the Golan Heights, geographically areas more than four times the size of Israel when the war started. The Arab countries accepted defeat and followed suit.
The war began and ended before some Arab soldiers had had a chance to join their units and before tens of thousands of Arab volunteers, most of the Iraqi army and any of the Algerian forces had had a chance to participate. It was so quick and decisive that there was an element of unreality about it. It resembled a sudden accident: the aftershock of the event exceeded its momentary impact.
Israel had told the United States of its plans to carry out a pre-emptive strike,1 but the Johnson Administration, including the CIA, expected a better Arab showing. Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the PLO and even the USSR, the entities which, by commission or unwittingly, drove Nasser into a corner and indirectly provoked the war, found themselves with little to say. Only King Hussein’s peripheral statements praising his fighting men are remembered. When an utterly devastated Nasser refused to allocate blame and offered to resign on 9 June 1967, the reaction at street level, combined with huge demonstrations in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, forced him to rescind it. The colossal magnitude of the defeat found the average Arab unwilling to saddle Nasser with exclusive responsibility for what had happened. In the end, all Nasser could do was to cashier some generals, including the Commander in Chief of his army, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, and to order an investigation into the causes of ‘the disaster’. In fact, no one was interested.
However generous the feelings of ordinary Arabs towards Nasser, things would never be the same again. In 1948 the majority of the Arab people, disenfranchised as they were, had been able to blame their defeat on corrupt, incompetent and non-representative governments, defective weapons, Western plots and ‘Jewish control of the world’. In 1967 there was no denying Nasser’s popularity and, though undoubtedly a dictator, he embodied their feelings and expressed their dreams. Furthermore, the Arab governments had convinced themselves that they were ready for conflict. So the war discredited Nasser and the ideal he stood for, Arab nationalism, the ideological magnet for most of the Arabs. This time the Arab people lost the war, and though most shied from explaining it in terms of their social and organizational backwardness, they analysed it enough to know that something was drastically wrong. Their low level of social development and inability to master technology could not produce armies which were capable of defeating Israel.
In signalling the end of pan-Arabism, the 1967 War also heralded the end of secularism and the march towards modernity and parity with the rest of the world. To a minority, the results of the war vindicated the traditional pro-West regimes and their non-confrontational policies. It justified their inherently defeatist attitude, which called for making peace with Israel. But to many more, the stress and hopelessness which followed the war meant an inevitable reversion to the usual religious solution, Islam. The major powers, as committed to manipulating an unstable, defeated people as ever, used what the war produced to further their own aims and designs. Every move made by the USA and the USSR turned the Middle East more than ever before into an arena for superpower rivalry. America wanted to impose a peace based on the new realities which favoured Israel, while the Soviets tried to capitalize on Arab weakness to strengthen their position with Nasser, Iraq, Syria and the rest of the anti-Western Arab bloc by resupplying them with military hardware.
The disheartened Arab masses could not countenance espousing once again the policies of the traditional regimes. They would not accept the total defeat suggested by the Western-sponsored solutions, had little faith in the USSR remedying the situation through supplying its client states with new weapons, and knew that a reversion to Islam would take years to produce results. However deep and fundamental their sense of defeat, the Arabs desperately needed something to lift their spirits, keep their hopes alive and soften the impact of the huge blow to their cultural being. Only the Palestinian call to resist stood between them and utter despair and self-disgust.
The Fatah leadership knew this, but once again it was Arafat who acted on it and moved to halt the rot consuming the Arab soul and to fill the natural political vacuum which the war had created. He did this with a speed which dazzled his admirers and detractors alike. This time his impulsiveness incorporated a rare sense of what was needed and how to capitalize on it. Rightly, he converted the situation into an opportunity for Fatah by transforming himself and his group into the symbol of Palestinian resistance and Arab rejection of total defeat. In so doing, Arafat became the second victor of the 1967 War. In a pure sense, because he triumphed over the pan-Arabists, defeatists and Islamists his victory was greater than the Israeli one.
Fatah was the only Arab organization to come out of the 1967 War intact, still in a position to do something through its cohesiveness, ample finances and size. Even the Palestine Liberation Army of the PLO saw action and suffered losses on the Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian fronts. More importantly, the identification of the PLO with the Arab governments condemned it. And it was no different for the Arab Nationalist Movement, which had depended on Nasser to the extent of neglecting to build an international network and secure independent backing.
The sudden focus on Fatah gained added momentum when on 28 June the Israelis, in a move which contradicted the repeated statements of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol before the start of hostilities,2 announced their intention to annex the Arab sector of Jerusalem. This decree followed steps aimed at changing the character of the city and guaranteeing permanent control of it by the victors. Among other things, the Israelis razed the Magharba district of the old city, including the house of Arafat’s uncle Selim Abul Saoud, after giving its residents twenty-four hours’ notice of eviction; they also expropriated narrow strips of land which hitherto had separated Jerusalem’s Arab and Israeli sectors. The Magharba neighbourhood was adjacent to the Al Aksa Mosque, and, responding to what they considered an open assault on the Islamic character of Jerusalem, the Arab people and governments called for a jihad to remedy the situation and commit themselves to following those who believed in the armed struggle. There was no one else to turn to; however small the chance of success, the Fatah fighters carried rifles and represented an inherent Arab determination to resist and retain a measure of honour.
Israel’s precipitate moves in Jerusalem and other places could not have come at a better time for Arafat. Like a genie let loose from a bottle and anxious to assume form, he had already sneaked into the West Bank one week before the Israeli annexation of Arab Jerusalem, on 21 June.3 A day or two after the shooting ended, showing little if any shock and longing for action, he had prevailed on Fatah members, including some who were so demoralized by the Arab defeat that they wanted to accept a Palestinian state made up of the West Bank and Gaza, to back his adventure. Once again he relied on the support of Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, and the three irrevocably recommitted Fatah to the idea of armed struggle. He travelled in disguise from Syria into Jordan and crossed into the West Bank with a small group of followers, including Abdel Aziz Shahine and Abdel Hamid Al Qudsi.
While Fatah had followers in some Palestinian towns, their numbers were too small to provide Arafat with protection. Most of them were in any case still reeling from the shock of defeat and had advised him not to come. The Israeli annexation of Jerusalem did not affect Arafat’s presence in the West Bank, but it justified it and went a long way towards converting those who doubted the wisdom of his daring though unorganized move. Every Israeli act of arrogance played into Arafat’s hands.
There is no denying the electrifying effects of Arafat’s appearance in the West Bank. Initially there was a whisper campaign among West Bankers about the mysterious presence of a figure whom they all admired but very few of them knew. Later the daredevil nature of his activities was blown out of all proportion and trumpeted by the Damascus-based Fatah, which transmitted the news to the rest of the Arab world. Exaggerations aside, his presence undoubtedly did take courage, particularly since he did not know the terrain.
Nor were his ambitions modest. Once he had made contact with the few Fatah followers willing to work with him – and that always meant obeying his orders – he divided the whole region into southern, central and northern sectors (Hebron, Jerusalem and Nablus), instructed the local Fatah to start a recruitment programme and build a cell structure, and prepared himself to lead a mass insurrection against the Israeli occupiers.
He did not do any of this during brief, clandestine meetings, but used his mastery of disguise to move from town to town under the nose of the Israeli army and hundreds of informers. He once conducted one of these meetings within yards of an Israeli army local headquarters in Ramla, and on another occasion, in Nablus, he escaped dressed as an old woman.4 He worked day and night, snatching quick catnaps and constantly changing the venue of meetings to prevent discovery. His non – stop movements were exceeded only by the restless workings of his mind, as in transmitting a message to the Damascus Fatah to start a recruitment campaign among the three hundred thousand Palestinians who had been displaced by the new war.5 It could be said that Arab hopes and dreams resided in his person.
That Arafat believed in the imminence of an insurrection is attested to by everyone who knew him at the time, and he kept the idea of an impending uprising alive by claiming that a widespread sabotage campaign signalling better things had already started. It was true that it had begun, but it was too small and sporadic to be effective. Yet his activities went beyond overstating the prospects, and even though he was constantly on the run the larger picture and other results of the war were very much on his mind.6 He bombarded his Damascus-based colleagues with suggestions regarding recruitment, finances and Fatah’s relations with the PLO.
Arafat had told his Fatah colleagues that they came out of the conflict blame – free because Nasser could not fault them for pushing him into war with Israel without this admission backfiring. Blaming Fatah would have led the Arabs to accuse Nasser of not having wanted to fight Israel. Arafat also sensed the predicament of the PLO and realized that the Arab Nationalist Movement too had suffered for following Nasser. Furthermore, he grasped what initiating an armed struggle would do for the psyche of the Palestinians and Arabs; and he knew that Fatah was the only guerrilla organization committed to it and in a position to start it. He was right on all counts, and in this context his exaggerations were necessary to keep the idea of armed resistance alive.
There could have been no greater testimony to his prescience than the fact that soon after his infiltration of the West Bank the PLO set up the Revolutionary Command Council to begin a rival guerrilla campaign. The ANM also rushed to maintain its position by starting armed resistance in the West Bank a month after he did.7 Shukeiri knew that one of Arafat’s aims was to undermine and replace him, and Habbash knew that the days of depending on the Arab countries were over. Arafat the man of action and natural publicist had outflanked them, and all they could do was follow his lead. In fact, that was all the Palestinians and Arabs as a whole could do.
Arafat’s performance, which dazzled the Arab world, catapulted Palestinianness into the limelight as the new popular alternative to Arab nationalism and forced his Palestinian competitors to emulate him, was in essence a propaganda success. He knew this, but lack of substantial military success was secondary to appearing to resist and to pre-empting others. On the ground, a combination of factors denied him the fruits of the daring and timely move to the West Bank, and his hopes for an armed uprising never got off the ground.
The refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip had always proved fertile grounds for the recruitment of Fatah fighters, but the ordinary people of the West Bank were reluctant to join him. To them their new Israeli masters were no worse than the pre-war Jordanian administration – in fact the Israeli police treated them better. In addition there were economic benefits, and before the war thousands of West Bankers had flocked to Israel to work. Furthermore, unlike refugees crying for someone to represent them, the people of the West Bank had their own leadership based on old regional, tribal and family associations. These rich and influential local leaders wanted to maintain the positions of power which Jordan had bestowed on them and resisted any attempt by Fatah to supplant them. They did not trust Arafat’s organization, viewed it as a danger to their powerbase, and saw King Hussein as their protector. Finally, the Israelis ran an effective security and intelligence apparatus, rendered more effective because Arafat could not pay much attention to security at the cost of creating a legend. Using hundreds of informers in the West Bank and Jordan, the Israelis managed to infiltrate Fatah and intercept its plans to organize, thus keeping Arafat and his group on the run.
When Arafat’s salesmanship was not enough to overcome these huge, unexpected barriers, his sense of frustration surfaced and he resorted to old tactics. He threatened locals and tried to browbeat people into supporting him, but this too did not work because the Israelis were there to protect them. When he met local leaders he was dismayed to find them more concerned with the narrow issues which perpetuated their control of their flock. Furthermore, Arafat’s personal characteristics did not help and, unlike the Gazans who accepted them and the desperate refugees who overlooked them, the West Bankers did not like his Egyptian accent and ways and found them alien.
In the end, many of the small number of people who answered his call to resist were discovered, arrested and imprisoned before they could do anything, and more still were deported to Jordan. This made other would-be recruits more reluctant, but it made Arafat redouble his efforts – still without paying proper attention to security considerations. His third course of action was to fight back by eliminating some who were collaborating with Israel openly and offering others generous bribes. Between June and September 1967 fewer than thirty collaborators were killed, but, significantly, he accepted the tribal-familial nature of West Bank society and included no local leaders among the victims for fear of a backlash. As with his wish not to alienate Arab governments, Arafat has always been reluctant to confront the Palestinian establishment. On the matter of bribes, he persisted in spending more money than Fatah could afford. Both actions backfired on him. To many local people eliminating collaborators was a step too far, and to some radicals sparing traitors just because they were leaders smacked of a bourgeois mentality. In any case, being poor, most of them resented his attempts to buy their loyalty or that of their traditional leaders.
Generally, Arafat’s behaviour in the West Bank did not detract from his overall standing with the Palestinians outside the West Bank and the rest of the Arabs. His activities gave them a much-needed psychological lift, although they created problems for Fatah insiders who were aware of the situation. Many among the Fatah command in Damascus still believed in committee rule and objected to his autocratic ways and misuse of funds. Some members rejected the elimination campaign; others lost faith in his organizing skills; and most found his huge expenditures counterproductive. Not for the first time, his traditional opponent, Khalid Al Hassan, objected that Arafat was unfit to command and demanded his removal. Al Hassan was joined by others, including Arafat’s younger brother Fathi.8 But the pro-Arafat group within Fatah, led by Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, mustered enough support and prevailed because they rightly placed considerable faith in the propaganda value of being perceived to resist – and Arafat was managing that magnificently.
It was a predictable victory which made Arafat aware of where the balance of power lay and unbothered by the debate over his behaviour; at least he was consistent, and continued in his ways. In the West Bank he promoted himself and, instead of using his real title of field commander, encouraged people to call him commander in chief of the Fatah forces. He even made false claims about the existence of thousands of people under his command in Jordan and Syria who were readying themselves to enter the West Bank. And he still tried to enlist people by offering them inflated salaries.
After three months Arafat bowed to the inevitable and withdrew from the West Bank to join most of his colleagues, who had moved from Syria to Jordan and set up camps in the Jordan valley. It was the combination of Israeli pressure on the West Bankers and their overall lack of responsiveness that threw him into King Hussein’s arms.9 Ordinarily the King would not have been unwelcoming, but his acceptance of armed guerrillas on his soil has to be judged in terms of the Arab state of mind and Arafat’s success in creating an irresistible aura around the Palestinian fighters. The conflict between the Jordanian and Palestinian identity is an inherent one and, unlike other Arab countries, Jordan had much to lose by supporting a Palestinian movement committed to wresting the West Bank from it. But the 1967 War had changed everything, and Fatah’s use of Jordan as a base was also legitimized by the decision of the Arab Summit Conference in Khartoum in September 1967. The Arab leaders, including King Hussein, agreed to bury their differences and committed themselves to no negotiations, no recognition and no peace with the Israeli state. Though not as strident as Fatah, the decision of the Arab leaders was tantamount to adopting the idea of an armed struggle, and they followed Arafat’s lead. These considerations left King Hussein with no choice but to accept the presence in Jordan of a force over which he had no control.
Behind the scenes the Arab leaders realized that the 1967 War had changed the nature of the Arab–Israeli conflict irrevocably in favour of Israel. But, as in the aftermath of the 1948 War, they could not admit this openly for fear of alienating their people and being removed from office. Despute this, King Hussein began a series of contacts with Israeli leaders aimed at a final settlement of the Palestinian problem, the return of territories occupied in 1967 and the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement. Using the excuse that he could not deliver peace by himself, the Israelis turned him down. This limited Hussein’s options.
Simultaneously, there were several moves by the UN, the USA and the USSR, all of which called for a permanent peace following an Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in the war. A more subtle and serious attempt to escape the rigid Arab attitude came from Egypt. The journalist Ahmad Baha’ Eddine, a close associate of Nasser, advocated in an article in Al Musawar magazine of 13 October 1967 the limiting of Arab ambitions to recovering the land lost in the war and the setting up of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as an interim aim. This plan, in essence an attempt to bridge the gap between the true thinking of Arab leaders and the demands of their people, died after generating more debate among intellectuals than among the Arab masses. The following November, Nasser in principle accepted United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied during the 1967 War in return for a comprehensive peace settlement; but this too was stillborn. Nasser himself diminished its chances of acceptance by trying to please the Arabs through describing it as a tactical move; the Israelis used this as an excuse and rejected it.
For Arafat, the Khartoum resolutions outweighed Hussein’s efforts, the peace proposals, Baha’ Eddine’s semi-official plan and Nasser’s personal acceptance of UNSC’s resolution 242; at least he used the three nos of Khartoum in this manner. Deciding that the Arabs were stuck with the decisions they had adopted at this conference because it was too soon to effect a radical change in direction that would be acceptable to the Arab people, he turned the rejection of the other proposals to advantage and produced two more victories to enhance the image his West Bank campaign had created. First, he expanded his propaganda efforts in Jordan and succeeded in creating an atmosphere of hope which crippled the secret contacts which King Hussein was pursuing with Israel.10 He followed this with open warnings, articulated in Fatah’s press announcements and pamphlets, against any Arab leader who would accept a negotiated peace. Second, he trumpeted the Khartoum declaration as the work of Nasser, put an end to the Baha’ Eddine suggestion and forced Nasser himself into adhering to his public stance, keeping silent on resolution 242 and speeding up his rearmament programme to plan for another war. Meanwhile, Israeli actions continued to play straight into his hands. Harsh measures were taken against refugees in Gaza: tens of thousands of them were moved to more secure camps, and many resistance fighters in detention there and in the West Bank were believed to have been executed.
Nasser needed time to rearm and he decided to establish a link with those in a position to keep the Palestinian issue in the limelight while he did so. He contacted Fatah and Arafat through his friend and adviser, the journalist Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, some time in November 1967. Heikal asked Arafat and his colleagues to continue their armed struggle and promised them Egyptian help. It was a singular triumph for Arafat’s instincts and political skills. Not only had he stopped all Arab moves towards a negotiated peace, but he had become a Palestinian leader to whom Nasser deferred.
Arafat’s success in having Nasser contact him was followed by another inevitable development to which he had contributed substantially. In December 1967 the executive committee of the PLO, acting with tacit Arab approval, finally decided to remove Shukeiri from office. The catalyst for the move was the protest resignation of Abdel Majid Shoman, the chairman of the Arab Bank, then and now the largest non-governmental financial institution in the Middle East, and at that time of inestimable value to the PLO; but many others too had decided that Shukeiri had outlived his usefulness. Shoman’s resignation confirmed the growing disaffection of the Palestinian establishment with the PLO, removed Arafat’s main competitor from his seat of power and enhanced Fatah’s position. Nevertheless the all-powerful PLO executive committee still shied from considering Arafat as a replacement for Shukeiri and elected a colourless lawyer by the name of Yahya Hammouda instead. Arafat did not protest; he knew things were going his way. He accepted Hammouda’s suggestion that Fatah should join the PLO as a member organization in the name of national unity, but not before Fatah was given 33 seats on the Palestine National Council, out of a total of 105 seats and 57 allocated to all the guerrilla groups.
Because of his commitment to Arab nationalism, Arafat’s chief competitor, George Habbash, had no option but to accept Fatah’s superior position. Suddenly Fatah was the most important component of the PLO, and in a move aimed at confirming its primacy in January 1968 Arafat invited seven guerrilla groups to join him in establishing a joint command for guerrilla action against Israel. Though most had no intention of following his lead, they had little choice but to bend to the overwhelming power of his image and accept his offer. This is what mattered to him – he regarded the fact that the proposed organization never exercised effective control as irrelevant.
Meanwhile, Arafat needed no prompting to live up to what Nasser had asked of Fatah, to keep up the pressure on Israel. He despatched groups of Palestinians to train in Egyptian military and intelligence schools. Five hundred volunteers from the West Bank were sent to training camps in Syria, Iraq and Algeria. Special emphasis was placed on the training of educated young expatriate Palestinians from Europe and other countries. Fatah’s money-raising activities in the oil-rich states were intensified and became more successful than ever. It established firm links with Palestinian workers’, students’, professional and women’s organizations throughout the Middle East. Within Jordan itself, Fatah training centres were opened in several refugee camps.
Raids against Israel from Jordan, Lebanon and occasionally Syria were increased. Arafat was behind every single move, and most of the time it was as if the other groups did not exist. Nine out of ten Fatah followers who infiltrated Israel were either killed or captured and their training was still poor, but Arafat the military commander would not stop and personally joined some of the forays to encourage others. His men bombed markets, attacked border posts, dynamited telephone lines, stopped some Israeli farmers from harvesting their crops and stirred up urban protests and strikes.
Compared to guerrilla movements in other parts of the world Arafat’s campaign was not producing many casualties, but the numbers were still too high for Israel. His activities were unbalancing the country and costing it a great deal of money at a time when it could not afford it. Foolishly Israel responded in a disproportionate way, by blowing up the homes of suspected guerrillas, imprisoning hundreds of people and crossing the River Jordan to attack guerrilla bases. The Israelis were playing into Arafat’s hands: the harsher their measures, the more they confirmed the soundness of his judgement.
Between December 1967 and the end of February 1968 the Israelis increased their attacks on the Fatah encampments across the River Jordan. Using a combination of commando raids and their unopposed air force indiscriminately, they inflicted heavy losses on both the estimated thousand guerrillas belonging to all groups and on the civilian population. Arafat the courageous military leader with a human touch was there after every raid, inspecting the rubble of destroyed buildings, comforting the wounded and the families of victims, and urging people to hold the line. One of the towns subjected to repeated Israeli attacks was Karameh. Located on the main road connecting the West Bank with Jordan, it had been a small village until 1948 when refugees made a large camp there and trebled the number of its inhabitants. Karameh means dignity in Arabic and its name, together with its strategic position and the presence of refugees, contributed to Arafat’s decision to make his headquarters there with his three hundred Fatah fighters.
On 15 February 1968 the Israelis attacked the town with heavy shelling and air raids, which killed an unknown number of civilians including several schoolgirls.11 As usual with this type of Israeli activity, the results were the opposite of what was intended: the Karameh-based guerrillas increased their raids into Israel and fired more rockets against Israeli positions across the Jordan. Israeli frustration began to show when they planned a major operation aimed at the total eradication of the guerrilla presence in Karameh. Arrogantly, they made no effort to keep their plans secret. News of their extensive preparations, which included the presence of heavy armour and thousands of soldiers, was transmitted to Arafat by the Jordanian government, his own raiders and Palestinian sympathizers in the occupied West Bank.
Arafat was now faced with one of the major military decisions of his career. The Jordanians, including the pro-Fatah divisional commander of the Jordanian Arab army, Major General Mashour Haditha Al Jazzi, advised him to withdraw to the hills to avoid military confrontation. They were supported in their view by many members of the Fatah leadership and most of the Palestinian guerrilla groups operating under the ephemeral joint command structure including the Arab nationalists – the former ANM who, in keeping with their new commitment to armed struggle, had changed their name to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Everybody argued that the avoidance of confrontation was intrinsic to guerrilla tactics, cited the teachings of Mao and Giap, together with facts and figures about Israeli strength and the results of the 1967 War, and believed that holding a conventional military line would play into the hands of the Israelis. Arafat would not budge. He saw any withdrawal as an acceptance of defeat, which would cancel his achievements and tarnish his image. ‘We want to convince the world that there are those in the Arab world who will not withdraw or flee,’ was his final answer.12 His stubbornness was clever and studied, aimed at maintaining his reputation, inspiring his fighting men, appealing to the Arab world beyond and fostering his new position. For though the PFLP and others withdrew their contingents, the Jordanian army bowed to his will to avoid accusations of cowardice and prepared to offer him help.
On the night of 21 March, the Israelis struck in force. Paratroops, tanks, armoured personnel carriers, helicopter gunships, jet fighters and bombers were used in the biggest single military action since the 1967 War. General Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Minister of Defence, predicted that the whole operation would be over in hours,13 but the Israelis were in for a surprise. The ill-trained and poorly equipped Palestinians heroically held their ground and used the rocky terrain effectively against an estimated fifteen thousand-strong Israeli force. For a few hours the Palestinians fought alone, compensating for their lack of heavy weaponry with impressive improvisations and dramatic individual sacrifices. The Jordanian artillery and armoured units stayed behind and held their fire, but when the pressure on the guerrillas intensified, the Jordanian field commander, General Al Jazzi, took the initiative and ordered his troops into the fray.14 At this point, the Israelis decided not to press their attack and withdrew. The Jordanian artillery destroyed some of the bridges behind them and inflicted considerable damage.15
The statistical results of the attack on Karameh indicated an Israeli victory. They had suffered twenty-eight dead and seventy wounded while Fatah had lost over a hundred men, the Jordanians twenty, and there were many more Arab wounded. But Arafat and his fighters had made their point, and left an indelible mark on the history of the modern Middle East. The Arabs had performed much better than in 1948 and 1967: an equivalent loss ratio during these wars would have made them prohibitive for Israel and might have led to its containment or even defeat. Furthermore, whatever the casualty figures, the manner of the Israeli withdrawal (they left behind at least one tank, an armoured personnel carrier and several trucks) supported the emerging picture of triumphant resistance. To reinforce this image Fatah paraded with relish what the Israelis had left behind, and stories of individual heroism, including the death of seventeen Palestine fighters who had refused to surrender after being forced into a cave, restored a shattered Arab sense of karameh.
Before delving into the substantial results of the real, propaganda and psychological victory of Arafat and his men, the question of Arafat’s personal performance during the battle, a hotly disputed element in previous reports and biographies, needs to be answered. The Israelis and later some Jordanians (former Prime Minister Zeid Al Rifai’) have claimed that he fled.16 This is not true. Not only are there many supporters who testify that he fought bravely and constantly urged his soldiers on during the battle, but Israeli intelligence sources appear to confirm this.17 Moreover, not only has the man never lacked for courage, but had he run away this would have been publicized by his many Palestinian competitors and critics and in particular the PFLP, who suffered because they withdrew their forces. George Habbash, who was away in China during the battle, would certainly have pointed this out. More tellingly, even Arafat’s severest detractors, those who have become critical of him because of his later behaviour, testify that he led his men bravely during the battle. The veteran correspondent John Cooley has documented the fact that Arafat personally supervised the defence preparations prior to the attack.18 Lastly, he, Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad later used their command roles during the battle of Karameh to advantage and, whatever Arafat’s propensity for hyperbole, he would have been reluctant to endanger his credentials and career through open lying.
However impressive his battlefield performance, Arafat’s propaganda made more of it than the facts justified, both in terms of what was needed to enhance the reputation of Palestinian fighters and of building a personality cult around himself. In no time at all, the alleys of refugee camps and the streets of Amman, Damascus, Beirut and other Arab capitals were full of pictures of the martyrs of Karameh and, more interestingly, of their leader. The same pictures, though not displayed publicly, found their way into many homes in the West Bank and Gaza.
In the photos Arafat occasionally wore a cap, but more often he was under his kuffiya, painstakingly shaped, whenever time allowed, to resemble the map of Palestine – the exercise took nearly an hour every morning. He donned the American-style sunglasses, which gave him an air of mystery and which he still wore indoors, and he was in military fatigues. In many photos he carried a stick, an improvised field marshal’s baton; not only did it distinguish him from people around him, it was also something which he could use constantly as a symbol of his power and to point out the locations of heroic acts or Israeli atrocities. Hidden from people, but always around his neck, was a pendant containing a sura from the Koran. And though he was without the now standard stubble, he soon became a familiar face and name throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world. He was Mr Palestine, the man who symbolized the country and its people.
To the pictures of heroism which lifted the gloom of the Arab masses, he added slogans which immortalized the occasion. ‘If I Fall Take My Place’, ‘I Am Fidai [self-sacrificer]’, ‘The Palestinians Are a Revolution’, ‘Revolution until Victory’, ‘We Shall Return (‘Adoun)’ and ’In Soul and Blood We Sacrifice for Palestine’ replaced the inter-Arab recriminations over the 1967 defeat. It was a propaganda blitz similar to that which accompanied the deeds of the RAF during the Battle of Britain in 1940, and it created an image which troubled the conscience of the world.
Arafat himself supervised the propaganda effort, all the way from the down-to-earth call to arms to the use of the kuffiya by his men in every picture and the selection of the self-aggrandizing photographs of himself. He showed exceptional talent and was inventive enough to become a natural interpreter of what his Arab audience wanted and an instinctive manipulator of the international media. For example, unlike him his fighters wore their kuffiyas around their necks instead of on their heads; this is the way a shamed desert Arab wears his kuffiya until avenged. Among other inspiring resorts to symbolism, this clever cultural association hooked into his ‘Revolution until Victory’ and other slogans. Unlike the propaganda effort surrounding his infiltration of the West Bank, the difficult publicity task of turning defeat into victory, this time he actually had something to celebrate. He had been vindicated; coming after his successful efforts to intercept Arab moves towards peace and to have Arab leaders defer to him, his decision to stand and fight gave him a stunning victory. The world’s media provided the rest: an interview with Arafat became a much sought after journalistic coup and he studiously divided his time between reporters on the basis of their national origins.
After Karameh, volunteers from all over the Arab world flocked to Jordan to join Fatah. Ten thousand Egyptians rushed to the Fatah offices in their country to offer their services.19 Small numbers of Germans, Scandinavians, French, South Americans and nationals of other non-Arab countries were also drawn to Arafat’s magnet. Arafat was an easy name to pronounce and remember, and so was Fatah. To the Arabs, the religious background to both names (Arafat is the mountain from whose top Muslims making the hajj stone the devil, and Fatah was a religious conquest) recalled visions of glory destroyed by the 1967 War but still dormant in the damaged recesses of their historical memory. To a world tiring of Israeli victories and sledgehammer tactics, the two easy, memorable names became a symbol which transcended the realities of what had happened in a small, dusty town in the middle of nowhere.
Moreover, the celebration of Arafat and Fatah went beyond appealing to the damaged Arab psyche on street level and to revolutionaries, leftists and adventurers from all over the world. The Palestinian establishment in the West Bank and elsewhere joined the refugee camps in recognizing the existence of a new national movement to fill the vacuum created by the destruction of the old ones that the Mufti and Shukeiri had represented. Not a single Arab leader, regardless of his true feelings, could do anything but appear to support Arafat and his fighters. Some Arab governments stepped up their financial contributions and encouraged the collection of money for Fatah by non-governmental organizations. Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other wealthy countries contributed unknown millions of dollars in direct assistance, and Arab businessmen everywhere competed with each other in the lavishness of their generosity. Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Egypt expanded the guerrillas’ training facilities. From 1969, help came from the new governments of the Sudan and Libya, which had been taken over by General Ja’afar Numeiri and Colonel Qaddafi respectively. Donations and offers of assistance came from as far away as Pakistan and Malaysia. Even the man who had most to lose, the aspirant to West Bank and Palestinian leadership, King Hussein, pretended to have been behind the decision of his army to fight, gave Fatah his unqualified support and declared: ‘We have come to the point where we are all fedayeen.’20
Arafat was always a much better military commander and propagandist than organizer. For while he managed to expand the ranks of Fatah hugely, and the presence of foreign volunteers made his troops sound like an international brigade, both the training and organizing of the new volunteers was woefully deficient and Fatah’s structure could not cope. Arafat monopolized the business of meeting the hundreds of new recruits. He ensured that he was photographed shaking their hands and embracing them, and resented others doing it. He went further and started a militarily nonsensical programme to train ten-to thirteen-year-old refugee children. The idea had good propaganda value, but he seemed more interested in that aspect than in the actual training and began dismissing the advice of Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad. He paid more attention to image-creating than to building a sound military structure or incorporating the thousands of new members into a military system that could live up to that image. In fact, the influx of the new volunteers destroyed whatever organizational hard core had existed before and contained obvious security dangers, particularly in using people from the West Bank and Gaza. He also continued to spend money without the slightest attempt to establish sensible financial controls or a system of accountability. According to a former colleague who wished to remain anonymous, most of the money Arafat sent to the families of those who lost their lives fighting in Karameh never reached them because Arafat loyalists pocketed it. Once again Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad and others complained, but stopped short of challenging Arafat openly.
He still favoured cronies, sycophants and members of leading Palestinian families and placed them in key positions at the expense of more competent people. Even though he continued to work a twenty-hour day, he found time to visit Amman to meet wealthy Palestinians to add to the list of those he had cultivated before. He was always at home in the company of the rich and influential, and easily talked them into making contributions or increasing payments. In Jordan as in Kuwait, his appeal to them was always embodied in one specific fact: unlike other groups, he was not conducting an ideological struggle which excluded their class and saddled old political families with the consequences of social decay which weakened the fabric of Palestinian society and its ability to fight Israel. His favourite saying was: ‘The revolution belongs to all of us.’ But he still thought Fatah could succeed without taking positions on social issues and inter-Arab conflicts, and, as ever, he could not be bothered with organization. Almost in spite of Arafat, Abu Iyad addressed himself to organizing Fatah’s intelligence apparatus while Abu Jihad tried his best to improve the level of military training.
The effect Karameh had on the Arab masses and those willing to fight for the Palestinian cause was coupled with a dramatic change in Arafat’s fortunes within Fatah, the PLO and the larger Arab arena. If success has a thousand fathers, Arab successes have many more. Immediately after Karameh a number of Fatah members, chief among them one Mohammed Msweida, began issuing communiqués about their role in the battle and claiming credit for successful raids into Israel which were supposed to have followed it. Although Arafat received most of the credit, this competition for headlines threatened to undermine Fatah’s overall achievement. The Damascus-based Fatah leadership, though uneasy about some of Arafat’s activities, wisely stepped in and appointed him the organization’s official spokesman. From then on only he could issue communiqués, military and otherwise, and every item of news carrying the imprint of Al Assifa, the military wing of Fatah, had to have his personal approval. The control of information was added to his control of the Fatah finances, which placed him in an unassailable position of personal leadership which suited him and which he used most effectively. After Karameh there was no way to criticize Arafat, even for the two men closest to him, without damaging the image of the Palestinian resistance and the cause it represented. Unfortunately the veto on criticism merely encouraged Arafat to overlook his lamentable shortcomings.
Arafat has always been proud of his manipulative abilities and was determined to continue to be all things to all Arab leaders. Karameh left the conservative regimes with no choice but to bow to the feelings of their people, but in this case responding to their people also suited them. They followed their people’s wish to support Fatah because it provided them with a way out of their obligations to the Palestinian cause, through committing what amounted to a financial act of absolution. Moreover, given that the newly acknowledged leader of the Palestinian cause had no interest in regional and social issues, Arafat was not a threat to them. Some Arab leaders saw another reason to back Arafat: they wanted to administer a final blow to the one leader still capable of undermining them, Nasser. Saudi Arabia led the way: the government grants and popular donations were followed by the imposition of a 7 per cent tax on the income of Palestinians working in that country, which was remitted to Fatah. Kuwait and the Gulf States followed suit, and all the conservative regimes began allocating air time on their radio and television stations to publicize the achievements of Fatah. It was support without direct involvement, and at its core was acceptance of Fatah’s notion that the Palestinians were capable of liberating their country.
Arafat assessed the reasons for their help correctly. The Arab leaders’ wish to appease their people and to reduce Nasser enabled him to extract the maximum concessions from them, but as ever without appearing subservient. The calls on their generosity were disguised demands rather than appeals from a needy party. According to a former Fatah leader, Arafat couched everything in positive terms, and instead of threatening Arab leaders told them that increased donations would predispose him to praise them. Most of the grants and other gestures made by these regimes were announced after Arafat’s visits to their countries, and each was made to look like a personal victory for him. His penchant for publicity never allowed announcements of new Arab aid to be made until he had attached them to a story which told of his uncanny ability to represent the Palestinian cause. For example, a substantial Kuwaiti donation was accompanied by a story about how the Emir of that country had cried after hearing of the heroism of Karameh fighters who had attacked an Israeli tank with nothing but stones in their hands. And, of course, pictures of Arab leaders receiving Arafat and embracing in the manner of a victorious hero were used on a regular basis.
Iraq and Syria, though reluctant to cede Arab primacy in the conflict with Israel to an exclusively Palestinian entity, also responded to the pressure of their people and accepted Fatah. However, both regimes saw this as an interim step towards an eventual integration of the Palestinian resistance into a larger Arab scheme. Syria in particular never relinquished its control of Palestinian groups capable of supplanting Fatah; it increased its support for the competing Al Saiqa guerrillas and forced Fatah to share training facilities with others. Not to be outdone, the Iraqis too redoubled support for their home-grown Palestine Liberation Front and positioned it as an alternative to Fatah with a commitment to the larger Arab struggle. However, whatever their misgivings about Arafat, neither country could escape providing him with support. The success of his propaganda machine made denying him Arab help tantamount to treason, and he accepted whatever they offered him without reluctance or argument over the differences between him and the donors. By mid-1968 most of his assistants were devoting a considerable part of their time to publicity work, and the Fatah renaissance was attributed to the energies of one man.
The biggest problem for Fatah was its relations with Jordan and Nasser. In Jordan, Arafat’s success made the King uneasy over the possible loss of the West Bank, which he still claimed as part of his country. The Jordanian people and their King had difficulty reconciling support for the guerrillas with their anti-social attitudes and lack of discipline, which represented a threat to the authority of the state. The pride that Karameh gave Palestinian guerrilla groups was used by some of them to justify thuggish behaviour. A couple of months after the battle, on 28 May 1968, a serious clash occurred between the guerrillas and the Jordanian army, when armed Palestinians raided a police station to free some of their comrades who had been detained for criminal activities including theft. The ensuing firefight resulted in an unknown number of dead and wounded and a Jordanian government crisis which led to the resignation of the cabinet. After that, confrontations between the two sides became regular occurrences, but most people still maintained their overall support for Arafat and his men. The government of Jordan, with two-thirds of its population of Palestinian origin, was too weak to do anything else.
The one Arab leader who could still block Fatah’s and Arafat’s claim to primacy in the fight against Israel was Nasser. The Egyptian leader continued to command an unrivalled street following and he was both fascinated and taken aback by what had happened. Nasser was an army officer who could accurately judge Israeli military strength and what had happened at Karameh, but he was also a master propagandist who appreciated the significance of Arafat’s achievement and the need to go along with it. To biographer Jean Lacouture, ‘He couldn’t watch without anguish the rising star of a man who might sooner or later become what he had been from 1956 to 1967.’21 Whatever misgivings Nasser had, he was always honest when it came to admitting defeat. He swallowed his pride and invited Arafat to Cairo.
During their first meeting, which was arranged by Mohammed Hassanein Heikal and which Arafat attended accompanied by two Fatah stalwarts, Abu Iyad and Farouk Qaddoumi, Nasser ironically asked Arafat, ‘How many years do you need to destroy Israel and set up your state?’22 When the Palestinian leader had no answer, Nasser told him to think about peace23 and advised him to consider a Palestinian state comprising the West Bank and Gaza. Prophetic as his words were, Nasser knew that peace was elusive and unacceptable to the Arab people, to whose wishes he always responded and tried to defer, and this made him follow up with several magnanimous moves. First, Nasser advised Arafat to maintain the independence of Fatah and to keep it out of Arab entanglements. Then he had the name of the Voice of Palestine radio broadcasts from Cairo changed to Sawt Al Assifa (Voice of the Storm, the Fatah military organization) and gave control of this apparatus to Fatah to use as it wished. Thirdly, Nasser attempted to push Fatah on to the international stage and invited the Palestinian leader to join him on a planned visit to Moscow.
Although Arafat never lost sight of the need to live with the two other Arab camps – the conservatives, and Syria and Iraq – everything Nasser did pleased him. His true reaction to the idea of making peace and creating a state in the West Bank and Gaza is not a matter of record, but he assured Nasser that Fatah would remain above Arab feuds, promised judicious use of the radio facilities and accepted the invitation to Moscow as a member of an official Egyptian delegation, carrying an Egyptian passport and using the name of Muhsin Amin. By all accounts, Arafat appreciated Nasser’s generosity, liked him and, most unusually for him, trusted him. He addressed him as ‘Mr President’ while Nasser, although only fifty-two, assumed a fatherly role and called the thirty-eight-year-old Palestinian ‘Yasser’. In Moscow in July 1968, Nasser went out of his way to ensure that Arafat was accorded special treatment.24 The two men’s need of each other transcended the differences in their thinking and became a strategic alliance. Arafat was free to act, while Nasser rebuilt his army and made up his mind.
The elevation of Arafat by Nasser was followed by his de facto promotion to Fatah leadership. Unable to deny his value and effectiveness as a leader and as their designated official spokesman, his detractors within Fatah joined his supporters and began referring to him as ‘The Leader’ and on occasions as ‘The Old Man’. This fell short, however, of his being a confirmed, elected leader or a chief executive, and even his closest associates thought of Fatah as subject to the decisions of an executive committee made up of ten members of the old guard. They refused to accept the paramountcy of one individual. Despite that, there was no way to stop Arafat; money and publicity had elevated him and everything he did took that into consideration. Fatah itself was still more of a symbol than a military fact, and it was Arafat, the visible, memorable face of Fatah, who was the physical embodiment of this symbol and what it stood for. His was the voice heard by the Palestinians, the Arabs and the world beyond. Before 1968 was out he had been on the cover of Time magazine and was being referred to as ‘the leader of the Palestinian guerrillas’; and the French government under General de Gaulle had become the first major non-Arab country to accept a permanent Fatah representative. With his Fatah base secure and with his recognition by the rest of the world gaining momentum, the time to assume leadership of all Palestinian resistance groups – and there were more than 30 of them – had come. The part-time soldier turned a partial military victory into a huge diplomatic one. Leadership of the PLO was his for the asking, and he had to decide between supplanting an organization backed by the Arab countries or assuming its leadership. When he opted for the latter course of action, Arafat took a major step towards compromising Fatah’s original independent position, tilted towards accepting indirect control of his movement by the Arab states, and made interference in their internal affairs inevitable. Once again the chameleon had changed his colours.
Arafat’s assumption of the chairmanship of the PLO in February 1969, though an inevitable move which was arrived at in stages, was ‘legalized’ by the fourth Palestine National Council which convened in Cairo for this purpose. Yahya Hammouda, the interregnum chairman, ceded the reins to Arafat and stepped aside. The event took place against a background of considerable myth-making and genuine activities which explain a great deal about Arafat’s future behaviour and the way he eventually controlled all decision-making and concentrated power in his hands. Significantly, the same meeting which confirmed him as chairman of the PLO amended the Palestinian National Charter adopted in Jerusalem in 1964 by replacing the commitment to Arab nationalism (kawmia) with a reference to Palestinian statehood (watania).
Using his new official status without restraint or consideration for the thinking and feelings of others, in particular without consulting King Hussein, Arafat now ordered several thousand members of the Palestine Liberation Army to move to Jordan. The King had no option but to accede to the move, and followed his tacit acceptance of it by arranging to meet Arafat for the first time – a curiously late event in view of the latter’s position as the uncrowned King of the Palestinians within Hussein’s own country. It was obvious that Arafat was still trying to reconcile the conflicting elements in Fatah’s philosophy while charting the direction of the Palestinians with total disregard for the requirements of other governments and what was acceptable to the Arab people.
Shortly before he became PLO chairman Arafat gave five interviews to a three-man reporting team from Time magazine, which eventually appeared as a cover story on 15 December 1968. Because he repeated and embellished what he had said in other interviews, and because his picture on the cover of Time was the largest single publicity event in his experience so far, the statements he made, coming when they did, amounted to a close – range examination of the emerging Palestinian leader which revealed more about the man and his myth-making than ever before.
The first thing noticed by the Time interviewers (whose unedited file has been made available to me) was Arafat’s desire to look and behave like a general. With his sunglasses on, he reminded one of them of General Douglas MacArthur and his Second World War promise of returning to conquered territory, while another interviewer compared him with a latter-day Saladin fighting the infidels. Arafat interrupted the questioning repeatedly to issue orders, sign little pieces of paper and receive people who whispered in his ear and received knowing nods in return. Everything was in his hands. He moved stiffly in the manner of an officer and sat diminutively behind a large desk with a detailed map of Palestine as a backdrop. He wanted to give the impression of someone conducting a war, someone in the middle of battle, and when followers interrupted the interviews he dramatically pointed to spots on the map.
On the subject of the leadership of Fatah and the Palestinians, Arafat sounded as if he was protesting too much. Objecting to personal glorification, he repeatedly refused to answer questions about his background and insisted that Fatah was a movement and not one person. ‘I am only a soldier,’ he said several times. But when pressed to clarify his personal history, he rehashed old stories about being born in Jerusalem and how he had fought there during the 1948 War. He refused to answer any questions about Fatah’s finances and who controlled them, including a specific one about whether Fatah was run by a syndicate of wealthy Palestinians. His evasion of issues took the form of turning them into jokes or light-heated anecdotes, or into redirecting them to the interviewers: ‘You should write about Israeli attacks on our civilians instead of asking about what I might do in the future.’ He refused to answer questions as to whether Israeli civilian targets were legitimate. The most he would say was that the Israelis did not discriminate; he recited a number of valid examples and supported them with statistics and pictures. His talents as a story-teller and his command of detail, including the dates and even the time of day when the attacks had taken place, were most impressive.
During the first interview he would not answer questions about his connection to the Husseinis of Jerusalem. When the question was repeated, he insisted that he was one of them, a member of the Gaza branch of the family. When the Time interviewers later asked the Mufti for confirmation, he supported Arafat’s claim. After some digging prompted by the recollections of many old Jerusalemites who refuted the statements of the old and new Palestinian leaders, the correspondents concluded that the Mufti had his own reasons for not telling the truth. Recognizing that his leadership days were over, the Mufti’s answer was no more than a pretence that Palestinian leadership was still ‘in the family’. This encouraged Arafat’s persistence in advancing this myth and strengthened the bond of a conservative, anti-ideological commitment to Palestinian identity between the two men.
The most interesting part of the interviews dealt with Arafat’s view of his position vis à vis the rest of the Arab leaders. To him they were all ‘brothers’, and he steadfastly refused to hold any of their past history or political decisions against them. ‘The Palestinian problem is an Arab problem which preoccupies all Arab leaders,’ was the way he put it. Regardless of their ideology or behaviour, he held the same attitude towards the thirty or more Palestinian groups operating in Jordan at the time. Obviously he favoured consensus, particularly at a time when all Arab leaders and Palestinian groups seemed to be supporting him. There was a measure of glibness in dismissing what other guerrilla groups advocated and how they behaved: ‘We have the same aim, the liberation of Palestine.’ His own idea of how he was going to achieve victory through marshalling Arab power and resources was judged to be vague, confused and inadequate. He had a goal but no plan to achieve it, on either the Palestinian or Arab level.
Arafat’s attitude towards the United States and the Western powers surprised his interviewers. He studiously stopped short of accusing them of supporting Israel in a way which justified labelling them an indirect enemy. He still used words similar to those of other Arab leaders, even to the extent of appealing to Western leaders to follow even-handed policies: ‘All we want from them is neutrality.’ The United States was a great power: ‘I almost went there, you know.’ He overlooked Nasser’s quarrels with the West and appeared to believe that Western interests dictated neutrality in the Arab–Israeli conflict. Arafat showed little understanding or appreciation of the history and reasons for Western backing for Israel. To him, backing Israel was harmful to Arab relations with the West, and that came before other considerations.
Above all, it was in his discourses on Palestinian suffering that he made the most impression. He had pictures of Israeli bombings, of houses which had been razed, of weeping widows and mutilated bodies, together with the names and ages of victims. His voice would go lower and thicken and he would stutter with obvious emotion when talking about them. His conclusions were equally impressive: all he wanted was for ‘the Palestinians to be like other people and have no need for Arafat’.
To the Time interviewers he was a guerrilla leader, an intense and committed advocate of an armed struggle against an undoubtedly superior force. He was not especially charismatic – his looks and unworldiness were barriers – but his manner was extremely attractive and he made a sympathetic spokesman for his people. Even when using a translator, his gestures and sad smiles told a lot. Considering the atmosphere which existed throughout the Middle East and the absence of a viable alternative, despite the occasional promotion of a lie he was the best the Palestinians, the Arabs and the West could hope for.
Late in 1968 Arafat expanded Fatah’s presence in Syria, and he moved hundreds more of his ill-trained and poorly led fighters into Lebanon where he set up a command centre in the Fakhani district of Beirut. His raids into Israel from Lebanon and occasional forays from Syria produced results similar to the ones conducted from Jordan. Though Arafat’s men were willing to continue to infiltrate Israel and die doing it, their military performance was hampered by Israel’s use of Bedouin trackers, the building of an electric fence on the Jordanian side, the existence of informers on the Lebanese border and the Syrian government’s wish to control the guerrillas. That they existed mattered more than what they achieved. Judged by Fatah’s own figures, which changed frequently, there were more than four thousand raids in 1967 and a probably exaggerated nine hundred Israeli dead and wounded. The raids and the Israeli reactions to them served their purpose of maintaining Fatah’s image for Arafat and giving Nasser time.
Simultaneously, in November 1968 the PFLP, operating under the direction of Habbash’s associate Dr Wadi’ Haddad, better known to Palestinians as ‘The Master’, carried out the first of many spectacular plane hijackings: an El Al plane flying from Rome to Tel Aviv was directed to Algeria. A month later the PFLP attacked an Israeli aircraft at Athens airport. The Israelis refused to accede to the demand to release Palestinian fighters in their prisons and retaliated by attacking Beirut airport and destroying thirteen parked aircraft. The Lebanese were being drawn into the conflict without having any say in the matter.
In Jordan, their stronghold, many of the Fatah fighters and most of the guerrillas belonging to other groups had moved into the major cities and turned themselves into unruly armed gangs beyond the control of the local authorities. King Hussein had a difficult time controlling his Bedouin army, and many Jordanian politicians called for the reimposition of discipline and the rule of law to keep the frequent clashes between the guerrillas and his soldiers under control. In Lebanon something similar was happening. The clashes between Arafat’s men and the Lebanese security forces caused many deaths, government crises and serious divisions within a country whose political structure, based as it was on delicate sectarian divisions, could not accommodate too much stress.
The intercession of Nasser favoured Arafat and kept both situations under control. In November 1969 the Egyptian leader brokered what became known as the Cairo Agreement between Arafat and the Lebanese government: it guaranteed Arafat considerable freedom to use Lebanese soil to attack Israel. The combined popularity of the Egyptian leader and the overwhelming Palestinian presence stopped Jordan from curtailing the activities of the Palestinians. Nasser still needed him.
It was remarkable that Arafat managed to ride the results of Karameh and assume the leadership of the PLO at a time when the unsoundness of his policies, the results of his lack of organization and the presence of a hooligan fringe among his fighters were beginning to take their toll. His fighters in Syria could not misbehave because they were under the strict control of that state and its army; but the ones in Jordan were out of control, while in Lebanon the Palestinians were creating a ‘country’ of their own which they named the Fakhani Republic after the area in Beirut which they occupied. Arafat’s disinclination to control other factions of the Palestinian resistance, and his attachment to consensus among the Palestinians, was exposed and undermined by the hijacking to Algeria and the worldwide damage it inflicted on the Palestinian image. Nor did the Israeli retaliation endear him and his Palestinian fighters to the suffering Lebanese. The behaviour of his men within Jordan, totally inexcusable and guaranteed to alienate most of the Jordanians, was a taste of worse things to come.
Amazingly, the course of events produced no serious response in Arafat. His concerns were still the continuation of the raids against Israel, imposing himself on the PLO and consolidating his control over it. Under pressure from some of his close associates, including Abu Iyad and Aby Jihad, he created two organizations to coordinate action between the various guerrilla groups and to control the behaviour of Palestinian fighters in Jordan and Lebanon. But the idea of making the Unified Command of Palestinian Resistance and the Palestinian Armed Struggle Command effective, like the idea of organizing anything, never engaged him. He gave up on both without offering them enough backing.
In late 1968 and early 1969 the raids into Israel increased to over 120 a month. In 1969 Nasser started a war of attrition against Israel, sending commando raids of substantial size and effectiveness across the Suez Canal. But the Israelis responded with punishing air raids deep into Egypt. The Egyptian efforts to engage Israel were soon proving too costly. Along with an Arab inability to establish an eastern front – a joint command incorporating the armies of Syria, Iraq and Egypt – the Egyptian failure enlarged the image of the Palestinian resistance. Arafat was justified in his assertion that his were the only effective forces battling Israel, and continued to have a ready Arab audience.25
Within the PLO, Arafat used the divisions in the PFLP, which was split into three different groups, to reduce their representation in the Palestine National Council to 20 per cent of the seats; he also relegated other groups to the status of marginal also-rans.26 Arafat’s dominance over the PFLP capitalized on its narrow ideological base and its rejection by most Arab states, and was aided by the split with Nasser over its objections to his moves towards peace and its involvement in hijackings. After subduing the PFLP and prevailing over its popular but uncompromising leader, George Habbash, Arafat initiated moves to turn the PLA into a guerrilla fighting force beholden to him and ended its semi-independent status as a regular army. Everything he did was aimed at gaining undivided control of the PLO and, by continuing the raids, at enhancing his reputation as leader of the Palestinian resistance. By mid-1969 he had achieved both of these goals.
The heroism of the fighters who kept Arafat’s claim to undivided Palestinian leadership intact could not diminish the pressure on him to change his ways in line with the thinking of the Arab countries and the international community. Early in 1969, in a curious move which again exposed Arafat’s Islamic inclinations, he and Abu Iyad founded a Fatah offshoot called Islamic Fatah.27 But the negative reaction to this organization on the Palestinian and Arab level forced them to disband it. Soon afterwards, bowing to Arab pressure, Arafat publicly and for the first time announced his opposition to hijackings. These concessions fell short, however, of convincing him of the need for a united guerrilla movement. Then, in a crucial decision, he dealt Habbash another defeat when he rejected a PFLP approach to unite with Fatah because Habbash had demanded sharing and strict control of funds.
Beyond the Palestinian sphere, whatever hope Arafat had of his raids producing an Israeli response which would lead to a recognition of Palestinian identity vanished when Golda Meir became Israeli Prime Minister in March 1969 and declared that ‘there are no Palestinian people’.28 Soon afterwards, on 31 July, Nasser accepted the basic principles of the peace plan drawn up by the US Secretary of State William Rogers, which called for a comprehensive solution to the Arab – Israeli problem based on the principle of land for peace.
Acting before thinking, Arafat used the Cairo-based Sawt Al Assifa radio to attack Nasser’s acceptance of the Rogers Plan. Utterly shocked, Nasser retaliated by shutting the radio station down. However, once again a random incident came to Arafat’s help when a crazed Christian fundamentalist, Michael Rohan, set fire to the Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem. The outcry in the Arab and Muslim worlds drowned the Arafat–Nasser feud and led to the convening of a Muslim heads of state conference in Morocco, which produced calls for saving the Muslim holy places in Palestine and promises of support for those who were most actively fighting for Jerusalem.
Despite the reprieve, Arafat’s reaction to peace moves by Nasser and other Arab leaders exposed the fact that he was operating on two conflicting levels. For it was Arafat, to his people the uncompromising Palestinian leader smarting from the blows of Meir and Nasser, who was making his own moves towards meeting the international requirements towards peace. At first secretly, but later openly, Arafat called for the creation in Palestine of a democratic state of Muslims, Christians and Jews.29 The idea had been advanced by a small offshoot of the PFLP, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) in 1968. The carefully formulated DFLP plan was genuinely based on egalitarian socialist beliefs, but Arafat aimed his version of it at ‘freeing the Jews from the yoke of Zionism’. In responding to criticism of a move which contradicted his avowed total liberation policy, he later described his democratic state idea as an attempt to blunt the criticism of those who worried about the total butchering of the Jews of Israel.
The attractive but impractical call for a multi-religious democratic state was less telling than the secret negotiations taking place in Paris between one of Arafat’s trusted lieutenants, Nabil Sha’ath, and Lora Elian of Israel’s Labour party.30 What these negotiators discussed remains wrapped in secrecy to this day, but whatever it was it certainly ran counter to Arafat’s declared aims and exposed his cynicism. Palestinians were fighting and dying because he had promised them total victory. Considering that he was conducting secret negotiations with Israel aimed at a compromise, his objections to Nasser’s and Hussein’s acceptance of the Rogers Plans meant only that he wanted to be the sole arbiter and custodian of the fate of his people.
Meanwhile, the results of his legendary lack of ideology and organization were a living contradiction of what Fatah had espoused openly. The vague line he drew between remaining independent and working with the Arab countries became fainter when he accepted the chairmanship of a PLO which needed Arab financial support and had to accommodate the Arab governments more than Fatah had ever done. The behaviour of his followers in Lebanon and Jordan was clear interference in the affairs of two Arab countries. In fact, the presence of thousands of armed men in Jordan ostensibly to fight Israel but beyond the control of Arafat represented a greater threat than Israel to King Hussein and Jordanian stability, while what was happening in Lebanon posed a risk to the delicate balance of the country but affected the Israelis rather less.
Terrorism overseas and hijackings, though committed by other groups, became commonplace and Arafat did nothing to stop them. His lack of attention to detail allowed Fatah and other groups to be infiltrated by the Israelis.31 The secret negotiations between Nabil Sha’ath and the Israelis, unreported for several years, made a mockery of his ‘Revolution until Victory’ slogan. That he spoke with a firm Palestinian voice and stood in the way of others deciding the fate of the Palestinian people is undoubtedly true; along with continuing to fight Israel, this undoubtedly endeared him to his people and made him an acceptable leader. But it is impossible to speculate positively or negatively on what might have happened had he not achieved this and had the Palestinian issue reverted to the direct custodianship of the Arab governments. There were two achievements in this period which are beyond question: his capture of the limelight and the attention which he drew to the Palestinians’ plight. But, perhaps more tellingly, the organization he commanded was flabby, corrupt and unprepared for the task which it purported to face.