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

Karama was a small battle with a long shadow. It lasted a single day and ended with the attackers going home, yet it changed the balance between the Palestinian guerrilla movement, the Arab states and Israel for years to come. Its name, Arabic for dignity, became part of the story.²

Who won the Battle of Karameh and why?

Each side could claim something. Israel reached and destroyed the guerrilla base and withdrew the same day, but at a higher cost than it expected. Politically the Palestinians won: Fatah had stood and fought instead of retreating, the Jordanian army had done most of the damage, and the battle broke the image of an invincible Israeli army.³

Background: after the Six-Day War

The war of June 1967 left Israel in control of the West Bank, and the Jordan River became the cease-fire line between Israel and Jordan. The defeat of the Arab armies discredited the old Palestinian leadership: Ahmad Shuqeiri, the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was forced to resign in December 1967, and the guerrilla groups, Fatah first among them, took the initiative.⁴

The guerrillas built their bases in Jordan and raided across the river; Israel answered with fire on the East Bank and complained to the United Nations of a premeditated campaign. On 15 February 1968 the fighting reached Karama itself, a town and refugee camp in the Jordan Valley north of the Dead Sea. Jordan told the Security Council that Israeli shelling and bombing had killed 56 soldiers and civilians there and in nearby villages; Yezid Sayigh, in his history of the Palestinian armed movement, counts 20 dead and 58 wounded.⁵

Armies and commanders

The attack was mounted by the Israel Defense Forces with armor, paratroops, artillery and aircraft. Lawrence Tal, in the Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, gives about 15,000 troops in three armored brigade formations; Sayigh describes two armored and infantry brigades and three paratroop, tank and engineer battalions, backed by five artillery battalions.⁶

Against them stood a few hundred Palestinian fighters: some 200 to 300 in the town by Tal's count, while Sayigh puts Fatah at 220 to 250 guerrillas, staff and trainees and the Palestine Liberation Front and Palestine Liberation Army at about 80 more. Behind them, on the ridge that overlooks the valley, were the Jordanian army's infantry, tanks and artillery, which Sayigh calls the real backbone of the defense.⁷

The commanders' decisions

The Israeli government decided on a large search-and-destroy operation against the bases around Karama. On 18 March Israel told the Security Council that raids from Jordan had killed and wounded Israelis in the preceding weeks and that it would act in self-defense. In Washington, Walt Rostow told President Johnson on 20 March that the Israelis were mobilizing; in his reading, an Israeli school bus hitting a mine on 18 March had made the pressure for retaliation all but irresistible.⁸

Jordan saw it coming. On 19 March it warned the Security Council that Israel was contemplating a mass attack on the East Bank, and on 20 March it dismissed the Israeli complaints as a cover for aggression. That night Johnson wrote to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol that a reprisal against Jordan would be a major miscalculation; by his own account he was also asking King Hussein for a maximum effort to stop the raids. The letter reached Eshkol about three hours after the operation had begun.⁹

On the Arab side the decisive choice was Fatah's. With the Israeli preparations visible across the river, Fatah decided to stand and fight in Karama rather than withdraw into the hills before a far stronger enemy, and the Jordanian army stood with it. Sayigh calls the decision militarily disastrous; Tal and he agree that it, more than anything that happened in the fighting, explains what followed.¹⁰

The battle in phases

The crossing

At 5:30 in the morning of 21 March Israeli units crossed the Damiya and Allenby bridges, with aircraft supporting the ground forces. The main thrust went into the Shuna and Karama area north of the Dead Sea; a second force struck at Safi, south of it.¹¹

The fight for the town

The Jordanian guns and tanks on the high ground fired into the Israeli columns as they crossed the valley, and inflicted the heaviest damage of the day. In Karama the Palestinian fighters, lightly armed, fought the paratroops and armor that entered the town. By noon, Sayigh writes, the Israelis held Karama, and they spent the next hours destroying much of it; the Security Council later deplored the loss of life and the heavy damage to property.¹²

The withdrawal

Eshkol assured Johnson that this was a limited raid and that his forces would withdraw as soon as they had finished their mission of preventing further sabotage and disarming the guerrillas. Shortly after midday local time he telephoned the American ambassador to say that the troops were pulling back; under Jordanian fire, the last of them were across the river by evening.¹³

Counting the losses

The figures depend on who is counting. Israel's admitted losses were 21 dead by Tal's account, or 28 dead and 90 wounded, with four tanks, five other vehicles and an aircraft destroyed, in the figures Sayigh cites. Palestinian sources have always given far higher numbers: more than 200 Israeli dead, Tal reports, and the Palestinian news agency WAFA still gives 250 killed and more than 450 wounded.¹⁴

Arab losses were heavy too. Sayigh counts 61 Jordanian soldiers dead and 108 wounded, and 116 guerrillas dead, 92 of them from Fatah, with about 100 wounded and dozens taken prisoner, close to half of the guerrillas' full-time fighters. WAFA gives about 185 Palestinian and Jordanian dead in all and more than 200 wounded.¹⁵

Three accounts of one day

Israel presented the raid as self-defense. Eshkol told the Knesset that terrorist bases had been concentrated in Jordan with the knowledge of the authorities and that information about a new wave of raids had left no choice; at the United Nations Israel described Karama as a large base under Arafat's control. In a letter to Johnson he added that the army had been ordered not to harm civilians, and that this restriction had cost Israel a heavy price.¹⁶

Eshkol's letter went further. Fatah, he wrote, had grown from a clandestine group into an open, organized force operating under King Hussein's eyes, a second army that threatened Jordan itself, and a blow against it should cause no regret in Israel, Jordan or the United States. At the Security Council Israel's representative said the Arab states were continuing their twenty-year war against Israel through terror, sabotage, blockade and boycott.¹⁷

Jordan presented it as aggression. King Hussein wrote to Johnson that his country was defending its land, its homes and the tents of the refugees against a blatant and premeditated attack; at the Security Council Jordan said the raid had been aimed at civilians and refugees in the Karama camp. Jordan has since commemorated the day as a victory of its army, which, the royal court writes, repelled the attack and inflicted heavy losses on the Israelis.¹⁸

Hussein's letter, written while the fighting went on, said his men were fighting once again with what weapons had remained to them since June 1967, and warned that if the battle went badly Jordan would become a victim of American weapons. At the United Nations Jordan asked for sanctions under Chapter VII of the Charter and called the description of Karama as a terrorist base an attempt to justify the killing of every young man there.¹⁹

For the Palestinians it was the first time their fighters had met the Israeli army face to face and held their ground. Fatah's own news site calls it the moment that turned the Palestinians from refugees into a national movement, and WAFA, while admitting that Palestinian losses were the greater, calls it a major symbolic victory.²⁰

Turning point: the battle after the battle

Militarily, Israel had done what it set out to do. Politically, Karama went the other way. Tal writes that Jordanian military sources say their troops did the bulk of the fighting, but King Hussein let Arafat and Fatah take the credit; Sayigh agrees that the real credit was the Jordanian army's, yet it was the guerrillas whose reputation soared, and many Jordanian officers came to feel their victory had been taken from them.²¹

Thousands of young Palestinians now joined the guerrilla groups and began paramilitary training.²²

Aftermath

The Security Council met from 21 to 24 March and adopted Resolution 248, which deplored the loss of life and heavy damage to property and condemned the Israeli action as a flagrant violation of the UN Charter and the cease-fire resolutions. It also deplored all violent incidents in violation of the cease-fire, and warned that reprisals and other grave violations could not be tolerated.²³

In the debate most members deplored the raid. The American representative said that terrorism could not be viewed with equanimity, but that large-scale military actions across cease-fire lines were not the answer; France said the action was out of proportion to the events that had preceded it.²⁴

In private the American line was the same. A week after the raid the State Department told its embassy in Amman that the United States opposed retaliatory raids just as it opposed terrorism, but that it was imperative for Jordan to show it could control the guerrillas, since no Israeli government could resist the pressure for military action if the raids went on.²⁵

Legacy and memory

The guerrillas turned their new standing into control of the Palestinian national institutions. They won a growing share of the Palestine National Council, and in February 1969 Fatah's Yasser Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO.²⁶ › Yom Kippur War, 1973

The victory also sowed the next conflict. The armed movement in Jordan grew into a rival to the king's authority, and between September 1970 and July 1971 the Jordanian army fought the guerrillas and drove them out of the kingdom. The battle that had joined the Jordanian army and the fedayeen became, within three years, the prelude to their war.²⁷