349. Occupation of The West Bank (Part 4)

19:59William:Welcome back. So we're now going to talk about a crucial moment in, if you like, the mythology of Palestinian resistance. On March the 21st, 1968, there is a clash which, oddly, in a sense, becomes this moment of Palestinian liberation.

20:19Anita:We can't really discuss this without discussing a pivotal figure at this moment, and that is Yasser Arafat, who rises at this time. Now, let's do a little pen portrait, first of all, Eugene. People will know the image, the kefir on his head over one shoulder, which, you know, Willie told me, actually. He draped it in a way such as it would represent the land of Palestine. I didn't know that, Willie, until you told me. But tell us who he was, what his backstory is. Yasser Arafat stands out as the iconic Palestinian leader. Though his actual birthplace is under some dispute, whether he was born in Palestine or in Cairo, he is nonetheless the quintessential Palestinian commando.

21:00He went to Cairo for his university education and immediately becomes active in student politics around the Palestine question. This gets him attention from the Egyptian authorities, ever supportive of Palestinian claims and rights. It also forces him under the watchful eye of security forces who don't want to see firebrand student politics creating turmoil in Egyptian universities. And upon graduation as an engineer, Arafat will seek his fortune in Kuwait. And it is there that he creates the most successful and enduring of all Palestinian militias, Fatah, the movement for the liberation of Palestine, and will bring together some of the most influential political leaders of the Palestinian liberation movement.

21:49It's Arafat who will launch the first armed struggle with the Sayaka movement in 1964. And now in the aftermath of Arab defeat in 1967 is Arafat who's looking to take the initiative.

22:05William:You painted this picture already of Arafat frustrated by the security system in the West Bank that means he can't do there what the Algerians have successfully done against the French in Algeria. But he has his big moment at the Battle of Karameh, March the 21st, 1968, few months after the defeat of 1967. And this is absolutely central to understand Palestinian politics. Tell us about it. What happens in that moment? Well, driven out of the West Bank, Arafat and his lieutenants established their base in a village in the Jordan Valley called Al-Karami. And the name means honor. And it was obviously of great symbolic value.

22:52Because they were training guerrillas in Karameh, it becomes a target for Israeli attack. Forworn that the Israelis are mobilizing for a cross-border raid across the Jordan River, the Jordanians suggest that Arafat and his men withdraw from the area, but they decide instead to stand their ground and take the Israelis on. The Jordanians take up positions with their artillery and the hills overlooking the Jordan Valley. And as the Israeli column enters across the Jordan River, the Jordanians open fire on the Israelis, but the Israelis have pretty much free movement to destroy the village of Karameh.

23:31And they do so without running into too much opposition from Palestinians on the ground. It's only as they come to the end of their destructive incursion and are regrouping to retreat back into Israeli-controlled territory that from underground bunkers, Palestinian guerrillas or Fedayins emerge, guns blazing, anti-tank missiles on shoulders to engage the withdrawing Israelis, the Israelis now find that between Jordanian artillery and Palestinian attackers, they're taking casualties. They lose tanks. And for the Palestinians, they could claim that the Israelis were forced into retreat under Palestinian pursuit and hot fire.

24:10It was, in that sense, the first victory against the Israeli army by Arab arms, and it was led by Palestinians. And though the victory is totally symbolic, Will.

24:22William:Yes, the figures, there's far more Palestinian casualties than there are Israeli casualties in reality. Palestinians lose about 150 men, and I think the Israelis lose about 20. It's those sort of numbers.

24:33Anita:But nevertheless, this does wonders particularly for Arafat. And even bigger, Anita, is the Fatah movement succeeding where Nasser and King Hussein had failed. This is an Arab militia defeating the Israelis in a way that Arab armies had not been able to do. And that inflames enthusiasm among Palestinians and among Arabs generally. And the most immediate consequence of Karami will be the flooding of recruitment centers with volunteers from across the Arab world who wish to come under the Palestinian banner and fight with Fatah and other militias for the liberation of Palestine. This is when the Palestinian movement really takes flight.

25:21William:How does the news get out? Do Arab TV stations cover it? What's the mythologizing of it. How quickly does that happen? You know, for an Arab world starving for good news, you could see where this was the story that every news agency, print and broadcast alike, was running. And so, yes, I mean, the word spreads very quickly, and the heroics of Karami are celebrated in Arab capitals right around the Middle East and North Africa.

25:51Anita:And Arafat becomes the face of this, doesn't he? Because, you know, he will appear in the cover of Time magazine. He'll be invited to address Arab summits. He will not just be regarded as a soldier, but as a statesman very quickly after Karameh. Well, I think it's the soldier reputation in 1968 that is the dominant one. So what you have is a kind of Arab Che Guevara, Fidel Castro. His fatigues, keffiyeh, sunglasses, always carrying a piece on him, whether it's a pistol or a Kalashnikov. This is the armed Arafat. He's going to carry that armed Arafat image until his address to the United Nations in 1974.

26:32But at this period, what's inspiring and mobilizing is the militant, well-armed militia leader, the commando Yasser Arafat.

26:41William:And the crucial thing is that this is the Palestinians for the first time themselves. They have their own homegrown hero. They're not relying on the Lebanese or the Syrians or the Jordanians or the Egyptians, nor are those countries particularly able to control this. This is now a self-propelled force, which becomes a problem for their hosts in Jordan pretty quickly. Absolutely. And, you know, if the Arab world is confined by the negativity of the three no's of Khartoum, the sheer electrifying energy of Palestinian military victory meant that the initiative had now passed from the Arab states to the Palestinian movement when it comes to the liberation of Palestine.

27:28That makes 1968 the vital turning point. But then the question is, how do you mobilize an armed movement when you don't have territory? They're not Algeria. Algerians were mobilizing guerrillas to fight against the French on their own land. And the Palestinians are trying to mobilize action from across the frontiers of their own land. And they're trying to do so through Arab states neighboring Israel, each of whom is fearful of the consequences of Palestinian activity against Israel, bringing Israeli reprisals against the territory of Egypt or Jordan or Syria.

28:04Anita:And Jordan, you know, just to remind people, has a majority Palestinian population. So they will have enormous sympathy for Arafat, for the PLO. You can't just go in there and stamp on them. But then there is a point which allows him to do just that. And that's what now we know as historians is Black September, 1970. Now, this is a pivotal moment, Eugene. Talk us through what happens here. Well, between Karami in 1968 and September of 1970, you have a period in which a number of different Palestinian militias are jostling for the agendas of seizing the initiative, of bringing Palestine back into public debate, getting the name of the country back into the headlines.

28:51And this is a very ideological age, Anita. Variants of Marxism. You have your Maoists and your Leninists and your Stalinists, all jostling for the ascendancy of whose solutions will drive the Palestinian revolution. And this is a revolution. No one's talking about just a liberation movement. This is meant to be a socially transformative moment where Palestinian working classes will achieve social revolution at the same time that they're achieving the liberation of their homeland. So the agenda is huge. Now, the umbrella organization of the PLO is meant to contain all these different militias and organizations.

29:31Fatah is emerging dominant, and by 1969, Yasser Arafat will become the chairman of the PLO. But that organization does include all the other militias, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front, General Command, all of them. And it is a debating arena with very little ground for agreement. And no one is particularly obedient to the authority of Yasser Arafat. Most challenging to Arafat would be the Popular Front, led by Dr. George Habash. Which is further to the left, is more ideologically Marxist than Arafat? So the Popular Front, as its name suggests, any popular organization usually has a Marxist orientation, emerges from the movement of Arab nationalists and follows Nasser's trends towards Arab socialism to then take off on a truly Marxist direction.

30:21And these are the origins of the popular front who see in Marxism the social revolution that they wish to couple with Palestinian liberation. But their first target, interestingly enough, is a public relations war. They're the ones who are keen to bring Palestine back into the headlines. And they see the strategy of hijacking as the best way of doing so. Because the moment you seize an airplane, you get the top of the news agenda. Their aim was not mass murder. It was not to destroy airplanes in the air. This is before the Al-Qaeda type of suicide attack. Rather, they wanted to hijack airplanes, land them into countries where they thought Palestinians might get a fair hearing, allow themselves to be taken, arrested by the authorities, and put on trial.

31:10And the trial could then become a show trial that could be drawn out as a way of making the case for Palestine for the public's eye. It seems to us a very convoluted way of getting there, but this leads the PFLP to a series of very dramatic hijackings that will increasingly lead them towards Arab capitals. There's one other element of the Popular Front's thinking, which is that the forces of reaction in the Arab world are getting in the way of the liberation of Palestine. And no one in their thinking more reactionary than a monarchy. King Hussein is in the crosshairs of the Marxist movements of the PLO.

31:50They talk about creating, now they're inspired more by Vietnam than Algeria, an Arab Hanoi. And what better place than Amman with its large Palestinian population, its regressive monarchy? You want to start the Palestinian revolution in Jordan, create an Arab Hanoi in Amman, and launch the liberation of Palestine from the Jordanian side. Then you'd have territory. Then you'd have infantry and air force and what it takes to mobilize a war against the Israeli enemy that would elude them as long as they were landless bands operating from different arenas. That's the picture that's going to lead us towards the collision moment of Black September.

32:34Anita:What will end up happening is that hijacked aircraft are blown up on television. I mean, you will have the cameras trained on them. Passengers are released, I should say, before they're blown up. But this gives King Hussein, who's already feeling threatened and hemmed in by these new forces that want him gone, a justification for military reprisal. And that reprisal is huge, isn't it? And a huge number, thousands of Palestinians are killed when he decides, okay, if that's what you're going to do, we're going to launch the military at PLO bases throughout Jordan. That's it. Had enough, get out.

33:10Well, Anita, September 1970 is an existential crisis for the Hashemite monarchy. Let's be clear. What's really at stake here is that the Palestinian movement is treating Jordanian territory as its own without reference to the sovereign authority, the king and his government. And it's the Jordanian military that really drives things to a crisis point. It's probably an apocryphal story, but it's repeated by Jordanians as well, that tank commanders and infantry commanders descend on the palace with their tanks flying women's brassieres off their radio antennas, saying, we are being emasculated by you allowing foreign militias to act on our sovereign territory that we, the army, are here to defend.

33:52Whose Jordan is it? Either let us resolve this sovereignty crisis, or else accept that you made women of your army. It was probably the justification that Hussein used to unleash what would prove to be a war of exclusion that drives every single Palestinian faction out of Jordan. And it starts in September of 1970 as largely urban-based warfare, the Palestinians having been settled into areas in and around Amman that are, in a sense, refugee camps that turn into city quarters. So these become the first venue, and then it follows up north towards Jerash into the Jordan Valley, up and towards the hills of Ajloon, wherever Palestinian camps were held, where you have this drive by the Jordanian army to drive every single Palestinian faction of militia out.

34:47It's going to be the crisis that will be the last act of Gabal Abdel Nasser, where working with his comrade King Hussein. As I said, the two, Nasser and King Hussein, had really come together after defeat in 67, but also with Arafat, now chairman of the PLO, who has found his authority undermined by the actions of the Popular Front and their hijackings, achieved without the permission of Arafat, Fatah, or the PLO, seen as a threat and a challenge to his authority. So everybody's a little compromised by the conflict in Jordan in September 1970. They go to Cairo. Nasser negotiates a resolution between these two sides, sees the last of his guests on their airplanes, goes home, and has the fatal heart attack that will lead to the death of Nasser in September of 1970.

35:38Anita:And he's only 52 years old. I mean, it's the age of him, considering he's been such a colossal figure.

35:44William:There are extraordinary scenes, aren't there, Eugene, in the streets of Cairo. There is sort of massive mourning. This man, in some ways, has lost his image as the liberator because of the defeat of 67. Nonetheless, in death, is sort of recognized as this great Arab hero. Well, I don't think the Arab world has ever seen the likes of Abdel Nasser. And I don't think that there will ever be a leader that achieves that unanimity of support across the Arabic-speaking world. Even after he was defeated in 67 and so much reduced, he was nonetheless a giant of Arab politics. His death really was the end of an age.

36:23And I think it's not a bad thing in the sense that having Egypt dominate Arab states the way that Nasser was able to do so was very disruptive to politics in the region. It was in no small way what leads the region to a catastrophic war in 1967. So a different kind of leader would probably serve Arab affairs better. But nonetheless, for people across the Arab world, they mourned the loss of one who they had thought had, for a moment, shown the Arab world to be players in the new international order. And now, instead of there being one big Arab leader, one big Arab world, it would be a more fragmented Arab world of sovereign states pursuing their own interests alongside Arab interests.

37:10And for Palestinian rights, this would have implications.

37:12Anita:You know, that outpouring of grief for a figure like Nasser. Five million people, I've seen estimates of five million people pouring onto the streets of Cairo. The man who will take over is a very different kind of character. President Sadat, Egypt's new president, you couldn't get two more different creatures, could you? No, I think that Sadat brought all the legitimacy of having been a free officer from the very prelude to revolution in 1952 to a distinguished military career. But the man had no charisma. He was a pious villager from the Delta who basked in the glory of Nasser but reflected very little of his own.

37:55He was an easy man to underestimate. And I think both the international community and Israel underestimated him to their peril when he would lead Egypt to a very different kind of war in 1973. But none of that was apparent at the time of his succession to power in 1970. You had the sense that a giant had given way to a very negligible successor when Nasser died and Sadat became president.

38:22Anita:It's true to say that this funeral, this huge outpouring of grief for Nasser, is almost a sort of a pause in what was going on before and what will continue to go on now, which is King Hussein of Jordan deciding to stamp on the Palestinians who are operating on his territory. So what happens then after the funeral and the grief all dies down, and what happens to the Palestinians that he now is determined to get out of Jordan? the truce negotiated by Nasser doesn't really survive him. And Sadat doesn't have the same kind of authority to pull in Hussein and Arafat and keep them to a truce. In fact, from the Jordanians' perspective, there remains unfinished business in the expulsion of Palestinians from their territory.

39:07And so, immediately after the funeral of Nasser, hostilities resume between the Jordanian armed forces and the Palestinian revolution, the different militias, and sees, you know, Jordanians moving into all the areas they know full well where Palestinian training camps have been based, where concentration of Palestinian forces are, and they begin to target them in a kind of military sweep that's driving the Palestinians well out of Amman and out of all the territory of northern Jordan. And the Palestinians increasingly see their position untenable, and they begin to decamp from Jordan to resettle, they move to Lebanon.

39:44William:So just to be clear about this, Black September is indeed a very bloody business. There are severe Palestinian casualties, aren't there, Eugene? And it's remembered by Palestinians down to the present day as a time where the Jordanian state turned on them. The violence of the suppression of Palestinians was another deep trauma, And I think many Palestinians felt it was a sort of new Nakba driving them out of Jordan this time. And there are still neighborhoods in Amman where you'll see damage to building facades of the bullets fired in September of 1970. So, yeah, a very traumatic event. Still a taboo subject in Jordan today between Jordanians and Palestinians.

40:26You arrived there immediately after this, Eugene, didn't you? So, my first visit to Jordan was in 1972. 1772. So I would have been there just when the final withdrawal of Palestinians had been complete. And I think when Jordan was still very much recovering from the trauma of that event, but in a sense reassured that it had re-established its sovereignty. I think in driving the Palestinians out of Jordan, King Hussein felt more secure on his throne.

40:55Anita:And driving them out of Jordan, they end up in Lebanon. Does Lebanon welcome them with open arms? Are they happy to be in Lebanon? I mean, what is the situation for those Palestinians who have been moved and moved and moved and moved again? Well, Lebanon had been a major site for Palestinian refugees since 1948, and that had caused tremendous pressure on the Lebanese state system. It's very complicated, Anita, but it's worth remembering that Lebanon was created as a sort of power share between the different religious communities where positions of government are apportioned according to your religious community.

41:31Anita:To this day, that still exists. That still exists. And the Palestinians who flock to Lebanon after 1948 are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims. And their presence in their hundreds of thousands destabilize the demographic balance of Lebanon with its political order based on the distribution of government posts.

41:50William:Which was intended to be, by its creators, the French, to be Christian majority. It was going to be a Maronite sanctuary. That was the point. And by the time you reach 1948, it's already the case that Christians are in the minority of the population. We assume no census has taken to Lebanon since the 1930s. Censuses were revealing inconvenient truths. And to preserve this ascendancy of Christian rule in Lebanon, you had a freezing of things that was challenged by the Palestinians. You would not think Lebanon would welcome the Palestinian militias driven from Jordan, but they're forced to do so by an agreement imposed on Lebanon by Gamal Abdel Nasser.

42:32Again, one of the last acts of the wounded Egyptian president will be the Cairo Agreement of 1969, which gets the Lebanese government to agree that the Palestinian movement is allowed to prosecute its revolution against Israel across Lebanon's frontier. It turns the Lebanese frontier with Israel into a hot border. And this meant that if driven from Jordan, the Palestinian militias could reconstitute, regroup, and relaunch their revolution, this time from Lebanese soil. But their presence in Lebanon, already destabilizing for politics in Lebanon, now is an armed militia growing increasingly assertive of their position and already demonstrating how the Palestinian revolution challenges the sovereignty of the host nation.

43:22is creating trouble in Lebanon that in 1971-72 is already beginning to pave the path towards destabilizing politics in Lebanon.

43:33William:So, as we come to the close of this episode, the seeds are already sown for further conflicts to come. We have the prospect of the 1973 war as Egypt tries to get back Sinai. We have Sadat, a leader of a very different profile to Nasser, who will eventually make a peace with Israel at Camp David. And finally, we have the tragedy of the Palestinians and the Lebanese in Lebanon unfolding. The PLO have moved to Lebanon. They are preparing to make cross-border incursions into Israel. And the result will be something that, again, resonates very much with us at the present, an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

44:24Anita:Till the next time we meet, then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durrumpur.

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