March 21: Battle of Karameh

Israeli soldiers battled hard with both PLO and Jordanian army fighters in Karameh, Jordan on this date in 1968. The fight followed a raid by the Israel Defense Force in reprisal for a series of nearly forty military actions by Fatah, including the destruction of an Israeli school bus by a landmine. Israel had expected Jordan not to get involved, but King Hussein committed his soldiers to fight alongside the PLO, resulting in some thirty Israeli deaths and twice that many wounded. Though the battle ended in Israeli victory, it empowered the PLO as a presence in Jordan, “gave an enormous lift to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization,” according to Gideon Rafael, “and irrevocably implanted the Palestine problem onto the international agenda, no longer as a humanitarian issue of homeless refugees, but as a claim to Palestinian statehood.” Two years later, the growing strength of the PLO in Jordan led to Black September, in which the Jordanian military expelled the PLO to Lebanon while killing thousands of Palestinians.

“We believe that the military counteractions such as those which have just taken place, on a scale out of proportion to the acts of violence that preceded it, are greatly to be deplored.” —U.S. Ambassador to the UN Arthur Goldberg, speaking of the battle of Karameh