Research notes collected by Franciso Gil-White from Howard Sachar's "A history of Israel". Retrieved from Internet Archive in April 2012.
Below are excerpts from Howard Sachar's book A history of Israel. These excerpts relate how Arafat's Fatah violence was directed significantly at the Palestinians he has always claimed to represent.
NOTE: Sachar refers to them as "guerillas" but the proper term is terrorist.
FGW
Starts (p.682)
THE RISE OF THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT
...Born in Cairo of Palestinian parents, Arafat embarked on his political career in 1951 while a student at Fuad I University. Living virtually as an ascetic, he concentrated his efforts on organizing the university’s Palestinian students into a militant anti-Israel society. He received his own guerilla initiation in 1953, joining Egyptian fedayun operations against the British in the Suez Canal Zone. Following his departure (or expulsion) from Egypt in 1957, Arafat and his colleagues took up residence in Syria, where they pioneered the Fatah movement on the basis of: an independent role for the Palestinians; noninvolvement in the internal affairs of Arab states; and commitment to the ideology of violence developed by the Algerian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. From 1956 to 1966 the Fatah enjoyed the near total support of the Syrian Ba’ath party and of the Syrian army, which trained and equipped the guerillas in their raids against Israel. It was the Fatah, too, we recall, inflaming the Syrian-Israeli border, that began the chain of events leading to the Six-Day War.
...Moreover, by annihilating the regular Arab armies, the June War doomed Palestinian faith in the official Arab governments as likely instruments of restoration. It similarly discredited the leadership of Ahmed Shukeiry and the Egyptian-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization. Even the Fatah, for that matter, was paralyzed temporarily by the shock of defeat. Only belatedly did Arafat awaken to the unique situation that had emerged, as new territories with large Arab population centers came under Israel’s military control. It appeared suddenly that he classical pattern of a revolutionary uprising from within could now be applied. Indeed Arafat and his followers were convinced that the Israeli occupation regime on the West Bank and Gaza, like the French regime in Vietnam and Algeria, ultimately would prove vulnerable to guerilla operations. In September 1967, therefore, the first in a series of Fatah operations was launched and directed mainly at towns on the West Bank. Grenades were thrown at Israeli patrols. To intimidate Arabs commuting to Jewish work projects, explosives were detonated variously in town squares, marketplaces, and bus terminals. From February 1968 on, too, as West Bank and Gaza Arabs began to accept employment in integral Israel, episodes of Fatah sabotage in Jewish territory mounted. Before long they were averaging thirty a month, with grenades and dynamite charges set off in Israeli town and city centers. The worst of the explosions that year killed eleven and injured fifty-five Israeli civilians in Jerusalem.
Dramatic as these episodes were, Arafat and his followers recognized by late 1968 that they had failed in their major purpose—to ignite a war of “national liberation” among the occupied Arab territories. Within months after their June victory, Israel’s security forces were effectively countering every attempt to touch off a popular armed rising in the West Bank. Reprisals occasionally were brutal. Throughout October and November 1967, Israeli troops killed substantial numbers of guerillas in exchanges of fire. In the last fortnight of November, we recall, the Israeli army leveled all 800 houses in the West Bank village of Jiftliq. The procedure of dynamiting homes was similarly followed elsewhere (usually without a hearing, a trial, or compensation to the innocent). By the end of 1968, as a result, 1400 Fatah members had been captured in the West Bank alone. Once the larges numbers of his followers in the West Bank were killed or imprisoned, Arafat himself was also obliged to flee his secret headquarters in Nablus and take refuge across the Jordan.
The initial effectiveness of this Israeli suppression was due partly to the guerillas’ own lack of tenacity and fiber. Whenever caught, they surrendered immediately, knowing that Israel would not impose the death sentence on them. As a rule, they collaborated afterward by informing on their fellow members; this led to the wholesale roundup of Fatah groups everywhere on the West Bank. Yet the principal reason for Fatah’s lack of success was the unwillingness of the West Bankers themselves to cooperate with subversion in any form. Fear of Israeli punishment and reprisal was a factor, of course. But so, too, was the West Bankers’ instinctive appreciation that if the combined Arab armies had not managed to defeat Israel, surely the guerrillas could not. Not least of all, Fatah’s demands on the allegiance of the West Bank population conflicted with the traditional structure of local leadership. The mayors wanted no part of the guerrillas, and the Israelis sensed this. By using a give-and-take approach toward the local mayors and village mukhtars, therefore, the Israeli occupation regime kept track of incipient unrest.
With the network inside the West Bank all but liquidated by mid-1968, the Fatah was thrown back to its pattern of the mid-sixties. It was limited to short forays across the Jordan, the harassment of Jewish settlements in the Beit Sh’an and Jordan valleys south of Lake Galilee, where the terrain was undulating and semitropical. In some cases fedayun groups launched Katyusha rockets from deep within Jordan. But while Jewish kibbutz and town dwellers frequently were driven to underground shelters, none of their communities was ever deserted. On the other side of the Jordan, conversely, thousands of Arab villagers fled Israel’s reprisal shellings, joining the refugee camps inside the East Bank. Fatah bases similarly had to be transferred well inside Hashemite [i.e. Jordanian] territory as Israeli border police refined their techniques of sealing off the Jordan valley, through patrols, ambushes, and electrified fences. Even as the guerrillas took up new positions inland, moreover, they were unable to escape the reach of Israel’s air force. In June 1968 an air strike at the principal Fatah headquarters at es-Salt killed more than seventy of Arafat’s commandos and wreaked extensive physical damage. So heavy was the blow that the fedayeen were obliged to disperse over a large area in small, well-hiden caves, even in forests. There, however, deprived of convenient access to the borders, they sustained even heavier losses during their intermittent forays.
In one region only did the guerillas achieve a limited initial success. This was the Gaza Strip, where 220,000 refugees nurtured a hatred of Israelis that was probably unmatched elsewhere in the Arab world. Deprived of significant employment opportunities, indigent for nineteen years before the June War, the Gaza refugees were uniquely vulnerable to Fatah propaganda. The very ‘logistics’ of their displacement well suited the Fatah cause. Thousands of their huts in the eight camps were grouped tightly around narrow lanes that made access difficult for Israeli military vehicles and offered the fedayeen convenient hiding places. Most of the guerilla attacks in any case were directed against Arabs and their families who sought work in Israeli enterprises. Thus, in the first year after the June War, over a thousand Arab men, women, and children were wounded by guerilla assaults, and 219 were killed. Arafat boasted, “The Israelis may rule Gaza by day. I rule by night.” His rule endured barely four years. Early in 1971 the problem of security was turned over to General ‘Arik’ Sharin. The flamboyant paratroop commander handled the matter in his typically straightforward way, ordering engineers to bulldoze roads even through the most densely inhabited refugee camps. Once armored cars and jeeps moved freely among these warrens, the incidents of violence declined markedly.
From 1968 onward, meanwhile, Fatah and other guerillas began to ensconce themselves deeply in Jordanian refugee camps and villages. Here they soon posed a far greater threat to Hussein than to the Israelis. Indeed, the fedayeen rapidly established a virtual substate of their own, boasting immunity to Hashemite laws and claiming extraterritorial rights. By 1969 they moved arrogantly through Jordan, wearing their own uniform, flaunting guerilla insignia and license plates on their vehicles, assessing and collecting their own taxes among refugees and Jordanian citizens alike, even soliciting Jordanian youths to enlist in the guerrilla forces rather than in the Hashemite army. At first [Jordanian King] Hussein was too circumspect to meet this challenge head on. Following a number of skirmishes, his government preferred instead to sign a ‘compact’ with the guerrillas, delimiting respective spheres of activity. It was the first of many accords that would be broken. The power of the fedayeen grew daily. Some of the more leftist among them, especially George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, began openly questioning the need for a Hashemite dynasty altogether. With the tension mounting, the king in February 1970 forbade dissident groups to carry weapons within Amman’s city limits. The ensuing demonstrations forced Hussein to rescind the order. The guerrillas promptly broadened their demands, however, insisting upon the removal of several antifedayun members of the Jordanian cabinet. In June, when a number of Habash’s PFLP followers were jailed, rampaging mobs of guerillas seized hotels in downtown Amman, held the European guests as hostages, abducted and murdered the United States military attaché, raped several American women, and wounded a French diplomat. Again Hussein capitulated, even bowing to a guerilla ultimatum for veto rights over cabinet appointments.
Then, in August 1970, the Egyptian and Israeli governments jointly accepted a United States peace initiative. A cease-fire was negotiated on the Suez Canal, and the Jarring talks resumed. Friction immediately developed between Egypt and the guerrillas over the question of a political settlement, and the Nasser regime angrily shut down the Fatah radio station in Cairo. If Hussein ever intended to move against the fedayeen, clearly this was the moment. Accordingly, in the wake of an assassination attempt against him, and the hijacking of four international airliners by the PFLP on September 6, the king launched his forces against the guerilla strongholds in the refugee camps. During the ensuing ten-day civil war—it was hardly less—nearly 2000 fedayeen were killed, together with many additional thousands of innocent refugees. Soon the battle of ‘Black September,’ as it was later to be memorialized by the guerillas, took on aspects of an international crisis. An Iraqi division had remained encamped on Hashemite [i.e. Jordanian] territory since the June War, and the Baghdad government now threatened to send it against Amman. With Russian encouragement, the Syrians were also persuaded to dispatch an armored column across the Jordanian border. Once again, [Jordanian King] Hussein confounded his enemies. In the ensuing battle, his forces proved more than the equal of the invaders; his tanks and jets mauled the Syrians badly. Yet, had the little monarch failed, the United States and Israel were quietly prepared to take coordinated action on their own. An informal understanding called for Israeli land and air attacks against Syrian tanks, with the United States Sixth Fleet functioning as a barrier against possible Russian intervention in the Canal area. The tacit agreement was never put into operation. As matters developed, Israel’s well-publicized troop concentration near the Jordanian frontier, buttressed by American warnings to Moscow, effectively persuaded the Syrians to withdraw their task force and the Iraqis to hold back their division.
Once the Syrian threat ebbed in late September 1970, Hussein moved to consolidate his power against the remaining fedayeen. Strengthened by $30 million in American military aid, the Jordanian army pressed its offensive during the winter months of 1970-71, bottling up the surviving guerillas in the northwestern hill country. At last, in July 1971, Hussein’s troops launched a decisive attack, shelling fedayun encampments, attacking survivors with tanks and infantry, rounding up some 2000 prisoners, and killing hundreds of them. Demoralized and seemingly shattered as a political and military force, the guerillas no longer appeared capable of mounting a threat to Hussein’s rule or of sustaining even the most nominal infiltration effort across Israel’s longest frontier. Thereafter they shifted their bases of operation entirely to Lebanon and Syria.