back to killing Israelis.
Presumably they believed that this public admonishment had brought Ghaled to heel; and, presumably, his general demeanour encouraged them in that belief. Subsequent references to him in PLO communiqués were laudatory in tone. His sudden turnaround, when the crunch came in Jordan, had obviously taken them by surprise.
Following the Six-Day War with Israel and the fresh influx of West Bank refugees which it produced, tension in Jordan between the government of the Hashemite King Hussein and the Palestinians had grown steadily. Half the population of that small country were now Palestinian refugees. The Al Fatah and other refugee guerrilla organizations began to present the king and his government with a serious challenge to their authority. In 1970 the Palestinians were warned by Ghaled that the Jordanian government was planning to make a unilateral peace settlement with Israel. It was time, he declared, to take over the government in Amman and make it their own. Quite suddenly he became the most militant and vociferous of the anti-Hashemite Palestinians. In a speech to his fedayeen, reported by the Damascus guerrilla radio, he had thrown down the gauntlet. “By Allah,” he had shouted, “we will wade through a sea of blood if need be. I tell you, comrades, we must risk everything now for our honour.”
From the self-styled Marxist, Salah Ghaled, this sort of hysteria was new. Frank Edwards thought that the fact that Ghaled’s parents had once again become refugees when the West Bank was occupied, and that Ghaled senior had subsequently died in an UNWRA camp, had precipitated the change. I wasn’t so sure. It seemed to me more likely that Ghaled had decided that the moment had come for him to make his bid for power, and that the hysteria had been calculated.
Anyway, he got the sea of blood he had called for. When he and the other Al Fatah guerrilla leaders attempted to take control of the capital, Amman, King Hussein ordered the Jordanian army to stop them, and the army obeyed.
At this point, the series of events which Ghaled was later to denounce collectively as “the Great Betrayal” took place. Alarmed by the spectacle of what was, in effect, an Arab civil war, the PLO Central Committee hastened to intervene. Negotiating with the king and his government, they secured a cease-fire, then an extension of it, and finally signed an agreement under which all Palestinian guerrilla forces would be withdrawn; to begin with from Amman, and later from all other urban areas in Jordan. This tragic conflict, it was said, had been the result of Israeli provocations designed to incite brother to fight brother instead of the common Zionist enemy.
Ghaled was not the only guerrilla leader to defy the Central Committee by refusing to honour either the cease-fire or the withdrawal agreement, and sporadic fighting continued in and around Amman for many weeks; but, with the acceptance of the agreement by most of the Al Fatah forces, the Jordanian army was free to concentrate on and to isolate those that remained. One by one, as they saw their positions becoming untenable, Ghaled and the rest had slipped away, taking their men, their arms, and their equipment with them.
Ghaled and his fedayeen went north, first to a base at Ramtha near the Syrian border, and then, when the Jordanian army moved to clear that area too, into Syria itself. Most of the dissident leaders, having taken to the Jordanian hills to await developments, now set about composing their differences with the Central Committee. Not Ghaled, however; he remained loudly defiant.
From a subsidiary camp in Lebanon he proclaimed his independence of the PLO “running dogs” in the Al Fatah and his support for the Maoist-Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. At the same time he announced the formation of the super-militant Palestinian Action Force.
I found a copy of the original PAF manifesto in the file. It was subtitled, Who Are