Israel, a Beachhead in the Middle East by Stephen Gowans

Author:Stephen Gowans
Language: fra
Format: epub
Publisher: Baraka Books

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In 1970, Israel once again acted as a guardian of US interests in the Middle East, this time by deterring a Syrian military intervention in Jordan. Syria was prepared to send tanks across the Jordanian border to protect Palestinians who were challenging King Hussein’s rule. As we’ve seen, Hussein, the scion of the British-installed Hashemite dynasty, was unacceptable to Jordanians as a leader, but was protected by the British, and now the Americans, as a local proxy for Western rule.

Israel’s crushing 1967 defeat of Egypt convinced Palestinians that they could no longer rely on the colonels’ regimes, or any Arab government for that matter, to recover their country. Up to that point, they had waited for a new Saladin to win back their land. The events of June 1967 washed away their illusions that the Arab nationalist leaders could deliver on their promises to vanquish Zionist colonialism. The harsh reality seemed to be that Palestinians would have to liberate themselves.

Additionally, it had become evident that in view of Israel’s clear military superiority—now all the more overwhelming given the hike in US military aid to Tel Aviv—that a conventional military confrontation with Israel was out of the question. Israel had handily won the First and Third Settler-Native Wars, and easily captured the Sinai in the Second. Arab armies were too weak to win a conventional war with the Western-backed Zionist state. What’s more, Israel had the ultimate deterrent—a nuclear saber. It seemed, from this perspective, that the more promising route to recuperating Palestine and ending Zionist colonialism was to fight a guerrilla war—the option of the weak. Hence, the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization passed from the now discredited Nasser, who had founded it, to Yasser Arafat, a self-identified Palestinian. In 1970, Arafat and his Palestinian guerrillas had taken up residence in Jordan, and were using it as a base from which to launch attacks on the Jewish settler state.

This state of affairs was, for obvious reasons, opposed by the Israelis, who didn’t want the Palestinians using neighboring Jordan, or any other contiguous territory, as a base of operations. It was opposed too by the Jordanian king for a host of mutually reinforcing reasons, not least of which was that his rule was at risk of falling to the well-organized Palestinian guerrillas. In September, a bloody confrontation erupted between the Palestinian fighters and the Jordanian monarchy. The events that followed became known as Black September.

Hussein’s forces, the stronger of the combatants, were on the verge of crushing the Palestinians, when the Syrians, under Arab socialist leadership, made infantry and tank incursions into Jordan on the side of the guerrillas. The Palestinians had waited in vain for 15,000 Iraqi troops, who had been in Jordan since the 1967 war, to spring to their defense, but Baghdad, led by Arab socialists who saw the Palestinian cause as their own, quailed. They feared that if they intervened on behalf of their Palestinian brothers—but more to the point, against the US protégé, Hussein—that Washington would order Israel to strike Iraq.

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