In the aftermath of the 1967 War and the 1968 Battle of Karameh, Palestinian guerilla and resistance groups created strongholds in the Wihdat refugee camp in the Jordanian capital Amman and the nearby Baqa‘a camp to the north of the city. The most well-known organizations were Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). The clout that the Palestinian groups held was further enhanced by the popularity of revolutionary movements in the world at the time, in places like Algeria, China, Cuba and Vietnam. Throughout its modern history up until then, Amman had been known for its relative stability and social harmony. Its residents tended to place their personal well-being and survival ahead of sustained ideological commitments. Yet by 1970, this relative harmony was seriously undermined by increased fedayeen activity, leading to an armed conflict between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian groups based in Amman and other parts of Jordan. Utilizing a broad range of primary and secondary sources, including interviews, material from the Department of the National Library in Jordan, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and memoirs, this paper sheds light on this tumultuous period in the city’s history. I argue that the 1970-1971 conflict, while bloody, was not an intercommunal civil war, but rather a limited confrontation between two rival claimants of the same territory: the monarchy and the fedayeen. Despite the rapid growth of the fedayeen resistance movements, and their proliferation all over Amman, I demonstrate that Amman’s residents, regardless of ethnonational origin, preferred the stability afforded by King Hussein to the revolutionary fervor championed by the fedayeen. Unlike in Beirut in the late 1970s and 1980s, the Palestinian groups were not able to build significant alliances nor generate enough support in Amman or the rest of Jordan for a long period of time. Although Amman was the regional epicenter of the fedayeen movement during this short time, I argue that its residents rejected the idea that their capital would be transformed into a gateway to the liberation of Jerusalem.