MESA Banner
A Social History of the Battle of Karameh on its 50th Anniversary
Abstract
The extant scholarship on the 1968 Battle of Karameh remains primarily limited to the fields of military and political history, focusing either on the battle’s geopolitical significance to the regional state actors or its role in Fatah’s rise to power within the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Academics writing about Karameh in English, with the notable exceptions of Yazid Sayigh and Paul Thomas Chamberlin, rely almost exclusively on American and Israeli military and diplomatic documents, eschewing entirely the primary and secondary literature written in Arabic. Yet even scholarship that utilizes Arabic sources seems primarily focused on establishing whether the Jordanian military or Palestinian guerrilla groups contributed more to the outcome of the conflict. By instead examining the instances of collaboration and competition between Jordanian and Palestinian participants before and during the battle, I aim to go beyond the Jordanian-Palestinian divide that has heretofore dominated the scholarship of al-Karameh and instead focus on the social factors that shaped these relationships. Indeed, the differences in class, military rank, and leftist proclivities among participants, as much as their ethnic identity, influenced the nature of these alliances and rivalries between Palestinian and Jordanian groups during this period. Drawing on Clifford Geertz’s notion of “thick description” and on testimonies from Arab participants in the battle, published in early issues of Shu’un Filastiniyya, my paper seeks to reconstruct the lived experience of Karameh through the unexamined voices of teenage recruits in Fatah, Palestinian officers in the Jordanian army, and local farmers internally displaced by the conflict. In addition, I examine the nationalist histories of the battle written by several Jordanian officers in the aftermath of Karameh in order to highlight the early signs of the military’s mutual antagonism with the fida'yyin that would erupt into violence within a few years during the Jordanian Civil War. The juxtaposition of these military elites’ accounts with the Shu’un testimonies’ depictions of an amicable relationship between PLO fighters and the local peasants illustrates the complexity of the social networks forming in the East Bank in the aftermath of the June 1967 War.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Jordan
Sub Area
Arab-Israeli Conflict