In December of 1970, the Jordanian Communist Party (JCP) experienced its first major split. The nature of the split concerned the question of Palestine and armed struggle as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its constituent revolutionary movements suffered a major and irreversible defeat at the hands of the Hashemite monarchy during what came to be known as Black September. The split was the culmination of a year-long factional struggle that emerged within the party over the political orientation of the party in times of fierce repression. Whereas the moderate line of Fahmi al-Salfiti advocated for accommodation with the Jordanian authorities, the revolutionary line of Fu’ad Nassar understood armed struggle to be the only means to overthrow reactionary, pro-imperialist Arab regimes. Accusing the accommodationist wing of being “petit bourgeois,” the Nassar faction of the JCP established a feda’i wing of the party called al-Ansar (the Partisans). Though al-Ansar also contained revolutionaries from the Iraqi, Lebanese, and Syrian Communist Parties that were committed to armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine, they were viewed by other Palestinian movements with heavy suspicion, and were never incorporated into the resistance. What were the main ideological tensions between the JCP and other Palestinian revolutionary formations? What implications did the tragic events of Black September have on the JCP in Jordan? How did the 1970 split affect future splits within the party? Utilizing primary sources published by these movements, as well as interviews and memoirs, this paper will answer these questions by revisiting significant 1960s ideological milestones. It will specifically focus on the ideological clashes between the accommodationist and the revolutionary wings of the JCP, as well as the role that the revolutionary wing played during Black September. Whereas most accounts of Black September focus on organizations affiliated with the PLO, this paper will shed new light on the political crisis within the JCP, historically the largest and most organized leftist party in Jordan. Beyond the JCP, similar crises took place in other major Jordanian parties. As this paper will argue, intra-factional clashes taking place across the Jordanian civic sphere signaled a major shift in the political and tactical orientation of a wide range of Jordanian parties towards both the Hashemite monarchy and the question of Palestine.

This paper seeks to contribute to an emerging literature on global revolutionary thought, analyzing the sinews that bound together Black and Palestinian transnational networks of solidarity. During the period from 1967 to 1974, prominent black radicals and their organizations articulated cogent and incisive analyses of the Palestinian Revolution as part of a broader anti-imperialist project. This paper will examine this intellectual engagement, drawing on archival research from the personal papers, memoirs, pamphlets and letters of Robert F. Williams at the Bentley Historical Library (University of Michigan). Williams, native of North Carolina and advocate of armed self-defense against racist aggression, was widely recognized during his exile in Cuba and China as the “ambassador of militant Afro-Americans” in the Non-Aligned world. Both he and his trusted confidant in London, Richard Gibson, were deeply moved by the advent of the Palestinian Revolution. Through their status as representatives of black America the two interacted with Palestinians and encouraged domestic actors stateside to voice support with the Palestinian struggle. Williams, who had the opportunity to meet a Fateh delegation in Beijing in 1968, was himself a signatory to the famous 1970 New York Times advertisement featuring black intellectuals and activists condemning Israel and Jordan for the events of Black September. Despite this record, the historiography has remained notably silent on his engagement with the Arab world. Key biographical works on Williams (Tyson, 1999, and Frazier, 2014) do not mention Palestine at all, and works that document Black-Palestinian solidarity (Lubin, 2014, Feldman, 2015, and Fischbach, 2018) ignore Williams completely or, at best, barely mention his name as a signatory to the 1970 statement. This paper contributes to both historiographies by detailing Williams’ embrace of the Palestinian Revolution. Unbeknownst to Williams, Gibson was secretly working with the CIA to spy on fellow black radicals. A close reading of CIA and FBI documents elucidate how black internationalists deeply worried U.S. intelligence agencies. Gibson, who interviewed and maintained contacts with Palestinian guerrillas in the 1970s, continued his informant activities throughout this period and even potentially provided information to the agency that might foster discord between them and the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, weakening Cleaver’s International Section of the Party in Algeria during his ideological (and sometimes physical) war with Huey Newton. In conclusion, this paper argues that both Black Power and the Palestinian Revolution were global events, whose fate and fortune were intricately linked.

“In the Shadow of Dual Authority” contributes to an emerging literature that seeks to engage with Arab thought production in relation to the United States, as it was grounded in the revolutionary worldviews and practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s. To that end, it explores Palestinian revolutionary analyses of the political and economic role of the United States (US) in the Arab world between the years 1968 and 1971. This period spanned roughly from the Battle of Karamah, when Palestinian guerrilla groups resisted extended Israeli aerial and ground attacks in the Jordan Valley alongside the Jordanian Army, to the fallout from Black September, the limited war that unfolded in 1970 between the two competing authorities in the country: the Jordanian monarchy and the guerrilla bases of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Over the course of those two years, the United States changed dramatically as a military and economic power, both in the Arab world and beyond. Out of this turn, the US developed a number of new security arrangements in the region, including in Jordan, where it backed both Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan in an effort to defeat an ongoing regional revolutionary tide led by the Palestinian national movement. In the eye of that revolutionary storm, the PLO had turned Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan into bases of revolution. In this setting, Palestinian revolutionaries’ understanding of the US developed through a combination of practice and theory production, a process shaped by intellectual exchange between internationalist anti-imperialist movements and by first-hand experiences on the receiving end of US-supported counterinsurgency. Whereas previous scholarship on this period had tended to label the situation a "civil war" and to emphasize the decision-making processes of the US, Israel, and Jordan (Nevo, 2008, Chamberlin, 2012, and Yaqub, 2016), this paper elucidates interpretations of these events as a revolutionary process of "dual power" found within Palestinian organizations Fateh, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP). The paper lends particular attention to converges and divergences in these factions' readings of US power and its significance for their respective revolutionary strategies. In doing so, it draws on rare Arabic pamphlets and official publications of the major PLO parties, as well as the memoirs of individual participants.

September 2020 commemorates the 50th anniversary of the limited war between Palestinian factions and the Jordanian Monarchy known as Black September. The events of Black September not only shaped the trajectory of the Palestinian liberation movement but also became a defining moment for Jordan’s nation-building project and foreign policy approach. However, despite the importance of Black September in both Jordanian and Palestinian histories and the passing of fifty years since its occurrence, it remains an understudied episode. The limited literature on Black September tends to analyze the event through a top-down approach that centers the states involved (United States, Israeli, Jordan, Egypt) and the Palestinian factions (Quandt, 1978, Sayigh, 1999, Maraka, 2016). These accounts sideline people’s lived experiences during the conflict. Based on oral histories and memoirs, this paper will center the voices of ordinary citizens as actors rather than passive observers of the limited war. It argues that the localized networks and ground-level acts of resistance were influential factors in both the unfolding of the events as well as the diverse ways in which Black September is enshrined within people’s memory. My analysis of the local and everyday dimensions that shaped the limited war emerges primarily through an analysis of women’s participation in the unfolding events, which has been silenced by top-down historical accounts. Oral histories and published memoirs show that women were engaged in all kinds of actions, including but not restricted to, fighting, hiding cadres and weapons in their homes, smuggling supplies from the West Bank to Amman, providing medical care for fighters, and fundraising in support of the different Palestinian factions fighting on the ground. Examining women’s activism complicates normative approaches to what we conceive of as “political” and therefore worthy of historical inclusion. Furthermore, writing the participation of women into history challenges the representation of women in the Arab world as inactive, docile, and observers rather than actors in the face of war.