1967 war had turned out to be hollow words. It was time for a new generation, and a new, more direct, form of confrontation with the “Zionist enemy.”
Arafat had set up camp with nearly a thousand men just across the Jordan River, in a town called Karameh. From early 1968, they had been launching hit- and-run raids, not just on the West Bank but into the Negev. Eshkol’s cabinet was initially divided on whether to attack his base in Jordan, in both an act of retaliation and a signal to King Hussein that if his army didn’t rein in Arafat’s men, Israel would take whatever action necessary. But the decisive moment came on the eighteenth of March. A school bus near Eilat, in the far south of Israel, hit a Fatah landmine, killing the driver and a teacher, and injuring 10 of the children.
I was called up the night before the Israeli attack, as part of a small Sayeret Matkal contingent which was supposed to play a support role. An enormous pincer operation was mounted around the Fatah camp and Karameh itself: including a full infantry brigade, the Seventh Armored Brigade and the paratroopers’ sayeret. But the resistance they met, both from Fatah and Jordanian troops, was much fiercer than expected. One of the paratroop commandos, Mookie Betzer, who would go on to join Sayeret Matkal, told me how they landed by helicopter and immediately came under a hail of AK-47 fire. Within minutes, several of his men had been killed. Mookie was wounded. The tanks of the Seventh Brigade advanced from the south. Battling the Jordanian army, they took losses as well. Amnon Lipkin, who would also later become a friend and colleague, in both the army and Israeli politics, was in command of a unit of lightly armored French tanks called AMLs. They, too, were hopelessly outgunned.
Our sayeret assignment was to block the southern entrance to Karameh as the Israeli armored force advanced. But we got bogged down in mud as we made our way from the Jordan River. By the time we arrived, hundreds of Arafat’s men had already fled the area. Arafat, too, had escaped, on the back of a motorcycle.
By the time the fighting was over, some two hundred Fatah fighters had been killed. But nearly 30 Israeli soldiers lost their lives as well, and more than twice that number were wounded. Politically, the outcome was even murkier. Most of Israel was still basking in our victory in the Six-Day War. Now, we had deployed many of the same units, only to fight to what looked like a costly draw. Arafat and Fatah could claim — and soon did — that they had stood and fought, and inflicted losses on the victors of 1967.
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