Now after 1967, after the loss of the West Bank, the Palestinians continued their arms-struggle against Israel from Jordan, but now from Jordan of the East Bank, Jordan on the other side of the river. And the question is, why do the Jordanians accept this? After the June war of 1967 the Jordanians were weak and struggling to recover from their defeat. And Hussein was also very reluctant to fight the Palestinians. After all, if Hussein sought to represent the Palestinians in a negotiation with Israel over the West Bank, he could hardly go about doing so by fighting the Palestinians and their deployment in Jordan. This deployment in Jordan gradually became a kind of state-within-a-state. And it is interesting to follow how this came about. After the June war, Fatah and similar organizations try to take root in the West Bank and to conduct a gorilla war against Israel from the occupied territories in the West Bank. But the Israeli security services were too efficient. And Fatah had to move out of the West Bank very quickly and take up deployment on the other side of the river, on the East Bank. And it is from the East Bank of Jordan that Fatah and other Palestinian organizations continued to wage their struggle against Israel. And the struggle against Israel naturally drew an Israeli retaliation. A major operation was conducted by the Israelis in March, 1968. On the village of Karameh on the southern Jordan valley where Fatah had established a base of operations, and the Karameh Operation became a great symbol in Palestinian historiography of armed struggle of the Palestinians which ended in great victory against Israel. What actually happened in Karameh? In Karameh there was a huge confrontation between Israeli forces that had entered Jordanian territory, and Jordanian forces. And it was actually Jordanian artillery which had inflicted most of the losses on the Israeli forces that moved into Jordan. But in the Palestinian narrative the Jordanians are completely left out. And the Israeli difficulties in Karameh, an operation which ended only with relative success and many Israeli casualties. Described by the Palestinians as an Israeli defeat inflicted on the Israelis by the Palestinian fighters themselves. Karameh was therefore presented as a great Palestinian victory. And not only the victory of the Palestinians, but the victory of their concept of popular armed struggle. That is, the Palestinian popular armed struggle could defeat the Israeli in a way that the Arab regular armies could not do. And though the Arab regular armies were defeated by Israel in 1967, just a few months before, here the Palestinians were able to achieve victory, just like the Algerians had done against the French in Algeria. Or how the Viet Cong was doing against the United States in Vietnam. And as a result of the, the symbolic value of the Karameh battle even though militarily it had been far less successful than the Palestinians portrayed it. It paved the way for the volunteering of many, many thousands of young Palestinian men in Jordan to join the Palestinian fighting organizations. It also paved the way for the takeover of the PLO by the Palestinian fighting organizations. And in the years of 1968 and 1969, the takeover of the PLO by Fatah and the other Palestinian fighting organizations was completed. And the PLO was converted from a bureaucratic organization as it had been under Shukhairy into an umbrella organization of Palestinian armed organizations. And since Fatah was the largest organization within the PLO, Yasser Arafat, the leader of Fatah, now also became the chairman of the PLO. But after Karameh, the Israelis continued to fight against the Palestinian presence in the Jordan Valley, and the Palestinian forces were forced to move inwards into deeper Jordanian territory. The Jordan Valley where the Palestinians had concentrated was pulverized by Israeli military action. And this forced the Palestinian forces to move further into Jordan and essentially to take over Palestinian refugee camps in the main cities of Jordan, particularly in Amman, creating the erosion of the Jordanian state. And the creation of entire territories within Jordan, completely controlled by Palestinian organization that became extra territorial entities into which even King Hussein was not admitted. In the summer of 1970 the United States made an initiative to launch the peace process between Israel and the Arab states based on Resolution 242. This was known as The Rogers Initiative named after the US Secretary of State at the time. [BLANK_AUDIO] A US initiative based on resolution 242, that is that resolution which did not include the Palestinians. Was it an initiative that meant an Israeli, Jordanian negotiation over the future of the West Bank and the parallel negotiation between Egypt and Israel over the Egyptian territories.
