The Battle of Karameh

On 21 March 1968, an Israeli force of roughly 15,000 troops with tanks and air support crossed the Jordan River against the town and refugee camp of Karameh, where Fatah had its main base. Rather than withdraw, some 900 to 1,000 Palestinian fighters stood and fought, and Jordanian armor and artillery entered the battle in force.

The cost fell heaviest on the Palestinians: about 156 fedayeen killed, around 100 wounded, and 141 captured, against 28 to 33 Israeli dead — while Jordanian units lost between 40 and 84 soldiers. Israel destroyed the camp but withdrew the same day under fire, leaving damaged tanks behind. Both sides claimed victory; what mattered was what Palestinians and the Arab world took from it, three months after the June 1967 defeat of three Arab armies: that Palestinian fighters had stood their ground against the army that had just routed the region.

Karameh — the word means “dignity” in Arabic — made Fatah a mass movement. Five thousand volunteers applied to join within forty-eight hours; by late March nearly 20,000 fedayeen were operating in Jordan, and within a year Fatah had presence in dozens of countries. The battle put Yasser Arafat’s face on the cover of the world’s magazines and shifted the Palestine question, in international eyes, from a refugee problem toward a national movement claiming statehood — a shift with consequences that ran through Black September to the PLO’s arrival at the United Nations in 1974.