Black September

After the 1967 war, Jordan became the main base of the Palestinian fedayeen, whose ranks swelled after the Battle of al-Karama in March 1968 and whose unchecked roadblocks, checkpoints, and tax collection amounted to what observers on all sides described as a state within a state. Clashes with the Jordanian army escalated through 1970, and in early September the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked three airliners to a Jordanian airstrip, openly defying King Hussein. On 16 September the king appointed a military government; the next day the army moved to drive PLO forces out of Amman, attacking fedayeen positions and refugee camps. Ten days of fighting between Jordanian and Palestinian forces followed — the violence the Arab world would call Black September.

Syria intervened on the Palestinian side, sending a tank force into northern Jordan that Jordanian armor and aircraft repelled within days. Under an Arab League truce concluded in Cairo at the end of September, the fedayeen withdrew from Amman to the north, but the Jordanian army resumed its offensive and in July 1971 overran the last PLO strongholds around Jerash and Ajloun, expelling the organization from the kingdom. The Palestinian dead were never reliably counted. Britannica records that troops loyal to Hussein killed several thousand Palestinian guerrillas; the PLO claimed far higher figures — Arafat spoke of some 20,000 killed — and most histories place the truth between a few thousand and the PLO’s claims.

The PLO regrouped in Lebanon, from which it staged raids into Israel — a shift that set the stage for Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. To avenge the defeat, a Fatah faction calling itself Black September assassinated Jordanian prime minister Wasfi al-Tal in Cairo in November 1971, and in September 1972 seized the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics; eleven Israelis were killed in a failed rescue attempt. Jordan, for its part, renounced its claim to the West Bank in 1988.