Karameh Symbolic of Ravages of Israel-Arab War

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KARAMEH, Jordan (NANA)— [first word cut off by the scan] you come down here to the bottom of the world, just north [of] the Dead Sea and three kilometers from where the Israelis stand on the hills above the Jordan River, you can still see Israeli tank-treads grooved into the tar of Karameh’s main street.

A year and a half ago, 50,000 Palestinians were living in this once-thriving agricultural community. Now Karameh is a mangled shell of a town, a maze of bullet-pocked concrete, dynamited houses and twisted metal, all sitting silently under the summer sun. The villagers have fled northeast into the highlands.

Karameh is symbolic of how the military war continues in the Middle-East, especially on Israel’s Eastern Front. The town was a base area for small-scale guerrilla strikes against the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River until March 21, 1968. On that day, fed up with the terrorism originating from here, the Israelis moved in and cleared this base once and for all.

Their operation was a military success in terms of its specific objective: Karameh was destroyed and there are no more raids being staged from here. On the other hand, the 15,000 Israeli troops suffered staggering losses in both men and materiel, and Karameh has since become the Arab “Alamo.”

Not only was it proven that the Israeli army was not invincible, Palestinians now say, but it was here in the Battle of Karameh that serious partisan warfare against the enemy can mark it’s birth.

Even though it was the regular Jordanian army which bore the brunt of Karameh’s defense, the fedayeen are the toast of Arab militants and a force no Arab conservative can afford to ignore.

Thus, Israel’s devilish military problem with the Arab “War of Attrition”: Each time they score another military success—and they have scored plenty since the Six-Day War—Arab stubbornness, intransigence and resistance only increases. But as the winter of 1969 begins, Israeli is still clearly on top of the military balance of pressure.

While Israeli army officers admit that Arab terrorism has “never been as bad as this” since 1948, they maintain they have the situation well in hand.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead and no dated folio line, so the date recorded here could not be checked against anything printed on the page. Nothing on the page contradicts it.

Cite this clipping

"Karameh Symbolic of Ravages of Israel-Arab War," Times Tribune, 8 December 1969. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1969-019. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1969-019