Each Israel Victory Only Serves To Increase Resistance Of Arab Forces

By THOMAS RESTON, North American Newspaper Alliance

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

KARAMEH, Jordan — If 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.

Karameh Destroyed 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 proved the Israeli army was not invincible, Palestinians now say, but it was here and in the Battle of Karameh that serious partisan warfare against the enemy can mark its 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.

Resistance Increases 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 increase. But as the winter of 1969 begins, Israel 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. All along the eastern front with Jordan, they have constructed an electronic security fence, which they maintain has all but stopped infiltration.

Most of the incidents at the moment are limited to shelling and mortaring the tough little kibbutzim in the Beit Shean Valley, just south of the Sea of Galilee, where the children sleep in bomb shelters every night and every morning Israeli mine detection teams sweep the frontier fields before allowing the farmers to get to work.

Losses Heavy Al Fatah and other guerrilla movements based out of Amman tell the story differently, but even though their claims are exaggerated, it cannot be denied they are right when they calmly report “this is only the beginning.”

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.

Cite this clipping

"Each Israel Victory Only Serves To Increase Resistance Of Arab Forces," The Oregonian, 9 December 1969, p. 3. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1969-020. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1969-020