Word: fatah
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Fatah's headquarters buildings in Amman, a hectic bustle reflects the growth of the movement. Switchboard operators bellow into makeshift World War II British field telephones, trying to make contact with branch offices in Salt or Irbid. Most communication is still by handwritten letter, carried by couriers on bicycles, in Jeeps or on foot. When a dusty Arab arrives with a tightly wadded piece of paper, Arafat scribbles an answer in the margin, then sends the courier off again. Agents arriving in little black Volkswagens dash up for conferences. A white ambulance pulls up bearing the insignia...
These days El Fatah hardly has time to fight as it copes with the avalanche of aid. Stacks of bandages, food and ammunition are piled everywhere. Sometimes the arriving shipments include beer. It is not drunk; the fedayeen sell it and use the money to purchase arms. Some of the fedayeen weapons are purchased directly, but some are contributed by Arab governments, particularly Egypt, Iraq and Syria, which help out in other ways as well. A Syrian raider captured by the Israelis revealed that he had been trained by Egyptian army officers...
...fedayeen and win them new allies among the Jordanian people. Last March, an armored column of more than 1,000 Israeli men punched across the Jordan River to destroy a guerrilla base at Karamah. They succeeded, but Karamah became the fedayeen Alamo. In the furious battle, as El Fatah recounts it, one youth strapped a bundle of TNT around his waist and jumped on an Israeli tank, blowing himself up with it. From the surrounding hills, the regular Jordanian army poured a withering fire on Israeli troops, who had to fight their way home, taking high casualties. Jordan...
...reserve duty. At Israeli schools, teachers are now being lectured on anti-terrorist tactics and given courses in first aid, and schoolchildren are instructed in how to identify mines. Cinema ushers and janitors are undergoing training to learn how to take precautions against bombs. In a treatise on El Fatah to be published next month by London's Institute for Strategic Studies, Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former chief of Israeli intelligence, warns that "subversion may become a feature of our lives for a length of time that no one can foresee. It might become like the toll of traffic accidents...
...date, the fedayeen's most damaging operation was a bomb in Jerusalem's Mahaneh Yehuda marketplace last month. It killed twelve civilians and wounded 53. Embarrassingly for the guerrillas, two rival groups claimed credit, but the Fatah man, a burly, mustachioed Arab dressed in dungarees and a dirty white sweater, told the more convincing story, and the fedayeen council granted the glory to El Fatah. Arriving back at Arafat's headquarters in suburban Amman, he related that he wore a stolen Israeli policeman's uniform, drove a small, British-built delivery van to .the market...