Eric Ambler: The Levanter

The Egyptian fedayeen were heavily armed commando forces. Operating from Egyptian and Jordanian bases, they penetrated deep into Israeli territory, murdering civilians, mining roads, and blowing up installations. The Sinai campaign of 1958 put an end to their activities, but among the Palestinians the fedayeen idea persisted. The guerrilla groups which now began to be formed were trained and organized by men like Ghaled who had soldiered with the Egyptian fedayeen. One of the larger groups became known as Al Fatah, and Ghaled was one of its early leaders.

In 1963 he was wounded in the left leg during an Israeli reprisal raid. The wound was serious and the early treatment of it inadequate. Toward the end of the year his father advised him to go to Cairo for corrective surgery.

His presence in Cairo at that time had decisive effects on his future. The Palestine Liberation Organization was in the process of being formed there, and Ghaled, convalescing after the operation on his leg, was drawn into the discussions. As an Al Fatah leader of note he was consulted about the PLO’s new official field force, the Palestine Liberation Army, which was to be armed with Soviet weapons. Though he refused the battalion command which was offered to him, he was appointed a member of the PLO’s new “Awakening Committee”.

Under the PLO charter this committee was to devote itself to “the upbringing of the new generations both ideologically and spiritually so that they may serve their country and work for the liberation of their homeland”. During his convalescence Ghaled was given the job of lecturing to groups of Arab students attending, or about to attend, Western universities, and of leading discussions. It was at one of these student meetings that he met Melanie Hammad.

There were two articles by her in the Ghaled file. The first had been published by a French left-wing quarterly and was a dull restatement of the Palestinian case enlivened by direct quotes from Ghaled. One of them, a comment on the Balfour Declaration, gave me a foretaste of the sort of thing I might have to listen to.

“The British are unbelievable,” Ghaled had said. “They promised to provide the Zionists with a national home in Palestine and in the same breath promised that they would do so without infringing on the rights of the existing inhabitants. How could they? Did they think that, because they were dealing with the Holy Land, they could count on another of those Christian miracles of loaves and fishes?”

The other Hammad piece, also in French, had been written in 1933 for a big-circulation newspaper noted for its sensationalism. In this Melanie Hammad had let herself go. Ghaled, then commanding an Al Fatah training camp in the Gaza Strip, was eulogized as the white knight sans peur et sans reproche of the Palestinian cause, a resolute yet honourable fighter for freedom, a Nasser-like politico-military leader of the kind needed if there were ever to be true unity of purpose in Palestine.

Edwards had written a note in red ink across the clippings: PLO Cairo spokesman went out of his way to dismiss this estimate of G. as “grossly distorted” and said that it “impugned his loyalty to the Palestinian cause”. Hammad dubbed “irresponsibly inaccurate and naive”. Picture declared phony.

The picture referred to, which appeared with the article, showed a tall man in desert uniform studying a map spread out on the tailgate of a truck. He was wearing a head cloth which shaded most of his features. All you could see was a prominent, somewhat aquiline nose and a thin moustache. Since there was no authenticated photograph of Ghaled in the file with which to compare it, I had no way of judging its possible phoniness. What interested me more was the suggestion, implicit in the spokesman’s strictures, that in 1966 Ghaled’s loyalty to the PLO was already suspect; I looked for evidence of disciplinary action of some sort.

All I found was an announcement put out by the PLO radio some weeks later (November ‘66) that Ghaled had been relieved of his duties as a member of the Awakening Committee in order to “concentrate upon his operational duties with Al Fatah in the field”. In other words he had been told to stay clear of politics, stop playing personality games, and get back to killing Israelis.

Presumably they believed that this public admonishment had brought Ghaled to heel; and, presumably, his general demeanour encouraged them in that belief. Subsequent references to him in PLO communiqués were laudatory in tone. His sudden turnaround, when the crunch came in Jordan, had obviously taken them by surprise.

Following the Six-Day War with Israel and the fresh influx of West Bank refugees which it produced, tension in Jordan between the government of the Hashemite King Hussein and the Palestinians had grown steadily. Half the population of that small country were now Palestinian refugees. The Al Fatah and other refugee guerrilla organizations began to present the king and his government with a serious challenge to their authority. In 1970 the Palestinians were warned by Ghaled that the Jordanian government was planning to make a unilateral peace settlement with Israel. It was time, he declared, to take over the government in Amman and make it their own. Quite suddenly he became the most militant and vociferous of the anti-Hashemite Palestinians. In a speech to his fedayeen, reported by the Damascus guerrilla radio, he had thrown down the gauntlet. “By Allah,” he had shouted, “we will wade through a sea of blood if need be. I tell you, comrades, we must risk everything now for our honour.”

From the self-styled Marxist, Salah Ghaled, this sort of hysteria was new. Frank Edwards thought that the fact that Ghaled’s parents had once again become refugees when the West Bank was occupied, and that Ghaled senior had subsequently died in an UNWRA camp, had precipitated the change. I wasn’t so sure. It seemed to me more likely that Ghaled had decided that the moment had come for him to make his bid for power, and that the hysteria had been calculated.

Anyway, he got the sea of blood he had called for. When he and the other Al Fatah guerrilla leaders attempted to take control of the capital, Amman, King Hussein ordered the Jordanian army to stop them, and the army obeyed.

At this point, the series of events which Ghaled was later to denounce collectively as “the Great Betrayal” took place. Alarmed by the spectacle of what was, in effect, an Arab civil war, the PLO Central Committee hastened to intervene. Negotiating with the king and his government, they secured a cease-fire, then an extension of it, and finally signed an agreement under which all Palestinian guerrilla forces would be withdrawn; to begin with from Amman, and later from all other urban areas in Jordan. This tragic conflict, it was said, had been the result of Israeli provocations designed to incite brother to fight brother instead of the common Zionist enemy.

Ghaled was not the only guerrilla leader to defy the Central Committee by refusing to honour either the cease-fire or the withdrawal agreement, and sporadic fighting continued in and around Amman for many weeks; but, with the acceptance of the agreement by most of the Al Fatah forces, the Jordanian army was free to concentrate on and to isolate those that remained. One by one, as they saw their positions becoming untenable, Ghaled and the rest had slipped away, taking their men, their arms, and their equipment with them.

Ghaled and his fedayeen went north, first to a base at Ramtha near the Syrian border, and then, when the Jordanian army moved to clear that area too, into Syria itself. Most of the dissident leaders, having taken to the Jordanian hills to await developments, now set about composing their differences with the Central Committee. Not Ghaled, however; he remained loudly defiant.