The Bible calls those lands Gilead, home to three of the twelve Israelite tribes that originally settled the Land of Israel three thousand years ago. But self-defense, not longing for biblical homelands, sent us east over the Jordan River in Operation Inferno.
A precise schedule involving the air force, artillery, armor, and infantry became the blueprint for action. At five-thirty in the morning on March 21, just as dawn broke over the mountains in the east, air force fighter jets would put on a show over the village, dropping leaflets warning Arafat’s followers to surrender or be killed. Very straightforward, the leaflets said simply, ‘The IDF is coming. You are surrounded. Surrender. Obey the army’s instructions. Drop your weapons. If you resist, you will be killed.”
Meanwhile, tanks and half-tracks would cross the narrow Jordan River over the Allenby Bridge, while north and south of Karameh, the engineering corps put up temporary bridges for more armor to block the village’s flanks. Artillery in the foothills of the Judean Mountains on the west bank of the river backed up the operation.
When the enemy woke to the sonic booms and the news of their imminent capture, their natural reaction would be to flee east. The tip of the IDF spear — the paratroops’ sayeret—would be waiting, helicoptered to a position east of Karameh to control escape routes into the foothills of the Edom Mountains. If the PLO’s fighters tried to flee into Jordan’s hinterland, we would be in place to catch them. Indeed, if the plan worked, the entire PLO would be arrested in one fell swoop.
Matan divided the company into two groups, one under his command and one under mine. He took forty fighters, while I took thirty. Just before we began loading the helicopters, Matan took me aside. “Listen, Muki,” he said. “We have some tagalongs.”
“That’s bad news, Matan,” I said.
Tagalongs are a phenomenon in the IDF — people show up wanting to get in on the action. Sometimes they are former members of the unit, sometimes from other units. The larger an operation, the more likely that the circle of people aware of the secret preparations will grow. And in tiny Israel, word spreads fast.
More often than not, tagalongs get in the way, especially in a special operations mission, where everything is measured out and planned. Vehicles are loaded so perfectly that every soldier and item has a number, the order in which they go in and out of the transport, or a specific position in a formation, or a task to accomplish. Adding a tagalong means taking someone else out. Matan knew this as well as I did.
“No tagalongs,” I said. “Not with me.”
“Muki, please …” Matan asked.
“No way,” I insisted. “And you know better,” I added, making no effort to hide a reprimanding tone from my captain (something that can only happen in a special operations unit of the IDF, where a soldier’s skills are as important — if not more important — than his rank).
Although Matan did know better, as a career soldier he had his own considerations. But I refused to give in — especially when I recognized one of the two tagalongs coming up the walkway.
Tzimel’s appearance confirmed everything I felt about lateminute arrivals from outside the unit. A company commander in the brigade when I first reached the sayeret, he made a bad impression on me then. Now, trailed by an air force intelligence lieutenant named Nissim, who claimed to have a background in infantry and wanted to be taken along, Tzimel’s appearance in the operation gave me a foreboding feeling.
“No way,” I said to Matan, shaking my head, not caring if Tzimel overheard. “No tagalongs. Come on,” I insisted. “This operation looks like a lot of fun, but it also could get very complicated. Those people will not be any help. They’ll just get in the way. And you know it.”
“I’ll take one and you’ll take one,” suggested Matan.
I shook my head. If he wanted to take them on, he could. But I wanted neither of them. “No way,” I repeated. “No way I’m going to take off someone who knows the plan to put in someone who doesn’t. No way.” Like many of my generation from the Jezreel Valley, I am stubborn. Matan finally gave in. I hoped he would send Tzimel and Nissim home. Instead, he added them to his force.
We took off in the dark, in eight helicopters. Half an hour into the ride, the pilots went into a holding pattern because of fog. Five minutes went by, then fifteen, while the pilots did figure eights. There is nothing unusual in an operation’s schedule changing in real time-as long as the other forces involved know about the new timetable. When the helicopters resumed their flight path down the Jordan Rift Valley, it never occurred to us on board that central command stuck to the same plan, without taking our delay into account.
I am not saying our job was the most important cog in the operation or that if we had arrived on time, everything would have worked like clockwork. But to prevent the enemy’s escape from Karameh, they needed us in the right place at the right time.
Nobody warned us that we lost the element of surprise in the swirl of dust before dawn, our landing camouflaged by the fastchanging light of the desert just as the sun rose over the red mountains of Edom.
My teams scrambled out of the rocking choppers, heading to the formation we had practiced. The choppers left behind their dust storms while we began jogging west to our position above Karameh about six miles away. Our plan said to be there by five-thirty, just as the air show began.
But barely a dozen strides into the hour’s run, carrying full gear across the wadis of the Rift east of Karameh, we ran into the enemy.
I don’t know who was more surprised, us or the armed Palestinians in their raggedy collection of mismatched surplus uniforms from Arab and Soviet-bloc armies, in sneakers and sandals as well as army boots. None seemed to have helmets, and most wore the black-and-white checkered keffiyot that identified them as Fatah, loyal to Arafat’s majority faction of the PLO.
Some tried to fight. Most looked for hiding places in the crumbly sandstone gullies of the wadis.
We chased them down into the dry riverbeds and over the ridges, killing about twenty-five who resisted and taking about a dozen more prisoner. All the while, we kept pushing to Karameh under annoying mortar fire from Jordanian Army positions in the foothills to the east behind us. It surprised us as much as the unexpected encounter with the enemy.
In the months after the Six-Day War, our intelligence experts scoffed at the idea that the Jordanian Army would help the Palestinians, or even challenge our temporary occupation of their country while we dealt the PLO a punishing blow. After all, since the end of the ‘67 war, the PLO under Arafat had challenged King Hussein’s authority throughout the country and completely subverted it in places like Karameh. But as so often happens, intelligence estimates proved to be wrong. Luckily, the Jordanians were not very accurate with their mortar fire.
It took almost five hours to move five miles, instead of the hour we planned. Because of that, I knew something was very amiss in the operation. At eleven in the morning we finally reached a bluff overlooking Karameh, giving us a panoramic view of the war in the village below.
About a mile to our west, tanks, armored personnel carriers (APCs), half-tracks (rear-axled tank-treads), and jeeps zigzagged through the village, blasting at resisters holed up inside the driedmud and tin-walled houses. Planes roared out of Israel in the west, looping in and out of the scene, diving to drop their bombs. Helicopters carrying wounded flew back and forth. From the foothills of the Edom mountain range, Jordanian artillery shelled the battlefield while our artillery shot back.