In 1961, as we have already seen, the unity between Egypt and Syria, the United Arab Republic, broke up. This was a huge disappointment for the Palestinians, generally speaking. After all, Arab unity was supposed to be the vehicle of liberation. And the break up of the UAR was another indication of the need for the Palestinians to establish their own self-reliance. They could not trust the Arab states to liberate Palestine for them. This required political and organization autonomy. It required of the Palestinians to have what they called the independence of decision. They would not intervene in the affairs of the Arab states. They didn't have a particularly social or revolutionary ideology, if we're speaking about Fatah. But they did believe very strongly on the need to establish a Palestinian organization that would decide for the Palestinians, independently of the Arab states, on the waging of their struggle. And the struggle had to be an armed struggle, and they drew their inspiration from the Algerian model. After all, in 1962 the Algerians were successful in their war of liberation and forced the French to leave Algeria. And the Palestinians took a great deal of encouragement from the armed struggle waged by the Algerians. Just as they through the armed struggle had pushed the French out of Algeria, so the Palestinians would push the Israelis out of Palestine. And there were many small organizations like Fatah at the time in the late 50s and early 1960s, but there was no firm organizational structure and most of them did not last, but Fatah did. And Fatah, still one must recall, not part of the PLO, operating outside the framework of the PLO, created strong connections with the radical Ba'thi Regime in Syria. And the Ba'thi Regime in Syria allowed Fatah to conduct operations from Syria against Israel, and but even more so to allow Fatah to infiltrate Jordan's territory and to attack Israel from Jordan. The first armed operation conducted by Fatah against Israel was in January 1965 against the Israeli National Water Carrier, which was a great enterprise of ideological consequence in Israel. The Water Carrier, very much like the Aswan Dam, was seen by Israelis as a great moment in their modernization and the establishment of the Zionist enterprise in Israel. So it was not by chance that Fatah chose to attack the Water Carrier for its first operation. The operation failed. It wasn't very important militarily. But this was an indication that Fatah had launched the beginning of the armed struggle against Israel. This put great pressure on Shukeiri of the PLO to make more gains in his negotiations with Jordan, and to establish an effective base for the PLO inside Jordanian territory. But that reached an inevitable failure as one could only have expected. And by late 1965 the relations between Jordan and the PLO had broken down altogether. And in early 1966, the Jordanian government, instead of negotiating with Shukeiri and cooperating with the PLO, was busy arresting all supporters of the PLO inside Jordan. And in the summer of 1966, King Hussein of Jordan disconnected all relations with Shukeiri and the PLO. And Jordan and the PLO were totally at loggerheads and in diplomatic confrontation. Hussein's argument was that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan. Jordan had essentially, so the Jordanians argued, inherited Palestine. Jordan therefore represented Palestine. And if Jordan represented Palestine, no one needed another Palestinian organization to represent the Palestinians who were represented by Jordan anyway. This of course didn't convince the Palestinians. And more Fatah operations from the West Bank continued against Israeli targets. This eventually resulted in repeated Israeli reprisals. And the most important and significant of them was a huge Israeli retaliatory action taken against the village of Samu' in the Hebron hills in November 1966. This came in the wake of the killing of a number of Israeli soldiers by a mine planted by Fatah in Israeli territory. And the operation in Samu' had long-term unintended consequences. In the Samu' operation in November 1966, Israeli forces took control of the village of Samu' in the, in the Hebron hills, demolished 41 buildings in the village, and essentially indicated the incapacity of the Jordanians to defend the people of the West Bank. The PLO and the Arab states waged a huge propaganda assault against Jordan arguing that the Jordanians, in their attitude towards Palestine and towards the PLO, were not taking an aggressive enough position towards Israel. And the people in the West Bank, the Palestinian population of the West Bank itself, rose in a kind of mini uprising against the Jordanian government for about two weeks after the Samu' operation of November 1966. The operation conducted by the Israelis was intended to convince the Jordanians to take a firmer hand in controlling Fatah operations that were coming out of Jordan. Hussein however, understood Samu' as this huge Israeli military operation conducted in daylight as an Israeli preparation for the conquest of the West Bank. That is not what it was. But that is how Hussein understood it. And this heady influence on Jordanian decisions in the future, as we will see. After this Samu' operation there were two main issues that continued to sour the relations between Israel and Syria and to create a serious deterioration in the security situation along the border between Israel and Syria. The one was that the Syrians continued to allow Fatah to carry out operations from their territory against Israel. And the other was the Syrian scheme to divert the sources of the Jordan river in order to interrupt, and interfere, and actually defeat Israel's irrigation program. The National Water Carrier that the Israelis had built depended on water that was coming from the Sea of Galilee, which received its water from the Jordan River. And by diverting the tributaries of the Jordan River, the Syrians sought to deny Israel its water resources. Israel naturally would not stand for that. And as a result, the security situation along the border between Israel and Syria deteriorated constantly. It was against this background that we come to the situation that eventually led to the outbreak of the war in 1967.
