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At times last week it seemed that the area's fourth war in two decades was al ready in progress. Israeli and Jordanian artillery opened up on two successive days. For the first time, Israelis also hit at the 15,000 Iraqi troops stationed in Jordan, who recently started firing their long-range, 122-mm. Russian heavy guns into Israel. Israeli jets flashed across the cease-fire lines three times to bomb the area around the Jordanian town of Irbid and hammer at the artillery positions of the 421st Iraqi battalion. Deep inside Jordan, Israeli commandos blew up two vital bridges connecting Amman and the port of Aqaba (see map).
In the past, the United Nations has merely deplored violations of the truce and urged all parties to get on with negotiations. Last week the great powers gave fresh evidence of their heightened concern that the fighting might get out of hand. Russia publicly urged a political settlement, declaring for the first time that it would not "permit" a resumption of war—whatever that meant. Washington registered its anxiety by calling in the Israeli and Jordanian ambassadors. They were warned against the dangers of continuing to violate the tattered cease-fire agreement that ended the Six-Day War.
It is in this tense milieu that the Arabs' "men of sacrifice" operate, in a defiant effort to exploit its instabilities to their own ends. The fedayeen, who owe no fealty to any government, are responsible only to themselves, and view any settlement as a betrayal and a disaster. They possess the power to sting Israel into repeated reprisals, and perhaps to whip Arab popular opinion to such a pitch that not even Nasser with all his prestige might dare a settlement with Israel. In Jordan, their primary staging area, they constitute virtually a state-within-a-state and could probably topple King Hussein and take over his splintered kingdom if they chose. And their power and influence are increasing all the time.
The Palestinian Diaspora
The primary sources of fedayeen strength are the Palestinian refugees, now 1,500,000 strong, who for 20 years have been a scattered and forlorn people, possessing neither a country nor any say in the harsh events profoundly affecting them. Dispossessed of their homes, lands and sense of nationhood when Israel was founded in 1948, they dispersed throughout the Middle East. They endured the scorn of their host populations toward outsiders, although the most skilled and educated came to dominate many areas of Arab intellectual and commercial life. Those that did not assimilate settled in crowded camps, mostly in Jordan and the Gaza Strip, where they lived a miserable, subsistence life, fed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.