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For 20 years they have been pawns in Arab politics, nourished on promises of a return to Palestine and a passionate hatred of Israel. Today the camps house 540,000, including 350,000 new refugees who fled the occupied territories after the June War. The camps seethe with frustration and anger, and provide a rich source of recruits for fedayeen. Says the mother of one dead commando: "I am proud that he did not die in this camp. The foreign press comes here and takes our pictures standing in food queues, and they publish them and say 'Look at this nation of beggars.' This is no life. I am proud to send my second son to replace the first, and I am already preparing my eight-year-old boy for the day when he can fight too."
With the fanaticism and desperation of men who have nothing to lose, the fedayeen have taken the destiny of the Palestinians into their own hands. Peace in the area would hurt their cause by removing the support of other Arabs. They have no brotherly concern for the ambitions of Nasser—and certainly not for, as one fedayeen communique puts it, the "slave traffickers in the U.N. lobbies" and their efforts to act as mediators in the Middle East.
In the aftermath of the Arab defeat, the fedayeen are today the only ones car rying the fight to Israel. The guerrillas provide an outlet for the fierce Arab resentment of Israel and give an awakened sense of pride to a people accustomed to decades of defeat, disillusionment and humiliation. In the process, the Arabs have come to idolize Mohammed ("Yasser") Arafat, a leader of El Fatah fedayeen who has emerged as the most visible spokesman for the commandos. An intense, secretive and determined Palestinian, he is enthusiastically portrayed by the admiring Arab press as a latter-day Saladin, with the Israelis supplanting the Crusaders as the hated-and feared-foe.
It was the Israeli victory last year that, as one fedayeen commander puts it, "handed us the Arab people on a golden platter." Students quit their classes to sign up as terrorists. Doctors abandoned their practices in Beirut and Cairo to come to Jordan to attend wounded fedayeen. Arab businessmen offered supplies and purchased weapons, and the Saudi and Kuwait governments began diverting to fedayeen coffers funds usually contributed to Jordan's budget. Individual contributions by the thousands poured in from Arabs throughout the Middle East and those abroad; the wife of Saudi Arabia's King Feisal sent $4,500. In the coffee bars of Beirut, young Arabs peddle El Fatah stamps, to be used like Christmas seals, bearing a picture of a burned child and the words "Shalom and Napalm"—a reference to the use of napalm by Israelis in last August's reprisal raid on the Jordanian town of Salt. Other stamps show a guerrilla fighter, a monument to martyrs or Jerusalem, with the slogan: "Palestinian Resistance." The money raised, of course, goes to buy bullets.