A Kingdom at Breaking Point: The Road to Black September 1970 Jordan
By the late 1960s, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan contained within its borders the largest concentration of Palestinian refugees in the Arab world. The 1948 Nakba had driven hundreds of thousands across the Jordan River, and the 1967 war had added a second wave. From among them — and from the camps that had become cities of exile — a generation of fighters had emerged. The Palestinian fedayeen, organized under factions united loosely under the Palestine Liberation Organization, operated from Jordanian soil with increasing autonomy, conducting cross-border raids into Israeli-controlled territory and, critically, functioning as a parallel authority inside Jordan itself.
For King Hussein, this represented an existential challenge to his rule. The PLO’s armed factions collected taxes, ran checkpoints, and moved armed through Jordanian cities. Clashes between fedayeen and the Jordanian military had escalated through 1968 and 1969, punctuated by uneasy ceasefires. By the summer of 1970, the kingdom was, in effect, governing two competing sovereignties.
Dawson’s Field and the Trigger for War
The immediate provocation came in early September 1970 when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine carried out a series of dramatic aircraft hijackings, redirecting multiple international flights to a remote Jordanian airstrip the PFLP called Revolution Airport — known internationally as Dawson’s Field, in the Jordanian desert northeast of Amman. Three aircraft and their hundreds of passengers were held for days before the planes were dramatically blown up on September 12, after most passengers had been evacuated. The PFLP sought to exchange the remaining hostages for Palestinian prisoners held in European jails and Israel.
The hijackings placed Hussein under enormous pressure — from Western governments, from his own military command, and from those inside Jordan who saw fedayeen autonomy as intolerable. On September 15, Hussein declared martial law and appointed a military government. The following day, his army moved against Palestinian armed positions across the country.
The Violence of September: Scale and Human Cost
What followed was a sustained military campaign of devastating intensity. Jordanian armored units shelled Palestinian refugee camps and fedayeen strongholds in and around Amman, Irbid, Zarqa, and other cities. The camps — already dense, already poor — bore the weight of artillery fire and urban combat. Palestinian civilians had no border to cross, no safe corridor to follow. They were caught between armed factions and a state military that did not distinguish cleanly between fighter and refugee.
The scholarly record on casualties is somber. Yezid Sayigh, in his authoritative work Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993, estimates that between 3,000 and 5,000 people were killed during the fighting, with the overwhelming majority Palestinian. The figure includes fighters, but also civilians in the camps. Sayigh’s account, grounded in interviews and documentary research assembled over years, remains the most detailed scholarly reconstruction of the Palestinian national movement’s military history, and his treatment of Black September stands as the essential reference point.
The Arab world watched with profound unease. Syrian armored units briefly crossed into Jordan in an attempt to support the fedayeen, but withdrew under Jordanian air pressure and the implicit threat of Israeli intervention. No Arab state rescued the PLO. The pan-Arab solidarity that had animated the fedayeen’s popular appeal was revealed, in the crucible of September 1970, as largely rhetorical. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser brokered a ceasefire in Cairo on September 27 — one day before his death from a heart attack.
Expulsion, Relocation, and the Shadow Over Lebanon
The September fighting did not end PLO operations in Jordan immediately, but it broke the fedayeen’s organizational spine in the kingdom. Months of continued clashes culminated in July 1971 when Jordanian forces drove the last PLO units from their strongholds in the Ajloun forest. The PLO’s military infrastructure in Jordan was finished.
The organization relocated, in the main, to Lebanon — a country whose own fragile sectarian compact and weak central state made it, as Jordan had once seemed, a viable base. The Institute for Palestine Studies, which has documented Palestinian political history in depth across decades, has traced how the PLO’s Lebanese chapter grew directly from the ruins of its Jordanian one. What was established in Lebanon through the 1970s — the armed presence, the quasi-governmental structures, the refugee camps as political base — would in turn end in the Israeli invasion of 1982 and a second, larger expulsion.
The name Palestinians gave to the covert operations unit that emerged from the trauma of September 1970 — Black September, the organization responsible for the 1972 Munich attack — carried the event’s grief inside it. It was a naming act: a refusal to let a month of killing go unmarked, even in the absence of any international reckoning.
What Black September Reveals About Palestinian Statelessness
Black September 1970 in Jordan is not a footnote. It is a hinge. It demonstrates what Palestinian statelessness made structurally inevitable: that Palestinian armed movements, expelled from one territory, would reconstitute in another, dependent always on the tolerance of host states whose own interests could shift. Each expulsion — from Israel-Palestine in 1948, from Jordan in 1970–71, from Lebanon in 1982 — compressed Palestinian political life further, stripped organizational capacity, and imposed new cycles of loss on communities already living with dispossession.
Yezid Sayigh’s scholarship frames this not as a series of accidents but as the logical consequence of a movement attempting to build revolutionary state capacity without sovereign territory. The Palestinian national movement, from Amman to Beirut to Tunis, was always operating inside other people’s political constraints. September 1970 showed, with lethal clarity, how those constraints could close.
Sources
- Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford University Press / Institute for Palestine Studies, 1997)
- Institute for Palestine Studies — documentation of Palestinian political and military history
- Al Jazeera Archive — contemporaneous and retrospective coverage of the 1970 Jordanian campaign and PLO expulsion
- Geneva Conventions (ICRC commentary) — on protections owed to civilians in non-international armed conflict
