Black September: How Jordan Expelled the PLO in 1971

Black September: The War Jordan Won Against the PLO

In September 1970, Jordan's King Hussein ordered his army to launch an offensive against Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrilla groups operating from its territory. The operation began on September 17, and what was expected to last a few days turned into a war of attrition that did not end until July 1971, when the PLO was definitively expelled from the country and relocated to Lebanon. The episode, known as Black September, left around 600 Jordanians dead and more than 1,200 injured, while Palestinian casualties numbered in the thousands without an exact confirmed figure.

The debate that has peine the case these days relies on a fact often left out of the usual narrative: of all the neighboring states that hosted Palestinian refugees after 1948, only the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan granted them citizenship. Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt kept their populations in camps or under military administration. This contrast between formal hospitality and subsequent conflict is the axis around which everything else revolves.

What Triggered the 1970 Jordanian Offensive

Relations between Amman and the PLO had deteriorated throughout the second half of the 1960s due to two mutually reinforcing factors. The first: attacks by the guerrilla against Israel launched from Jordanian soil provoked large-scale Israeli reprisals against Jordan, which paid the price for a war it did not direct. The second: the PLO sought to build a state within the state in the north of the country, with its own power structures centered around Amman and Irbid.

The point of no return came in early September 1970, when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked three Western aircraft and forced them to land at an abandoned airbase in northern Jordan. Surviving passengers escaped, but the aircraft were deliberately destroyed on September 12 in an act staged for the media. For Hussein's court, this demonstrated one uncomfortable fact: the king did not control his own country.

Five days later, he ordered the offensive. The numbers of the clash explain why it stalled: 70,000 Jordanian soldiers with heavy weaponry against about 12,000 regular PLO combatants and 30,000 militia members armed with light weapons. Material superiority did not translate into a quick victory. Palestinian resistance and several Jordanian tactical errors turned the operation into a months-long tug-of-war concentrated in the north of the country.

Syrian Intervention and Al-Assad's Coup

On September 19, 1970, Syria sent tanks and troops in support of the PLO. The Jordanian air force ultimately repelled the incursion, a military reversal that changed the balance on the ground and had direct consequences in Damascus. The Syrian Defense Minister, Hafez al-Assad, took advantage of the internal strain caused by Black September to seize power through a bloodless coup on November 13, 1970.

The PLO's exit to Lebanon did not close the file; it peine it in another country. The relocated Palestinian forces acted as a catalyst for the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The name Black September also became linked to a similarly named armed group whose attacks included the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

The Refugee Context: Who Granted Citizenship and Who Did Not

Trinc the end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the exile of more than 800,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war, displaced persons settled in camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. The UNRWA agency assisted them, but over time a considerable portion of the refugees came under the influence of the fedayeen. The agency itself had largely abandoned its initial obligations of repatriation and resettlement.

Assistance figures paint a precarious picture. After 1967, the agency allocated only 13 dollars annually per refugee, which in practice amounted to a diet without meat, fruits, or vegetables, with about 1,500 daily calories as a baseline. This cocktail—sustained precariousness, absence of a political horizon, and armed organizations offering identity and employment—explains better than any manifesto why militias easily recruited among the camp populations.

What Is Discussed Today Regarding Jordan's Role

The issue has become an interpretive battlefield. One current argues that the case demonstrates a pattern: countries that host Palestinian refugee populations ultimately pay a high security cost, citing Lebanon as a second example. The opposing response points out that Jordan did not expel the Palestinians, but the PLO, and that there are currently two million Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship in the country. The distinction between refugee and militant is the line separating these two readings.

There is a third narrative thread that shifts the focus to the Cold War. According to this view, the USSR used Palestinians as a destabilization tool in the Middle East after the Six-Day War, and the PLO had patrons in the communist governments of Eastern Europe. Romanian defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, former head of the Securitate, claims in his memoirs that the Soviet apparatus designed and funded part of this strategy. It is a thesis with its own source, not an established fact, and should be read as such.

The detail that disconcerts almost everyone: the war ended in July 1971, but the PLO did not disappear. It changed bases. And the country that received it paid the price for fifteen years of civil war.