Talk:Operation Shredder

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Info from Es Samu

I have moved the following deatils about OperationShredder from the [[Es Samu] page here, so that rel;evant information not already in the article may be merged into it

Early on the morning 13 November, King Hussein, who had been having clandestine meetings with Abba Eban and Golda Meir for three years concerning peace and secure borders, received an unsolicited message from his Israeli contacts stating that Israel had no intention of attacking Jordan. However, at 5:30 a.m. in what Hussein described as an action carried out,

under the pretext of 'reprisals against the terrorist activities of the P.L.O.' Israeli forces attacked Es Samu, a village in Jordanian-occupied West Bank of 4,000 inhabitants, all of them Palestinian refugees whom the Israelis accused of harboring terrorists from Syria.

In Operation Shredder, Israel's largest military operation since 1956, a force of around 3,000-4,000 soldiers, backed by tanks and aircraft, divided into a reserve force, which remained on the Israeli side of the border, and two raiding parties, which crossed into the Jordanian-occupied West Bank. The larger force of eight Centurion tanks followed by 400 paratroopers mounted in 40 open-topped half-tracks and 60 engineers in 10 more half-tracks headed for Samu, while a smaller force of 3 tanks and 100 paratroopers and engineers in 10 half-tracks headed towards two smaller villages, Khirbet el-Markas and Khirbet Jimba. In Samu, Israeli soldiers destroyed the village's only clinic, a girls' school, the post office, the library, a coffee shop and around 120 houses. Conflicting reports of this incident have been made. According to Prittie 50 houses were blown up but the inhabitants had been evacuated hours before. The 48th Infantry Battalion of the Jordanian army, commanded by Major Asad Ghanma, ran into the Israeli forces north-west of Samu and two companies approaching from the north-east were intercepted by the Israelis, while a platoon of Jordanians armed with two 106 mm recoilless guns entered Samu. In the ensuing battles three Jordanian civilians and fifteen soldiers were killed; fifty-four other soldiers and ninety-six civilians were wounded. The commander of the Israeli paratroop battalion, Colonel Yoav Shaham, was killed and ten other Israeli soldiers were wounded. According to the Israeli Government, fifteen Jordanians were killed but the true number was never disclosed by the Jordanians in order to keep up morale and confidence in King Hussein's regime.

Two days later in a memo to President Johnson his Special Assistant Walt Rostow wrote "retaliation is not the point in this case. This 3000-man raid with tanks and planes was out of all proportion to the provocation and was aimed at the wrong target" and went on to describe the damage done to U.S. and Israeli interests: "They've wrecked a good system of tacit cooperation between Hussein and the Israelis... They've undercut Hussein. We've spent $500 million to shore him up as a stabilizing factor on Israel's longest border and vis-à-vis Syria and Iraq. Israel's attack increases the pressure on him to counterattack not only from the more radical Arab governments and from the Palestinians in Jordan but also from the Army, which is his main source of support and may now press for a chance to recoup its Sunday losses... They've set back progress toward a long term accommodation with the Arabs... They may have persuaded the Syrians that Israel didn't dare attack Soviet-protected Syria but could attack US-backed Jordan with impunity."

Facing a storm of criticism from Jordanians, Palestinians and his Arab neighbours for failing to protect Samu, Hussein ordered a nation-wide mobilization on 20 November.

On 25 November the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 228 unanimously deploring "the loss of life and heavy damage to property resulting from the action of the Government of Israel on 13 November 1966", censuring "Israel for this large-scale military action in violation of the United Nations Charter and of the General Armistice Agreement between Israel and Jordan" and emphasising "to Israel that actions of military reprisal cannot be tolerated and that, if they are repeated, the Security Council will have to consider further and more effective steps as envisaged in the Charter to ensure against the repetition of such acts."

In a telegram to the State Department on 18 May, 1967 the U.S. ambassador in Amman, Findley Burns, reported that Hussein had expressed the opinion in a conversation the day before that,

Jordan is just as likely a target in the short run and, in his opinion, an inevitable one in the long run... Israel has certain long range military and economic requirements and certain traditional religious and historic aspirations which in his opinion they have not yet satisfied or realized. The only way in which these goals can be achieved, he said, is by an alteration of the status of the Occupied West Bank (never internationally recognized as Jordanian). Thus in the King's view it is quite natural for the Israelis to take advantage of any opportunity and force any situation which would move them closer to this goal. His concern is that current area conditions provide them with just such opportunities-terrorism, infiltration and disunity among the Arabs being the most obvious.

and recalling the Samu incident,

Hussein said that if Israel launched another Samu-scale attack against Jordan he would have no alternative but to retaliate or face an internal revolt. If Jordan retaliates, asked Hussein, would not this give Israel a pretext to occupy and hold Jordanian or Occupied territory? Or, said Hussein, Israel might instead of a hit-and-run type attack simply occupy and hold territory in the first instance. He said he could not exclude these possibilities from his calculations and urged us not to do so even if we felt them considerably less than likely.

The incident at El Samu is regarded as a prelude to the Six-Day War.

Information to merge

Es Samu. Isarig just removed it saying it belonged in this article. It doesn't look like he actually merged the information though. Maybe there should be a separate article called "Samu Incident" because it does seem larger than just a military operation, although it is clear that Israel's military operation was a key part of the whole event. --Abnn 18:21, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

I just moved it here a minute ago...merging takes time. I don't think it makes sense to have two articles. Perhaps rename this one to Samu Incident. Isarig 18:24, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I would recommend the rename but with a different capitalization, Samu incident. --Abnn 18:26, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

I believe I have already responded to Isarig's point. It's inappropriate to structure Palestinian history according to which Israeli military operation was taking place. The Incident is of course much larger than Operation Shredder. I doubt also whether many people have heard of this operation's code name whereas most relevant history books cover the Samu Incident. --Ian Pitchford 16:51, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

feel free to rename this article, as suggested above, but there's no need to create duplicate articles which have nearly identical content. Isarig 17:16, 2 June 2007 (UTC)