(Bar-Ilan University Press, 2022, ISBN: 978-965-226-609-5, 458 Pages, Hebrew)

ATTRITION, ARMY AND CIVILIANS ON THE NORTHEAST FRONT, 1967-1970

The new circumstances following the Six Day War required the IDF to change from being an offensive army to one that carried out security and defense missions. While the Arab countries licked their wounds, the Palestinian terror organizations began guerilla and terror operations against Israel, primarily from the Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese borders, with the aim of exhausting the IDF and, especially, the Israeli home front. The IDF had to undertake operations that were different from those it had been used to, and the Israeli security system, headed by Moshe Dayan as defense minister, seemed to have difficulty in adapting to this type of military confrontation (as manifested, for example, in the IDF’s operation in the Fatah camp in Karameh). From 1967 to 1970, Israeli towns and villages in the Jordan Valley and the Beit She’an Valley suffered shelling and infiltration of terrorists from Jordanian territory. These localities were not prepared for the attacks from the east and complained that the country’s leadership and the IDF had left them on their own to face the Palestinian and Jordanian fire.

In this book Eran Eldar describes and analyzes the years of the War of Attrition on Israel’s northeastern front: on the one hand, the entrenchment of the Palestinian terror organizations in Jordan and Lebanon, their military and propaganda activity, and their complex relations with King Hussein of Jordan and the Lebanese government, and on the other hand, the daily coping of the inhabitants of the Jordan Valley and the Beit She’an Valley, who felt they had been abandoned