Some authors consider the Battle of Samu to have been a contributing factor to the outbreak of the
Six-Day War in 1967. Clea Bunch wrote that "the attack on Samu was the first link in a lengthy chain of miscalculations, false perceptions and high stakes gambles that steadily led to war". In Jordan, following the battle, King Hussein was faced with a storm of criticism for failing to protect Samu, emanating from Jordanians, as well as from Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries. Riots spread throughout the West Bank demanding the king be overthrown. Four Palestinians were killed by Jordanian police as a result of the riots. On 20 November, Hussein ordered nationwide military service.
Egyptian and
Syrian radio also verbally attacked Jordan accusing King Hussein of collaborating with the
CIA to plot an overthrow of the
Ba'ath Party in Syria. Following the Palestinian demonstrations against him, King Hussein accused
Nasser of using the presence of the
United Nations Emergency Force on Egypt's border with Israel, as an excuse for failing to take action against Israel. As Palestinians rioted in
Hebron,
Nablus,
Jerusalem on the West Bank and
Irbid in Jordan, the
Palestine Liberation Organization warned all Jordanian ministers to resign by noon on 26 November. In Israel, angered opposition parties demanded to know why Israel attacked Jordan rather than Syria, which was the guerrilla home base. In a special parliamentary debate, Prime Minister Eshkol listed 14 major acts of sabotage carried out from Jordan in the past year, climaxed by the land-mine explosion that killed three Israeli troops on 12 November. Eshkol said: "It is regrettable that this particular act of aggression came from Jordan." But since it did, he had picked Jordan as his target. "No country where the saboteurs find shelter and through whose territory they pass on their way to Israel can be exempt from responsibility." What Eshkol left unsaid was his certainty that, with the so-called Arab unity being what it was, Jordan would find itself with far less Arab support than Syria, which was much closer to Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. Jordan's Arab partners did wait until the Israelis had withdrawn before making indignant vows of support. Two days after the attack, in a memo to
President Johnson, his National Security Advisor
Walt Rostow wrote "I'm not suggesting our usual admonition against retaliation. We'll maintain that posture ... but retaliation is not the point in this case. This 3,000-man raid with tanks and planes was out of all proportion to the provocation and was aimed at the wrong target. In hitting Jordan so hard, the Israelis have done a great deal of damage to our interests and to their own: 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. It's important that we strengthen the hand of those within the Israeli Government who feel this is not the proper way to handle the problem. Even members of the Israeli military now doubt that retaliation will stop the cross-border raids, though they see no better solution." On 16 November 1966 the UN Security Council convened to hear the Jordanian complaint and invited an Israeli response. Some months later and just weeks before the
Six-Day War, the U.S. ambassador in Amman,
Findley Burns, reported in a telegram to the
State Department that Hussein had expressed the opinion in a conversation the day before 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.
David Ben-Gurion later criticized the raid, arguing that it weakened King Hussein's position counter to Israel's interests.
Moshe Dayan was also critical. He believed that the Samu Operation should have been directed at the Syrians. ==See also==