[NYTr] The First Intifada, 20 Years Later

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

electronic Intifada - Dec 10, 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9155.shtml

The first intifada 20 years later

by Sonja Karkar

The first Palestinian intifada (uprising or shaking off) erupted
dramatically on 9 December 1987 after twenty long years of brutal
Israeli military occupation. The Palestinians had had enough. Not only
had they been dispossessed of their homeland and expelled from their
homes in 1948 to make way for the boatloads of European Jewish
immigrants flooding into Palestine on a promise of a Jewish state, they
had been made to suffer the indignities of a people despised and
rejected by the whole world. They were the victims of a colonialist
project that denied their existence and their rights to
self-determination in the land that they had continuously inhabited for
millennia so that a state could be created in all of the land
exclusively for Jews from anywhere in the world. To this day, the
Zionist project has held powerful countries and august institutions
hostage in its service, despite the indisputable rulings of
international law and United Nations resolutions supporting the rights
of the Palestinians. What Israel had not bargained for, though, was the
steadfastness of a wronged people and their indomitable spirit that
sent the first stones hurtling towards army tanks and bulldozers in
their desperate bid to shake off Israel's crushing occupation. So began
the "War of the Stones."

The occupation and the intifada

The cause of the first intifada is most often attributed to the killing
of four Palestinian civilians by an Israeli jeep at a checkpoint in the
Gaza Strip, and then the subsequent killing of seventeen-year-old Hatem
Abu Sisi by an Israeli officer who fired into a crowd of aggrieved and
protesting Palestinians. However, these violent individual acts -- and
those preceding them -- were merely the last straws in a 20-year saga
of military occupation and its debilitating effects on a population
denied any control over their economic, social and political
development. More than a knee-jerk reaction to that occupation, it was
a united demonstration of a continuous political struggle for
self-determination that had been playing out long before 1987 at the
grassroots level.

A whole generation of Palestinians had never known anything other than
occupation. That occupation had made them economically dependent on
Israel. Not only did they have to put up with being treated like
inferiors and prisoners in their own homeland, but they were also
grossly exploited for their labor. They were paid half the wages of
Israeli workers, they were taxed higher, they had few benefits and they
were without job security because official Israeli policy denied them
any rights within Israel. Many Palestinians were employed without the
required work permits, which put them in an even more tenuous
situation. They -- like any other people -- wanted to be free from
Israel's tyranny, and like any other people, they wanted to resist the
force being used against them, but without an organized resistance
movement, they were powerless to challenge the occupation itself. The
more dependent they were, the more the occupation became entrenched,
and the more Israel profited. Beneath the surface, though, their
discontent was seething.

Palestinians were also seeing their confiscated land being illegally
settled by Jewish foreigners who were allowed to carry machine guns and
were protected by the Israeli army when they used them to terrorize
Palestinian families. These families were constantly under threat, not
only for continuing to live on their own land and properties, but also
for any outward expression of their cultural identity or nationalist
feelings. Anything that was deemed pro-Palestinian was forbidden or
destroyed. The word "Palestine" was expunged from textbooks and any
products marketed as Palestinian were relabeled as Israeli. [1]
Literature, art, music, and other activities that encouraged a national
consciousness were subject to attack and universities were often closed
for long periods because they were seen as fomenting nationalist
fervor. This repression of Palestinian national identity led to an
underground movement which only deepened their feelings for liberation
and over time created a culture of resistance which ultimately found
expression in the intifada. [2]

Israel tried numerous times to manipulate events so that a "new
leadership" would supplant the Palestinian Liberation Organization
(PLO) that was spearheading the national movement. The idea was to
limit Palestinian control of their own affairs as much as possible
while leaving Israel in complete control of military and security
matters. The Palestinians, however, had other ideas and rose up against
the "Civil Administration" scheme in 1976, against the Camp David
accords in 1979-80, and also against confederation with Jordan. They
pursued their rights through political and legal channels, but Israel
used deportation as a means of quelling the growing resistance.
Thousands of political figures and activists were expelled from their
country, their lives often threatened. By 1987, there were still some
4,700 political prisoners in Israeli jails [3] out of the 200,000
Palestinians arrested in that 20 year period. [4] The Palestinians
found that they had no impartial avenue available to them to hear their
grievances fairly, particularly over Israel's land confiscations, water
use and building constructions. As conditions deteriorated and
Palestinians saw their political and cultural identity at risk of being
annihilated, it is not at all surprising that they rose up to shake off
Israel's brutal occupation.

Challenging images

The Palestinians realized that their greatest power lay in mass civil
disobedience -- boycotting Israeli goods, refusing to pay taxes to
Israel, establishing their own mobile medical clinics, providing social
services, organizing strikes and demonstrations and unarmed
confrontations. The tactics they used took Israel unawares and captured
the attention of a hitherto unreceptive Western media. Specifically,
the images of Palestinian boys throwing stones at advancing armored
tanks totally upended the David and Goliath myth that Israel had
propagated so effectively -- a fledgling Israel struggling to survive
against the mighty Arab world. Suddenly, everyone was seeing a
different Goliath. Israel -- the most powerful military force in the
Middle East -- was facing down defenseless "David" in a re-enactment of
the Old Testament story when David slung his stone and slew the giant,
Goliath.

Israel's carefully constructed image of the defenseless victim had
already been crumbling since the 1967 War when it launched preemptive
strikes against Egypt and Jordan and won spectacularly and then had no
qualms in defying international law and occupying all of Palestinian
land. In 1982, the scenes of butchered Palestinian bodies in the
refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon horrified the world and
there was no mistaking Israel's involvement. By the time the intifada
catapulted the Palestinian struggle into the public spotlight, Israel's
schizophrenic self-image of victim and conqueror was up against the
media's pictures of soldiers' bullets shooting down Palestinian boys
with rocks in their hands. Matters were made worse by Israel's Defense
Minister, Yitzhak Rabin who ordered the soldiers to "break the bones"
of Palestinian demonstrators. In just four years, more than a thousand
Palestinians had been killed and many more were crippled.

To the outside world, the throwing of stones became a powerful visual
image of the first intifada, but it was the use of leaflets that
effectively mobilized the Palestinians against the occupation. Writers
Shaul Mishal and Reuben Aharoni observe that "In the absence of an
official and prominent local leadership, leaflets became a substitute
leadership during the intifada." [5] Their influence was felt
everywhere as they informed the people of where to go and what to do
and what had been achieved. Messages of upcoming strikes, boycotts and
specific campaigns made the rounds and gave the people a sense of unity
of purpose. This was also a time when symbolism became very important
to the national movement and the Palestinian flag and its colors were
incorporated even in clothing and embroidery. When so much else was
restricted in their lives, the Palestinians had found novel ways to
resist nonviolently, which had Israel searching for ways to respond.
Force was still its preferred method of control, but later its
manipulation of the peace process so frustrated even the small gains
made by the Palestinians, that resistance took on a new and much more
dangerous meaning with the second intifada in 2000.

Punishing the Palestinians

Throughout the years of the first intifada, it was not the
stone-throwing youths that had Israel worried as much as the civil
disobedience that had become rampant amongst the Palestinians. To quell
it, Israel resorted to punishing the Palestinian population en masse.
Ordinary civilians found themselves without freedom to pursue even the
most routine daily activities. Curfews were ordered for weeks on end
and thousands of Palestinians were arrested. With the closure of
schools and universities, education effectively became illegal and
teachers and students had to resort to "underground" classes. Homes
were demolished without warning, olive trees and agricultural crops
were destroyed, vital water supplies were redirected to Israel and then
water usage restricted so severely, people had to queue with containers
for hours to buy back their own water. So punishing were Israel's
assaults on the Palestinian population that rumors of transfer began
surfacing, especially when Israeli Former Military Intelligence Chief
General Shlomo Gazit said that these measures were intended so that
Palestinians would "face unemployment and a shortage of land and water
and thus we can create the necessary conditions for the departure of
the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza." [6]

Empowering the people

The idea of population transfer was not something new even then and the
Palestinians understood that their survival depended on uniting all
levels of society. The intifada drew its support for the first time
from the lower social strata -- people who had been most burdened by
Israel's occupation, particularly by Israel's exploitation of their
resources and their labor. Under what was called the United National
Command, "unified" popular committees took responsibility for
everything, from keeping watch over villages and refugee camps at night
against army and settler raids to distributing food and clothing to
those in need. Emerging from these groups came nonpartisan local
leadership and a social revolt against traditional conventions. The
masses took part in the demonstrations and confrontations with the
Israeli army, urged on by the anonymous printed leaflets that were
always careful to avoid calling for armed struggle so as not to
alienate the people. In their book, The Intifada, Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud
Ya'ari say that "This was a sharp psychological turnabout for a public
that had discovered what it could do -- and how to exploit the enemy's
weaknesses." [7]

There was no doubt that this national movement gave every Palestinian a
sense of empowerment, even though there were very few gains on the
ground. Women especially found themselves free to engage in productive
work, much of which was created by women's committees, and conventional
social boundaries soon blurred as women became more politically
involved by transforming "their family responsibilities to encompass
the entire community." [8] While the stones were no match for Israel's
impressive arsenal, an Israeli commander observed that "The essence of
the intifada is not in the actual level of activity, but in the
perception of the population ... the sense of identity, direction and
organization." [9] If nothing else, the people's non-violent mass civil
disobedience strategy had attracted media coverage and journalist
Thomas Friedman commented that "the presence of the foreign media
really forced Israelis to look at the true brutality of their
occupation." [10] That is, until Israel found other more sinister ways
to turn around public opinion.

Israel shifts the goal posts

The Oslo "peace process" took the wind out of the intifada. Suddenly,
Israel was the peacemaker on the world stage and began talks with the
PLO, fully intending to neutralize it. Rather than leading the national
movement and resistance to Israel's oppression, the PLO morphed into an
institution -- the Palestinian Authority (PA) -- charged with policing
its own people for a place at the negotiating table. The world breathed
a sigh of relief and international efforts were concentrated on the
peace process while the sordid realities on the ground were once again
ignored. Despite Israel agreeing to withdraw from the occupied
territories, it did no such thing. Instead, it confiscated even more
Palestinian land and continued to build more illegal Jewish
settlements. Jerusalem residency rights were withdrawn and not only was
Jerusalem closed to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, but
freedom of movement within the occupied territories was further
curtailed and reduced to the humiliating experience of being told when
and where they could go -- if at all. What is more, the Palestinians
found themselves split into three disconnected enclaves A, B and C --
islands in a sea of looming Israeli settlements. Yet, the world dangled
the carrot of an independent Palestinian state and Israel allowed the
discourse to continue, everyone knowing full well that Israel was doing
what it wanted. The brazenness of the charade was breathtaking. Even
more breathtaking, is that the charade is being repeated today.

As peace and a two-state solution became the catch-cry for the
protagonists and observers alike, the intifada appeared to lose its
raison d'etre. It had wrought a huge toll on the disintegrating
Palestinian economy. The mass national strikes had invited a
devastating military response in the form of curfews where "every
Palestinian living in the Occupied Territories had spent an average of
approximately 10 weeks under in-house curfew," [11] creating an
incredible worker absenteeism problem. Palestinians not only lost their
jobs at home, but Israeli employers began employing imported labor and
newly arrived immigrants to replace the Palestinians. Essentially, mass
resistance was impossible to sustain indefinitely, if the routine of
daily life was to go on with some semblance of normality.

The intifada lives on

The carefully organized resistance network was gradually disbanded as
Palestinians prepared for the promise of Oslo. The intifada became much
less dramatic, even uninspiring, but nevertheless, it was rooted in the
Palestinian that would allow it to endure for years. [12] When the
Palestinians came to realize that the Oslo process would never reach a
conclusion and that their national struggle had been in fact further
eroded by Israel's unbridled expansionism, the intifada that followed
was understandably explosive.

It should not be forgotten that every day, all Palestinians engage in
acts of resistance just by simply finding ways of getting around the
grid of suffocating checkpoints to pursue normal, ordinary activities
like working or going to school. Every week, villages like Bil'in stage
nonviolent protests against the apartheid wall that Israel is building
throughout the West Bank. Thousands of such protests go unnoticed by
the Western media which mindlessly repeat Israel's mantra that the
Palestinians must stop their violence. For Israel, every act of
resistance against its colonialist and illegitimate policies is
anathema and must be put down, punished and demonized. For the
Palestinians -- with the experience of two intifadas behind them --
they know that their resistance will continue as long as Israel denies
them their universal human rights to freedom and self-determination.
The question that should weigh heavily on our consciences is -- how
many intifadas must be fought before justice for the Palestinians
finally prevails? 

Endnotes

[1] R Jamal Nassar and Roger Heacock, Intifada: Palestine at the
Crossroads, New York: Praeger, 1990, p.27.

[2] Samira Meghdessian, "The discourse of oppression as expressed in
writings of the intifada," World Literature Today, 72.1 (1998), p.43.

[3] Toby Shelley, and Ben Cashdan, Palestine: Profile of an Occupation,
London: Zed Books Ltd, 1989, p.21.

[4] Ruth Margolies Beitler, "The Intifada: Palestinian Adaptation to
Israeli Counterinsurgency Tactics," Terrorism and Political Violence,
7.2 (1995), p.68.

[5] Shaul Mishal, Reuben Aharoni, Speaking Stones: Communiques from the
Intifada Underground, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press,
1994, p.25.

[6] The Jerusalem Post International Edition, 5 March 1988, p.7.

[7] Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, The Intifada, Jerusalem: Schocken
1990, p.102.

[8] Kanako Mabuchi, "The Meaning of Motherhood during the First
Intifada: 1987-1993," M.Phil Thesis in Modern Middle Eastern Studies,
St Antony's College, University of Oxford, Trinity Term 2003, p84.

[9] D. Reische, Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, New
York: Franklin Watts, 1991, p.135.

[10] Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, New York: Anchor Books,
1995, p.447.

[11] "No Exit: Israel's Curfew Policy in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories," Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre, 1991.

[12] Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal
Account of the Intifada Years, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996 p21-22.


[Sonja Karkar is the founder and president of Women  for Palestine in
Melbourne, Australia.]