‘Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart' — Yasser Arafat ‘You cannot continue to victimise someone else just because you yourself were a victim once —there has to be a limit' — Edward Said We are the fire of struggle. We are the storming wind. We are the spring of offering, when generosity is scarce.
We are the whiffing scent. We are the voice of conscience. We are the rumbling thunder, when the horn is blown.
The limits of time approach us. And we give it the banners of extreme. Oh, you extorters, You renegades! These are our chests.
The soil yearns for a new dawn. For a new dawn yearns the blood of sacrifice. Our dream is to be. Our promise is to keep our right to our land. — The Intifada Anthem, by Marcel Khalife
This month commemorates the 25th anniversary of the first Intifada when local demonstrations set against the then decades old brutal Israeli occupation erupted in the West Bank and Gaza. What commenced as indigenous demonstrations swiftly snowballed into a large-scale popular uprising: a collective endeavour to “shake-off” Israel's devastating occupation. Taking on simple means of resistance, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were engaged in throwing rocks towards advancing tanks and bulldozers, in addition to participating in an ever mounting form of civil disobedience — both of which took the Israeli military and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leadership exiled in Tunisia by surprise. In front of these young stone throwers stood a confused Israel, which diffidently rummaged for ways to respond and once again in the course of its ruthless history resorted to its aggressive totalitarian system of forceful control to repress the predominantly unarmed rebellion. The media coverage, which was sluggishly uncovering the real face of this occupation since the 1967 war, achieved full maturation by the time the Intifada erupted and fully challenged Israel's schizophrenic self-image as victim and victor, therefore reversing the famous “David versus Goliath” myth in the process. Moreover, the immense international sympathy which ensued as this unbiased coverage revealed how the Palestinian, or the “occupied” ought not be the target of a process of erasure, theft, displacement and cleansing Israel had started decades earlier. But the true legacy of this critical, historical moment was how the Palestinian came to be seen as a wronged person with an unconquerable spirit, capable of non-violent and indefatigable resistance — and someone to be in solidarity with.
‘BREAK THEIR BONES': Soaring Palestinian disappointment was beneath the surface for years before the eruption of the first Intifada — a disappointment that only deepened as the Israeli government continued to embark on its long plan to realise its grand colonialist scheme. Throughout the 1980s, as the PLO was expelled from Lebanon, Israel was pressing ahead with its hyper settlement building activity (which had seen an unprecedented increase since the rise of Likud to power in 1977) and the Palestinian was exploited for his labour, rejected on his land and subjected to a cruel process of destroying everything Palestinian that embroidered his consciousness. It was both an increased understanding of and rejection of the iron wall policy that was put into play by the Israeli state decades earlier that resulted in a significant simmering discontent amongst Palestinians. As Vladimir Jabotinsky would rightfully predict decades earlier, the natives' resistance against Israeli settlers who were depending on this iron wall policy was an inevitability, and so no voluntary pact between the groups could ever be conceivable: “Those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say ‘no' and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonisation, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population — an iron wall that the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.” Thus, it was an amalgamation of growing political awareness on the side of young Palestinians and an unfathomable realisation that their agency was enough to defy this iron wall policy that eventually paved the way for the eruption of the uprising. The catalyst for its immediate outbreak arrived when on 8 December 1987 an Israeli truck hit and killed four Palestinian civilians from the Jabaliya refugee camp. The following day brought yet another violent episode when an Israeli officer fired at a protesting throng of Palestinians killing a seventeen year-old by the name of Hatem Abu Sisi. Hastily these separate violent acts sparked an unarmed rebellion that acquired the character of mass civil disobedience when Palestinians began to organise commercial strikes, refused to pay taxes to Israeli authorities, boycotted Israeli goods, established their own movable medical clinics and underground schools, provided social services and other non-aggressive forms of resistance and drew political graffiti. What facilitated the mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and assembled all echelons of Palestinian society, including children, teenagers and women, were the distributed leaflets that informed the masses of impending strikes, boycotts or campaigns. In fact, the effect of these leaflets became so powerful that the leaflet came to be viewed as the actualised form of Palestinian political expression. The increasing momentum of the Intifada eventually incited the popular committees of the United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU was a coalition of the four PLO parties active in the areas constituting the occupied territories — Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Palestinian People's Party) to undertake the role of organising its activities. In addition to its reliance on live ammunition, Israel resorted to breaking the limbs of these rock-throwing demonstrators to quell what it feared was a successful form of resistance. Then-Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered his soldiers to use “force, might and beatings”, which came to be known as the “break their bones” strategy. In addition, collective punishment of the Palestinian population took shape. Curfews were set, economic sanctions were deployed, houses were demolished, schools and universities were closed down, olive trees were destroyed, and water usage was severely constrained. So, when in the wake of the Intifada footage showing a group of Israeli soldiers on a hillside in the West Bank following the orders of bone-breaker Rabin — breaking the bones of two incarcerated Palestinians — was circulated through different media venues, the world was witnessing shattered a myth hitherto so deep and unfathomable. TV images, newspaper articles, international headlines, photographs unearthing the everyday acts of occupation, acutely reversed the Old Testament narrative appropriated by Israel to serve as propaganda framing its very existence: the survival of a small people in a sea of hostility, rather like David facing the giant Goliath. Media now showed the truth: that the sides were, indeed, radically unequal, but that the giant was Israel, deploying all its might to destroy and stamp down a largely defenceless people — the occupied Palestinians.
THE VISIBILITY OF OCCUPATION: The international media's misrepresentation of Palestinians by equating them with terrorists, fanatics and extremists was slowly altered in the aftermath of the 1967 war when the world saw Israel's “pre-emptive” attack on Egypt and Jordan, and later with the 1982 photos of murdered Palestinians of Lebanon's Sabra and Shatila camps. The perception shift was near complete by the time of the first Intifada, when many Western correspondents seemed to have acquired a less ethnocentric and biased approach towards the conflict. This was when potent images of armed soldiers firing at stone-throwing children, of wounded children, arrested men, crying women, and enthusiastic young men confronting unarmed a heavily armed and strong army began to see the light. At the dawn of the rebellion, there were 700 journalists in addition to 350 news organisations were positioned in Israel. As many as 370 news stories were carried on developments in the Intifada on US media channels like ABC, NBC and CBS. According to a paper prepared by the International Communication Gazette, titled “Bias in the News? The Representation of Palestinians and Israelis in the Coverage of the First and Second Intifada,” the first Intifada witnessed some Western dailies explicitly label Israel an “occupying power” reporting that the occupation “provokes” Palestinians to acts of violence. Media that had relied on labels such as “extremist”, “fundamentalist”, “guerrilla fighter”, “martyr”, “militant”, “radical”, “terrorist” and “suicide bomber” to describe Palestinian activity in the past now began to speak of Palestinians as “victims”. Likewise, these same journalists began to use heavily charged labels to describe the Israelis as perpetrators rather than simply the “occupier” or the “occupying army”. But this increased “visibility of the occupation” was also made possible by some Israeli photojournalists who like their Western counterparts were committed to documenting Israel's ruthless policies since 1967 towards the Palestinians. Hadashot, a Hebrew-language daily newspaper that was published in Israel between the years 1984 and 1993, was the first Israeli media agency to regard the Intifada as a rebellion without any attempt at concealment. Soon, another Hebrew-language newspaper by the name of Ha'ir followed suit. In his book, Israeli Culture Between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance, Yaron Peleg attributes this change in the stance of Israeli media to societal transformations that were underway in Israel as the Intifada erupted. He explains: “The human and civil-rights dimensions of the popular revolt coincided with a heightened sensitivity to these issues by a maturing Israeli middle class.” Many of these attempts at uncovering the ugly nature of the occupation and showing Palestinian resistance in unbiased light were compiled by Ariella Azoulay, an Israeli theorist of photography, curator and filmmaker, and documented in an archive entitled Acts of State, 1967-2007. The book was based on an earlier exhibition under the same name that constituted the first attempt to provide a photographic history of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. The archive includes the work of photographers who through the lens of their cameras attempted to expose the realities of demolition, incursions into Palestinian homes, arrests of Palestinians, the inhumane treatment of Palestinians at detention centres, and the direct body injury inflicted on Palestinians. Hence, the title “acts of state” refers — as Azoulay explains — to the “legal doctrine that grants immunity to people who are sent by their state to carry out acts that under different circumstances would be defined as crimes.” These photographers, therefore, were attacking the invisibility of the occupation, and resisting its brutality, by bringing these “acts of state” to light — acts that were crimes against the Palestinian people and were justified on claims to “safeguarding security” and maintaining “public order”. As Azoulay explains in the introduction to her book, the driving force was that these photographers “saw the goings-on, at least in certain points in time, as a moral or political outrage that must be recorded, and should become a matter of public concern.” By placing the gross power disparity between Israelis and Palestinians in its accurate form, Azoulay explains in an interview with the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University in 2011 that these photographers were disrupting “the homogeneity that the occupier had imposed upon the Israeli field of vision, cracking it, [and thus] creating a place and giving presence to the subjugated Palestinians' point of view.” From these photographers' point of view, photography was a means to expose, resist and renegotiate a horrid reality. As Azoulay puts it: “To criticise power is also to reflect it. It's not a question of being ‘outside' of power, but of how to suspend the omnipresence of its discourses in order to claim the right to imagine a shared world without — in advance and as the limit of our thinking — considering the way it will be ruled.” The counter discourse employed by some Western and Israeli media outlets during the first Intifada was powerful enough to cripple previous dichotomised representations of the Palestinian as either an “aggressor” or a “victim”. Today, Palestinian resistance continues apace, and the recent victory of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Campaign acts as a reminder of Marcel Khalife's “Intifada Anthem”. This decades old description of Palestinians still resonates today. The writer is a freelance journalist. The photos are taken from the book Act of State: A Photographed History of Occupation 1967-2007 authored by Ariella Azoulay
