RAMALLAH: On December 8th, 1987, a car smashed into a military checkpoint near Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, at the time still under direct Israeli occupation. Four Palestinian migrant workers were killed, and rumors that it was an intentional attack and not a mere car accident immediately alighted in cities, villages, and refugee camps across Gaza. The residents of Jabaliya turned his funeral into a 10,000 strong demonstration against Israeli tutelage. The following day, Israeli soldiers entered the refugee camp to find a less than warm welcome from its residents. After their jeeps were repeatedly pegged by stones, they shot and killed an unarmed 15-year-old youth, Hatem Sissi. Two decades of the resentment and anger of life under the humiliating conditions of a foreign military occupation fueled the protests that engulfed the 365-square-kilometer Gaza Strip. Two decades of settlements spreading rapidly throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) didn't help either. Within hours the demonstrations also swallowed East Jerusalem and the West Bank (also occupied during the June 1967 War). The Intifada, literally translated as “shaking off", had arrived. It raged on with occasional lulls until 1993, when the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) formally ended the uprising. Strategic considerations The First Intifada, much like the three-year Palestinian rebellion against the British Mandate government that began in 1936, was a grassroots uprising against colonialism and foreign occupation. It was an unarmed, though not exclusively nonviolent, movement to end the two-decade Israeli military rule over the 1967 territory. By the first week of January 1988, a leadership appeared in the form of the Unified National Command of the Uprising (Hereafter: UNC), which quickly moved to create shadow institutions that could potentially fill the vacuum after the Israeli occupation was evicted from the 1967 territory, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The UNC was not guided by any particular party. Rather, it was a democratic structure that incorporated the four major Palestinian parties of the time: Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Palestine Communist Party (and after some time Islamic Jihad joined in solely Gaza). By enacting an unarmed revolt, the Palestinian street was able to maximize use of its most valuable resource: human capital. Only limited segments of any society are able to join armed militias and take up weapons against a highly modernized military; virtually everyone, on the other hand, can participate in sit-ins, strikes, marches, boycotts, graffiti, and stone-throwing. The UNC assisted the creation of institutions and committees in each region, city, village, and refugee camp. These institutions coordinated acts of resistance against the brutal tutelage of occupation. Women's committees, merchants committees, information committees, alternative media and other institutions allowed Palestinians to organize despite the suffocating air of the occupation. The most important point regarding the UNC, however, is that it was an internal rather than external leadership, suggesting that it was also rebellion against the outside leadership, at that time the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under the auspices of the late Yasser Arafat. The UNC guided the rebellion primarily by distributing leaflets. The focus was on civil disobedience from day one. While violence did occur, it was uniformly unarmed, meaning that the Israeli military was the only party firing live ammunition. Palestinian violence, on the other hand, was restricted to stone throwing and Molotov cocktails, neither of which compare to automatic weapons and tanks. Unlike the innumerable guerilla operations launched against Israel in preceding decades, the Intifada was first born in the alleyways of refugee camps and only later acquired a leadership (and a loosely-knit one at that). Clandestine and democratic in nature, it provoked a harsh response from the Israeli military forces. The costs and rewards of rebellion Rumors quickly spread that General Yitzak Rabin (later assassinated while Prime Minister) approved a “broken bone" policy to literally crush the Intifada. Unarmed protests were greeted by unchecked military force, many media outlets were banned from the occupied territory, and in one instance soldiers attempted to bury alive four Palestinian youth near Nablus. According to the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding (IMEU), more over 1,000 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military, 237 of which were children. Another 29,900 children received medical treatment for injuries inflicted by Israeli forces. Over 120,000 Palestinians were imprisoned during the six-year period. Israel also responded with mass deportations, seizing the property and assets of thousands of Palestinians. Though the primary goal of the Intifada—shaking the chains of occupation completely—has yet to be reached till today, the uprising achieved much. Firstly, the Palestinian leadership, at that time mostly based in distant Tunis, had long neglected those Palestinians living under occupation, instead having focused on refugees scattered across the Arab region. The Intifada forced the PLO to consider those in the occupied territory again, who felt that they had been carrying the weight of occupation on their shoulders with no relief from their alleged representatives. Secondly, Israel's record in the Western press, namely in the US, was put under a critical light for the first time. It became much more difficult to sell the image of Israel as an embattled democracy desperately attempting to preserve its existence as images poured in: Palestinian youth bearing stones simply do not present the same physical threat as heavily armed soldiers beating protesters with batons and often firing indiscriminately on large crowds. Thirdly, Jordan was forced to relinquish its longstanding claim to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. King Hussein, who had long attempted to present himself to the world as the sole representative of Palestinian affairs, bitterly accepted Palestinians' right to self-determination. With that, the old Israeli pipedream of settling the conflict via Amman died. Most importantly, the Intifada put the Palestine question back on the agenda of Arab states and the international community—for years it had been overshadowed by the bloody Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet assault on Afghanistan, and the Lebanese Civil War, among other things. In the end, unarmed resistance simply could not outlast Israel's willingness to employ draconian and repressive tactics and brutality. Additionally, the PLO was able to politically co-opt the struggle, garnering Arafat enough internal support to change his organization's focus from complete territorial liberation to a two-state solution aiming for Palestinian sovereignty in the 1967 territories. Under American pressure, Israel was forced to allow the outside leadership to return to Palestinian territory after over four decades of exile. Memories that don't die “My parents were married around the onset of the First Intifada," said Fadi, a 23-year-old businessman from Ramallah. “The Israeli military imposed really strict curfews on the entire occupied territory. While my mother was pregnant, she and my father had to walk through back trails and in the mountains to visit our family in Kafr Malek," he continued, referring to a village between Ramallah and Taybeh. “People were united, and they were not scared. If a soldier was chasing a Palestinian, for instance, someone would hide him, protect him." The idea of Intifada is embedded in Palestinian culture. Najeeb, a 27-year-old pharmacist from Ramallah, explained: “The First Intifada is our legacy of resistance. First and foremost, we are a people who resist." “My little brother was born during the first month of the uprising," he said. “My parents decided to name him Nidal, which means struggle." “Unlike the Second Intifada, which was dominated by religious factions, the First Intifada brought us all together, regardless of religion or political faction, and allowed us to overcome infighting and focus our sights on the oppressor, on the occupation." Intifada as a blueprint In Western media Palestinians continue to be almost unconditionally portrayed as the sole aggressors, as ragtag gangs of terrorists who prefer death to life (a bizarrely inaccurate tagline for people who have survived so much). The news shows images of stone-throwing youth draped in keffiyehs, though deplorable Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian civilians are conveniently overlooked. In recent years, a genuinely grassroots, nonviolent movement for self-determination has flourished in Palestinian society. Palestinian and international activists have adopted tactics such as peaceful marches, sit-ins, and hunger strikes. In November 2011, six Palestinian “freedom riders” were arrested for boarding Israeli settler-only buses in the West Bank. Modeled from the tactics 1960s American Freedom Riders, who opposed segregation of interstate buses in the American south, activists demanded freedom of movement by refusing to exit Jerusalem-bound buses, despite the commands of Israeli soldiers. In June, Palestinian and international activists marched peacefully in solidarity with the residents of Susiya, who were delivered demolition orders by the Israeli military. Destroyed five times in the past, the 56 illegally erected homes in Susiya are tents constructed from rain tarps and cinder blocks. Israeli forces greeted the unarmed dissent with water cannons, sound bombs and tear gas. Others protest Israel's use of administrative detention, an acrimonious practice in which prisoners are held for extended periods of time without access to basic legal resources, let alone a trial. At the time of writing, 156 prisoners are held in administrative detention. At least five have launched hunger strikes against their jailers, and twice in the last two weeks thousands of prisoners staged one-day hunger strikes in solidarity.
