First Intifada

First Intifada
Part of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Date 1987-1991 Location West Bank, Gaza Strip, Israel Result Oslo Accords
Belligerents
Israel	Unified National Leadership ot the Uprising
Commanders and leaders
Yitzhak Shamir	Yasser Arafat
Casualties and losses
160 (5 children)	1,162 (241 children)

The First Intifada (1987 - 1993) (also "intifada" and "war of the stones") was a mass Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule that began in Jabalia refugee camp and quickly spread throughout Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Palestinian actions took a number of forms, including civil disobedience, general strikes, boycotts on Israeli products, graffiti, barricades, Molotov cocktails and grenades; but it was the stone-throwing demonstrations by youth against the heavily-armed Israeli Defense Forces that brought the intifada international renown.

Over the course of the first intifada, an estimated 1100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers. Palestinians killed 160 Israelis and an additional 1000 Palestinians as alleged collaborators, though fewer than half of the latter had actually maintained contact with the Israeli authorities.

General causes

As with all incidents within the Arab-Israeli conflict in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the context and causes for this event are heavily disputed.

Most accounts point to a growing sense of frustration among Palestinians, particularly on the West Bank, but also in Gaza, at the lack of progress in finding a durable resolution for their humanitarian and nationalistic claims after the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967. The Palestine Liberation Organization had failed to make any significant headway against Israel since the 1960s, and in 1982, had been forced to establish its offices in Tunis. Although all Arab states with the exception of Egypt maintained an official state of war with Israel, rhetoric was toned down in the mid-1980s, and Palestinians found advocacy on their behalf weakened. The November 1987 Arab Summit in Amman, preoccupied by the Iran-Iraq War, downgraded the importance of the Palestinian issue for the first time in years. Israeli military occupation of Southern Lebanon and the continued Israeli military involvement of the West Bank and Gaza fed a growing discontent with the status quo.

Muslim clerics used their pulpits to speak against the Israeli government. When an Israeli was stabbed to death on December 6, 1987 while shopping in Gaza, tensions heightened. On December 8th, when four Palestinian refugees from the Jabalya camp were killed in a traffic accident in Gaza, rioting broke out in Jabalya. An 18-year old Palestinian named Hatem al-Sisi was killed by Israeli soldiers during these riots after throwing stones, the net effect of which was the sparking of further riots.

Palestinians and their supporters assert that the Intifada was a protest of Israel's 'brutal repression' which included extra-judicial killings, mass detentions, house demolitions, deportations, and so on. While relatively few houses were demolished in the years before the intifada, house demolitions then "appeared to have deterrent value" to Israel. After the start of the intifada, and after the PLO began compensating affected families, demolitions "were transformed into a stimulus to further escalation of resistance." In addition to the political and national sentiment, further causes to the Intifada can be seen in the Egyptian withdrawal from their claims to the Gaza Strip as well as the Jordanian monarchy growing weary of supporting Jordanian claims to the West Bank.

Rapid birth rates and the limited allocation of land to new building or agriculture amidst land scarcity contributed to the increasing density of population in the Palestinian territories. Unemployment was growing. While income from service labor in Israel benefited the Palestinian economy, even those with a university education were hard pressed to find employment.

Others point out that Palestinians felt abandoned by their Arab allies and the PLO had failed to successfully challenge Israel and establish a Palestinian state in its stead as promised. However, it did manage to block the Israeli attempts to call for a puppet election inside the territories (beginning with 1974), and as it seemed to many of them, they would spend the rest of their lives as second class citizens, without full political rights.

Considering all of the above and the mass scale of the uprising, it is of little doubt that it was not initiated by any single person or organization. However, the PLO was very quick to take matters into its hands, sponsoring provocateurs and enhancing their presence in the territories (called the "tandhim", or "organization"). The PLO was not uncontested, however, competing in its activities for the first time with radical Islamic organizations - Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And most importantly, the uprising was predominantly led not by any of these groups, but by community councils consisting of ordinary Palestinians creating autonomous structures and networks in the midst of Israeli occupation. These councils, though they mainly engaged in armed resistance, also focused on creating independent, often-underground infrastructure, such as autonomous schools, medical care, food aid and other basic institutions.

Prior events

The uprising of the Palestinians in the First Intifada is generally understood to have been a spontaneous phenomenon. The PLO later claimed that it had organized it, but most historians view this as an attempt to create an appearance of having more control. On October 1, 1987 Israeli military ambushed and killed seven men from Gaza believed to be members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. Several days later an Israeli settler shot a Palestinian schoolgirl in the back. On December 4, 1987 Shlomo Sakal, an Israeli plastics salesman, was stabbed to death in Gaza. On December 8, there was a traffic accident in which an Israel Defense Force truck crashed into a van, killing 4 Palestinians from Jabalya. Under these already heated circumstances, many rumors began to spread. Rumor reinforced by real incidents caused anger and street fights against Israeli policemen and soldiers.

The uprising

File:Intifada1990.jpg

"Intifada" A poster from 1990

On December 8, an Israeli truck hit two vans carrying Gaza labourers in Jabalya, a refugee camp packed at that time with 60,000 residents. It instantly killed four of them. Rumor spread quickly that the wreck was no accident, but an act of vengeance on the part of an Israeli stabbed to death several days earlier in the Gaza market. That evening, an uprising began in Jabalya where hundreds burned tires and attacked the Israel Defense Forces stationed there. The uprising spread to other Palestinian refugee camps and eventually to Jerusalem. On December 22, the United Nations Security Council condemned Israel for violating Geneva Conventions due to the number of Palestinian deaths in these first few weeks of the Intifada.

Much of the Palestinian violence was low-tech; dozens of Palestinian teenagers would confront patrols of Israeli soldiers, showering them with rocks. However, at times this tactic gave way to Molotov cocktail attacks, over 100 hand grenade attacks and more than 500 attacks with guns or explosives. Many Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed this way.

Additionally, an estimated 1,000 alleged informers were killed by Arab civilian militias, though Palestinian Arab human rights groups contend many were not "collaborators" but victims of revenge murders.

In 1988, the Palestinians initiated a nonviolence movement to withhold taxes - the legality of which under international law is disputed. When time in prison didn't stop the activists, Israel crushed the boycott by imposing heavy fines while seizing and disposing of the equipment, furnishings, and goods from local stores, factories, and even homes.

On April 19, 1988, a leader of the PLO, Abu Jihad, was assassinated in Tunis. During the resurgence of rioting that followed, about 16 Palestinians were killed. In November of the same year and October of the next, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolutions condemning Israel.

As the Intifada progressed, Israel introduced various riot control methods that had the effect of reducing the number of Palestinian fatalities. Another contributor to the high initial casualties was Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin's aggressive stance towards the Palestinians. On a tour of the Jalazon Refugee Camp in January 1988, Rabin said, "The first priority of the security forces is to prevent violent demonstrations with force, power and blows ... We will make it clear who is running the territories". His successor Moshe Arens subsequently proved to have a better understanding of pacification, which perhaps reflects in the lower casualty rates for the following years.

In July 1989, the first suicide attack occurred inside Israel's borders, the Tel Aviv Jerusalem bus 405 massacre. No further attacks of this scale occurred until after the Oslo Accords.

Benny Morris describes the situation by June 1990: "By then the Intifada seemed to have lost direction. A symptom of the PLO's frustration was the great increase in the killing of suspected collaborators; in 1991 the Israelis killed fewer Palestinians - about 100 - than the Palestinians did themselves - about 150."

Attempts at the peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were made at the Madrid Conference of 1991.

Outcome

By the time the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, 1,162 Palestinians (241 of them children, some of whom took an active role in the violence) had been killed by Israelis and 160 Israelis (5 of them children) had been killed by Palestinians In addition, approximately 1,000 Palestinians had been killed by Palestinians as alleged collaborators, though only 40-45% of those killed had maintained contacts with Israeli authorities.

In the first thirteen months of the intifada, 332 Palestinians and 12 Israelis had been killed. Often when facing demonstrators IDF soldiers would shoot unarmed demonstrators with live fire.

The Intifada was never a military endeavour in either a conventional or guerrilla sense. The PLO (which had limited control of the situation) never expected the uprising to make any direct gains against the Israeli state, as it was a grassroots, mass movement and not their venture. However, the Intifada did produce a number of results the Palestinians considered positive:

1. By engaging the Israelis directly, rather than relying on the authority or the assistance of neighbouring Arab states, the Palestinians were able to globally cement their identity as a separate nation worthy of self-determination. The era marked the end of the Israelis referring to Palestinians as "South Syrians" and largely ended Israeli discussion of a "Jordanian solution".
2. The harsh Israeli countermeasures (particularly during the earlier years of the Intifada) resulted in international attention returning to the plight of the Palestinians, as prisoners in their own land. The fact that 159 Palestinian children below the age of 16 (many of them shot while throwing stones at IDF soldiers) were killed was especially alarming for international observers. Significantly, numerous American media outlets openly criticized Israel in a way that they had not previously and have not since. The conflict succeeded in putting the Palestinian question back on the international agenda, particularly in the UN, but also for Europe and the United States as well as the Arab states. Europe became an important economic contributor towards the nascent Palestinian Authority, and American aid and support of Israel became - at least in appearance - more conditional than it was previously.
3. The intifada also dealt a heavy economic blow to Israel. The Bank of Israel estimated it cost the country $650 million in lost exports, largely through successful Palestinian boycotts and the creation of local microindustries. The impact on the services sector, including the important Israeli tourist industry, was notably bad.
4. The uprising can be linked to the Madrid Conference of 1991, and thereby to the return of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation from their Tunisian exile. Although the negotiations failed to fulfill their potential, it is notable that prior to the first Intifada, it was doubtful whether there would ever be a Palestinian state. After the Oslo accords, an independent Palestine of some sort, at some time in the future seemed relatively certain.

Ultimately, Israel was successful in containing the uprising. The Palestinians' force was inferior in relation to the well equipped and trained Israel Defense Forces. However, the Intifada pinpointed numerous problems with the IDF's conduct in the operative and tactical fields, as well as the general problem of Israel's prolonged control of the West Bank and Gaza strip. These problems were noticed and widely criticized, both in international forums (in particular, when humanitarian questions were at stake), but also in Israeli public opinion, in which the Intifada had caused a split.

Further Reading

• Eitan Alimi (2006). Israeli Politics and the First Palestinian Intifada. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415385601.
• Geoffrey Aronson (1990). Israel, Palestinians, and the Intifada: Creating Facts on the West Bank. London: Kegan Paul International. ISBN 0-7103-0336-X.
• Joel Beinin; Zachary Lockman (1989). Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation. Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-363-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Joost R. Hiltermann (1991). Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women's Movements in the Occupied Territories. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-07869-6.
• Mary Elizabeth King (2007). A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance. New York: Nation Books. ISBN 1560258020.
• Benny Morris (1999). Righteous Victims: a History of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-1999. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-679-74475-4.
• Don Peretz (1990). Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-0860-7.
• Andrew Rigby (1991). Living the Intifada. London: Zed Books. ISBN 1-85649-040-8.
• Aryeh Shalev (1991). The Intifada: Causes and Effects. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post & Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-8303-X.
• Ze'ev Schiff, Ehud Ya'ari (1989). Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising: Israel's Third Front. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-67530-3.

External links

• The Intifada in Palestine:Introduction (www.intifada.com)
• United Nations Security Council Resolution 605
• Palestinian Arab "collaborators" (Guardian, UK)
• The Future of a Rebellion - PalestineAn anaysis of the 1980s intifada revolt of Palestinian youth. on libcom.org