Causes of the First Intifada

The First Intifada was a major Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation between 1987 and 1993. While the Intifada is widely agreed to have broken out spontaneously, scholars, journalists, and figures involved in Israeli and Palestinian politics during the Intifada, have proposed a wide range of factors as underlying causes of the uprising. These factors include ones that contributed to the initial outbreak of unrest in late 1987, ones that contributed to the development of that unrest into a sustained popular uprising, and ones that contributed to the uprising taking on the particular shape that it took.^[1]

Background

See also: Israeli–Palestinian conflict

On 9 December 1987, an Israeli truck driver collided with and killed four Palestinians in the Jabalia refugee camp. The incident sparked the largest wave of Palestinian unrest since the Israeli occupation began in 1967: the First Intifada. During the early stages, the Intifada was largely characterised by a non-violent campaign, with actions including labour strikes, tax strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, boycotts of Israeli institutions, demonstrations, the establishment of underground classrooms and cooperatives, raisings of the banned Palestinian flag, and civil disobedience. The actions were led by the led by a decentralised leadership composed of the grassroots organisations of the PLO, such as labour unions, student councils, and women's committees, who organised themselves into the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), mainly outside of the direct control of the PLO leadership, who were mostly in exile or imprisoned (or had been killed by Israeli forces over the preceding years).^[2][3][4][5]

The Israeli government responded to the breakout of the Intifada with a harsh crackdown, however, with Minister of Defence Yitzhak Rabin pledging to suppress it using "force, might, and beatings," including ordering Israeli soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian protestors, imposing widespread lockdowns on Palestinian cities, mass arrests, and demolitions of Palestinian houses.^[6][7] During the later stages of the Intifada, as the Israeli crackdown severely damaged the Palestinian economy and morale, and as the PLO leadership in exile attempted to take on greater day-to-day control over the Intifada, the UNLU began to lose control over the uprising and the uprising grew more violent during its last stages, including Palestinian internal political violence against rumoured collaborators.^[8][9][10] By the end of the Intifada, over a thousand Palestinians had been killed and over a hundred thousand injured by Israeli forces, with around two hundred Israelis having been killed by Palestinians. The First Intifada would come to an end with several high-profile peace negotiations, including the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the 1993 Oslo Accords.^[11]

Overview of causes

Ian Lustick identifies four common themes in explanations for the outbreak of the First Intifada: "an explosion caused by pent-up despair and humiliation," the uprising as "a strategic extension of the PLO'S struggle to gain Palestinian national liberation," the uprising "having sprung from and been modeled after grass-roots organizations active in the territories during the preceding decade," and a "reflection of changes in Israeli politics and policies toward the territories."^[12] Eitan Alimi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has grouped explanations into four clusters: explanations that focus on inter-state developments (particularly Palestinian disillusionment with the role of other Arab states in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), explanations that focus on the socio-economic effects of the Israeli occupation (particularly the growing grievances among Palestinians), explanations that focus on the shift in nationalist tactics within the occupied territories (particularly the shift towards mass mobilisation), and explanations that focus on the tactics which were used during the Intifada itself (including its effects on Israeli soldiers and on the mass media).^[13]

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "the proximate causes of the First Intifada were intensified Israeli land expropriation and settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the electoral victory of the right-wing Likud party in 1977; increasing Israeli repression in response to heightened Palestinian protests following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; the emergence of a new cadre of local Palestinian activists who challenged the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a process aided by Israel’s stepped-up attempts to curb political activism and break the PLO’s ties to the occupied territories in the early 1980s; and, in reaction to the invasion of Lebanon, the emergence of a strong peace camp on the Israeli side, which many Palestinians thought provided a basis for change in Israeli policy. With motivation, means, and perceived opportunity in place, only a precipitant was required to start an uprising."^[14]

Social and economic factors

Declining quality of life in the Palestinian Territories

Israeli civil rights activist Israel Shahak claimed in 1991 that "the chief reason for the outbreak of the intifada" was that "before the Intifada, the daily oppression, humiliations, land confiscations and arbitrariness of the Israeli regime were steadily increasing."^[15] According to Aden Tedla of the Global Nonviolent Action Database, "Palestinian discontent about the quality of their living conditions and their lack of political and economic autonomy began to escalate" through the 1980s, citing factors such as the establishment of hundreds of checkpoints throughout Palestine by the Israeli military, the requirement for Palestinians to carry ID cards to travel between Palestinian communities, heavy taxes imposed by the Israeli Civil Administration on Palestinian imports and exports, the requirement for Palestinians to pay taxes to the Israeli state, lower wages for Palestinians than Israelis, and an increasing shortage of arable land available to Palestinians.^[16] Reviewing Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Yaari's 1990 book Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising—Israel's Third Front, Ian Lustick states that "Schiff and Ya'ari's explanation for the intifada emphasizes the cumulative rage of Palestinian refugees, workers, and farmers. In particular, they stress the unbearable conditions in Gaza refugee camps, the frightening new threats to divert some of what remained of the farmers' water resources to Israeli settlers, and, especially, the bitterness of Palestinians employed inside Israel at the routine humiliations inflicted upon them by soldiers, policemen, and border patrolmen."^[12]

According to Nadia Naser-Najjab of the University of Exeter and Ghassan Khatib of Birzeit University, the enactment of the Iron Fist policy - "a series of repressive and humiliating crackdowns in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including an upsurge in home demolitions, deportations, arbitrary school closures, and various other forms of collective punishment" - by the Israeli government in the mid-1980s impacted "upon almost every aspect of daily Palestinian life."^[17] According to Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, "there was a proliferation of over a thousand laws and regulations... Books by the thousands were banned. The colours of the Palestinian flag were outlawed; even the word 'Palestine' could earn its user a jail sentence... To plant a tree required a permit. To hold meetings also required a permit. Entry and exit required permits. To start a well required a permit, one that was never given."^[18] According to Mouin Rabbani of the Institute for Palestine Studies and Lisa Hajjar of the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Israeli government had made it illegal for Palestinians to "fly the Palestinian flag, read “subversive” literature or hold a press conference without permission. One Israeli military order in the West Bank makes it illegal for Palestinians to pick and sell wild thyme (to protect an Israeli family’s monopoly over the herb’s production)," and "Israel contributed $240 million in aid and investment to the Occupied Territories in 1987 but took back $393 million in taxes. In the 20 years of Israeli rule from 1967-1987, residents paid Israel a net “occupation tax” of $800 million, 2.5 times as much as the entire Israeli government investment in the territories over that period."^[19]

According to Samih Farsoun and Jean M. Landis of the American University, "the lack of public investment in health facilities led to a decline in the number of hospital beds from 26 per 10,000 population in 1974 to 18 per 10,000 in 1985."^[20]

Struggles of the Palestinian economy

According to Kenneth W. Stein of Emory University, "the uprising occurred in an economic setting in which many middle- and lower-class Palestinians found themselves suffering from several years of severe financial hardship. Dramatic price drops, particularly in agriculture and amputated international markets, caused enormous strain on the local economy. Although present in previous years, traditional sources of capital import into Palestine were stringently reduced by changes in regional and international conditions."^[21] According to Ahsan I. Butt of George Mason University, "both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank suffered major economic slumps in the 1980s. Between 1981 and 1985, per capita GNP fell almost 2 percent annually in Gaza and 0.7 percent annually in the West Bank."^[22]

Jacob Høigilt of the Fafo Foundation has described the economic situation that emerged in Palestine by the 1980s as a result of the Israeli occupation as "economic depression and blocked industrialization."^[23] According to Leila Farsakh of the University of Massachusetts Boston, the period between 1967 and 1990 "witnessed the West Bank and Gaza’s economic integration into Israel through trade and labour flows. Some 35 to 40 percent of the employed Palestinian labour force worked in Israel during this period, largely contributing to the doubling of Palestinian per capita income but also to the gradual shrinking of major economic sectors (agriculture, industry, and services), which were not able to grow viably and in response to Palestinian rather than Israeli demand and supply. This is when Palestinian economic growth was primarily described as 'stalled,' that is, below capacity, or skewed, meaning that growth was tied to Israeli demand and labour exports rather than to domestic demand and employment."^[24] Samih Farsoun and Jean M. Landis of the American University have written that the Israeli government's occupation policies had the effect of making Palestinian infrastructure dependent on Israeli infrastructure, giving as an example that "the occupied territories' electric generation units have been linked to the Israeli grid. Permission to expand the production capacity of power companies or to construct new electrification projects required for industrial or agricultural expansion must be granted by the military government, a requirement that has resulted in the maintenance of power capacity in the occupied territories at pre-1967 War levels."^[20]

Erika G. Alin wrote that "Israel sought to use the relatively cheap Palestinian work force in labor-intensive sectors of its economy and to transform the territories into a large market for Israeli products, both of which required that it prevent the development of an indigenous industrial and manufacturing base among resident Palestinians. One consequence of Israeli economic policy was a decline in the traditional, predominantly agricultural base of Palestinian society and the emergence, in the early and mid 1970s, of a large migratory workforce, dependent on employment in Israel for its livelihood."^[25]

According to Ilan Pappé, Israeli companies "dumped their products on the territories, undercutting local factories and producers. This was accompanied by an aggressive marketing campaign of Hebraizing signposts, public spaces and individual consciousness... The realization of the economic price paid by dependence on the occupiers’ market was visible in additional ways. It was seen by the Palestinian workers comparing their wages with those of their Jewish colleagues (they were paid half as much). It was also painfully evident to independent professionals who had to pay taxes at a rate bureaucrats are free to impose on an occupied population. It was obvious to entrepreneurs who had to go through a humiliating and degrading process of pleading for concessions and subcontracts. Finally, it was driven home to thousands of villagers who were forced to leave their farms."^[26] Sergio Catignani of the University of Sussex has written that "the strangling bureaucracy that developed in the territories compounded the effects of Palestinian depedency," adding that Israeli goods enjoyed high levels of protection in the occupied territories, that Palestinians had to pay an effective "occupation tax," and that the relationships between the broader Palestinian people and those Palestinian notables who were willing to act as intermediaries with the Israeli government had collapsed by the early 1980s.^[27]

Generational change

According to Aden Tedla of the Global Nonviolent Action Database, "in 1988, 59 percent of Gaza’s population was under the age of nineteen, and many of these youths had only known life under the Israeli occupation. These frustrated youths wanted to resist Israeli dominance, and many of them felt that older generations had become too accustomed to the occupation."^[16] Avraham Sela of The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace has stated that "the fomenters of the intifada represented a generation that grew up in the shadow of the Israeli occupation, with all its internal contradictions: between an “enlightened occupation” and threatening Jewish settlement."^[28]

According to Nadia Naser-Najjab of the University of Exeter and Ghassan Khatib of Birzeit University, in the 1980s, an "emerging generation actively sought to develop new techniques and strategies of resistance through which the occupation could be directly challenged. This caused elements within the PLO to express concern that its revolutionary preeminence was being indirectly challenged."^[17] The New York Times quoted Palestinian writer Jamil Hammad in late December 1987 as saying that "My sons are very different from my generation. They did not witness the Arab defeat of 1967, so they don't have any inferiority complexes. But most important, my sons believe that they can, by their actions, change the world. They are full of confidence. They are not smashed and frustrated like my generation."^[29] According to Don Peretz of Binghamton University, "by the end of 1987 frustration among Palestinian youth could not be controlled, even by the cooler heads among the older generation, the traditional "notables" or the occupation forces with their threats of increasing use of force."^[30]

Radicalisation of Palestinian students

Palestinians invested heavily into their education and universities in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to Palestine becoming one of the best-educated nations in the Middle East. However, according to Boaz Ganor of Reichman University, " this progress did not translate into demand for skilled labor. Instead, university students had to increasingly accept menial labor in Israel, leaving young Palestinians with limited opportunities to apply their higher skills," while "educated youth were likewise more exposed to the increasing politicization and radicalization of student movements and the emergence of new ideological and political movements."^[31] According to Don Peretz of Binghamton University, "young Palestinians, among the best educated groups in the Middle East, had only limited opportunities to apply their higher skills, especially since the return of thousands of workers from the Gulf states following cutbacks in oil production during the early 1980s."^[30] Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said noted that Palestinian students during the 1970s and 1980s saw their universities frequently ordered closed by the Israeli government, sometimes for weeks at a time.^[18]

Radicalisation of Palestinian refugees

British historian Martin Gilbert argued that the Intifada "drew much of its numerical strength from the twenty-seven Palestinian refugee camps inside Israel. Not allowed by the Jordanians to integrate into Jordanian society before 1967 and remaining for the most part in their camps after 1967, or in the poorest of housing elsewhere in the West Bank, the refugees of 1948 contained a bitter hard core of extremists who were prepared to face Israeli bullets in order to defy the occupiers and assert their national identity."^[32]

By 1987, unemployment rates in the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip had reached 35%, and, according to Ilan Pappé, in those camps, "the average family of five persons made do with a room and a half, usually with an outside toilet and nothing comparable to a madafa, a living-room, an important space for Middle Eastern families and for their relations with their neighbours. The refugees were also the most politicized sector of the society, which probably explains why they had borne the brunt of Israel’s collective punishment policy in the two years preceding the uprising. The worst of these punitive acts was the sealing off of houses, or rather of refugee huts."^[33]

Changes in internal Palestinian politics

Shift in nationalist tactics towards mass civilian organising

British journalist Helena Cobban has suggested that the Intifada emerged as part of a third phase of Palestinian nationalist tactics. During the first phase, from 1948 to 1967, nationalist tactics were centred around hopes of a successful intervention by neighbouring Arab states, while during the second phase, from 1967 until 1982, nationalist tactics were centred around Palestine Liberation Organization-led guerilla warfare. According to Cobban, following the failure of those phases, nationalist tactics turned towards "mass civilian organising," with the 1980s in the Palestinian Territories showing "a steady growth in organizing activities in all sectors and at all levels: women’s organizations, labor unions, professional organizations, relief organizations, student movements—you name it."^[34]

American historian Wendy Pearlman has described the period from the late 1970s through the 1980s as a "war of the institutions" where "PLO factions vied to recruit as many members as possible," and "tens of thousands of men, women, and youth became linked in political networks. This grassroots organising represented a radical alternative to traditional, top-down patterns of politics. It schooled a new generation that was raised under occupation, was not afraid to challenge it, and viewed community-based political participation as a way of life."^[35] According to Francesco Saverio Leopardi of the University of Edinburgh, there was "a multiplication of trade unions and popular associations due to the high degree of political competition" between Palestinian factions in the 1980s, with each faction aiming "to achieve the highest number of members possible."^[36]

This shift towards mass organising was influenced by the Israeli government's move to ban the Palestinian National Guidance Committee and disband Palestinian city councils that had been elected in 1976.^[37] According to Rex Brynen of McGill University, following the decline of the nationalist municipal leadership, "the level of popular organization grew dramatically in the form of student, trade union, and women's organizations. Such organization (and the diffuse local leaderships they spawned) proved far more resistant to Israeli countermeasures than the earlier reliance on a relatively small number of public nationalist figures. In terms of elite types, this form of organization also provided new mechanisms for participation and upward political mobility, both in urban centers and in rural areas and the camps, and would provide much of the organizational underpinning for the intifada."^[38] According to Ian Lustick, "by proliferating at the grassroots level, these organizations produced enough capable leaders in enough different localities to frustrate the Israeli policy of decapitating Palestinian organizations by regularly imprisoning or deporting leaders who emerged at the national or regional level."^[12]

Shift in nationalist tactics towards demonstrations

The 1980s saw a significant increase in the number of demonstrations undertaken by Palestinians, with Anne Marie Baylouny of the Naval Postgraduate School stating that "in the period from 1977 to 1982, an average of 500 such protest events took place per year. From 1982 to the start of the uprising, the average increased to between 3,000 and 4,000 annually."^[39] According to Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, "between 1977 and 1984 there were 11 internal Palestinian demonstrations for every externally generated [terrorist] attack. In 1985 the ratio became 16 to 1 and in 1986 it rose to 18 to 1."^[40]

According to British-Israeli political scientist Ahron Bregman, between April 1986 and May 1987, an average of 81 Palestinians in the West Bank were arrested each week by the Israeli military for participating in demonstrations and other actions deemed by the Israeli government to be terrorism. Bregman also noted that, by 1987, Palestinian demonstrators had become "bolder and more daring than in the past," saying that "Israeli troops on the ground realised that methods which had been used in the past to dispel demonstrations were not, on the eve of the Intifada, as effective as they had previously been."^[41]

Growth of the Palestinian Communist Party

According to former Le Monde diplomatique editor Alain Gresh, "the role of the Palestinian Communist Party (PCP) is one of the most important and least understood aspects of the Intifada."^[42]

The shift towards mass organising was initially led by the PCP. According to Julie M. Norman, the Communist Party was "unique at the time in concentrating their work inside the territories, focusing on popular participation, and advocating for nonviolent approaches to resistance across Palestinian society," being followed by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and eventually by Fatah, the largest and most well-resourced Palestinian faction.^[43] The Communist Party was also the first Palestinian faction to support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.^[44] According to British journalist Helena Cobban, this advocacy of a two-state solution and nonviolence resulted in communist-affiliated Palestinian labour unions being relatively less repressed by the Israeli government, allowing them more room to grow and gain influence.^[45]

According to Linda Tabar of Birzeit University, the shift towards mass mobilisation "began with the formation of the voluntary work movement that was established by the communists," saying that "the movement set out to provide a popular people’s alternative to the services and institutions (i.e. such as the municipalities) that were linked to the colonial apparatus" and that "the decentralised, democratic formations that were set up by the voluntary movement inspired and became the basis for the popular committees that led the first intifada."^[46]

Growth of women's committees

As well as the Palestinian Communist Party, women's committees and student unions also played the leading roles in the shift towards mass organising.^[47][48] According to Mason Herson-Hord of In These Times, the women's committees formed throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Palestine, "allowed individual women to stretch the boundaries of patriarchal control and become more active participants in the national movement; and they laid the early foundations of the ​“home economy,” which fostered Palestinian self-sufficiency that would sustain boycotts and strikes during the Intifada."^[49] According to Palestinian activist Laila al-Hamdani, "the women's organisations which have developed over the past 20 years are now geared towards organising for the intifada. The popular committees, for example, are dominated by women."^[50]

Growth of labour unions

According to Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, Israeli labour unions largely failed to protect the rights of Palestinians working in Israel, leading those Palestinians to turn towards expanding Palestinian unions; and as Palestinian unions could not organise those workers in their workplace because of Israeli restrictions, they focused organising on workers' homes inside the occupied territories.^[51] Samih Farsoun and Jean M. Landis of the American University have written that Israeli repression of expanding Palestinian trade unions forced those unions to organise underground, with "diffuse and quickly replaceable leadership," leading those unions to increasingly prioritise nationalist politics over class struggle.^[20]

Decline in influence of the PLO

According to Francesco Saverio Leopardi of the University of Edinburgh, "while Fatah and Jordan tried to buy the loyalty of the OPT leadership, the leftist factions focused on developing their grassroots presence among the Palestinian masses. This approach helped reshuffle the power balance among the Palestinian factions, limiting Fatah’s supremacy."^[36] According to Ian Lustick, "the PLO's rivalry with Jordan, corruption of many of its agents in the territories, factional disputes over political strategy and the disbursement of funds, and increasingly stringent Israeli policies pushed Palestinians toward new forms of mobilization."^[12] According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, in the 1980s, the PLO's leadership was "paying the price for chronic problems within the PLO that had begun at the movement’s inception. It housed a proliferation of small groups, all clients of one Arab country or another. Before the Lebanon war, this fragmentation had been disguised. However, once in Tunis, the PLO was more restricted in its ability to formulate a consensual policy, and spent more time dealing with internal rifts. In the years after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, therefore, the Palestinian political hub moved even further away from Palestine itself, and was even less able to attract the attention or interest of the Jewish body politic in Israel."^[52]

According to Anne Marie Baylouny of the Naval Postgraduate School, "faith in solution driven by external actors, like the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), based in Tunis, and the Arab countries, had declined" by 1987.^[39] According to Nadia Naser-Najjab of the University of Exeter and Ghassan Khatib of Birzeit University, "the PLO had been expelled from Lebanon in 1982. This further restricted its already weak and limited ability to support Palestinians living under occupation. The limitations of external support and the ongoing situation within the Occupied Territories therefore made it clear to Palestinians that they were ultimately responsible for determining their own fate."^[17] According to former Le Monde diplomatique editor Alain Gresh, "the departure of the PLO from Beirut following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 cut the leadership off from the last concentration of Palestinians that had provided most of the fighters and many of the cadres. This seriously weakened the capacity of Palestinians on the outside to lead the national struggle. The 1983 revolt of the Fatah dissidents and the broad split in the PLO merely reflected this disarray. The very idea of armed struggle was now in question, because for the first time since the 1967 war the PLO had no direct access to the borders of the “Zionist enemy.”"^[42]

According to Erika G. Alin, Palestinians through the 1980s increasingly came to believe that, "after more than a decade of institutionalized existence and operation from exile, the leaders of the PLO, as well as their principal representatives in the territories, were developing vested political and economic interests in the national struggle, reflected in growing nepotism and corruption, and were losing touch with the everyday experiences and sentiments of the majority of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians."^[25]

Influence of non-violent resistance ideals

Journalist Daniel Gavron has pointed towards the influence of Palestinian civil disobediance advocate Mubarak Awad, who founded the Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence in 1983, saying that "the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising never adopted his philosophy of non-violence, but most of his ideas non-cooperation and civil disobediance were implemented" during the Intifada.^[53] According to Emile A. Nakhleh of Mount St. Mary's University, by the late 1980s, there was an increasing perception among Palestinians that the PLO's guerilla strategy "has run its course. Some West Bank elites have begun to voice the cautious opinion that it is time for the PLO openly and unequivocally to reject violence as a tool of liberation."^[54]

Growth of Islamism

According to Kenneth W. Stein of Emory University, "in the half decade before the uprising, the mosque and Islamic symbols became focuses and platforms for political action," and "philosophies associated with the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt emerged with some degree of prominence in a few urban areas."^[21] According to the Jewish Virtual Library, "false charges of Israeli atrocities and instigation from the mosques played an important role in starting the intifada."^[55]

Seyed Alavi of the SOAS University of London has argued that the growth of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad through the 1980s played a role in sparking the Intifada, saying that "from the earliest stages of the Intifada, the role of Islamic Jihad was visible," and that "the Intifada was not dominated by nationalist or secular discourses and thus marked the end of their total hegemony on the Palestinian political stage."^[56] Israeli scholar Elie Rekhess has noted that, "prior to the eruption of the uprising, the Jihad movement had stepped up its operations, causing increased tension between the population and the Israeli authorities."^[57]

Changes in external Palestinian politics

Stalled peace negotiations

Israeli political scientist Yitzhak Reiter has argued that "the major cause of the uprising was the deadlock in negotiating the Palestinian demands to Israel’s end of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and the establishment of a Palestinian independent state."^[58]

According to Lev Luis Grinberg of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, "the agreements with Egypt left the relations with the Palestinian people unresolved. Although the legitimate claims of the Palestinians were recognized in the ‘Framework for Peace in the Middle East’, the proposal to establish autonomous authorities for a five-year interim period was very vague, and never implemented."^[59] According to Jacob Høigilt of the Fafo Foundation, "a sense of standstill and loss of direction in the political process" was a significant trigger of the Intifada, as "Israel had no clear idea of what to do with the occupied territories, and resorted to day-to-day military management of them. The political process was non-existent, the Reagan plan of Palestinian autonomy in association with Jordan having been rejected first by Israel, then by the Palestinian National Council in 1982."^[23]

According to Nadia Naser-Najjab of the University of Exeter and Ghassan Khatib of Birzeit University, by 1987, "the occupation had been in place for two decades, and there was no solution on the horizon. Israeli politicians refused to acknowledge, much less engage, Palestinian political representatives. Politicians from Israel's more moderate Labor Party, such as Rabin and Shimon Peres, viewed the so-called Jordanian option (where Jordan would accept responsibility over some of the Occupied Territories in lieu of a Palestinian state) as the most realistic option for the resolution of the conflict."^[17] Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has pointed towards the failure of the Peres–Hussein London Agreement in mid-1987, which failed due to internal opposition within the Israeli cabinet, as permanently ending chances for Jordanian involvement in resolving the conflict and as leaving direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians as the only viable option.^[60]

Israeli journalist Shalom Yerushalmi has pointed towards the failure of a mid-1987 series of secret peace meetings initaited by Israeli activist David Ish Shalom, well-connected Likud member Moshe Amirav, senior PLO member Faisal Husseini, and Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh that collapsed after Husseini was suddenly arrested by the Israeli military and Amirav subsequently being expelled from Likud, saying that "I assume that the disappointment and frustration from the unsigned agreement was one of the factors that led to the outbreak of the intifada."^[61]

Declining Palestinian relations with other Arab states

See also: Jordanian disengagement from the West Bank

Historian Mustafa Kabha has suggested that "Jordan also played a part in weakening the economy of the territories and increasing its dependence on Israel," pointing towards the Jordanian government's cuts to payments of Palestinian teachers' salaries and of the shutdown of the Jordanian government committee that oversaw donations from richer Arab states to Palestinians.^[62] According to of The New York Times, while wealthier Palestinians in Jordan had integrated into Jordanian society, "many Palestinians say they are treated as second class citizens," and the consensus among poorer Palestinian refugees in Jordan was "that all Palestinian refugees must return to their land in Palestine."^[63]

According to Don Peretz of Binghamton University, there was a "feeling of abandonment by the outside world" among Palestinians in the late 1980s, "particularly by their Arab brethren, who did little to end the recent 'War of the Camps', in Lebanon where Palestinians, many of them relatives of those in the occupied territories, were besieged for months by the Shi‘ite Amal militia. The Arab League summit in Amman during November 1987 produced little apparent support for the Palestinians. Although the meeting was convened to deal with the Gulf war, Palestinians in the territories perceived the secondary attention it devoted to their problem as a slight, an attempt to avoid confronting the Palestinian issue head on."^[30] Nadia Naser-Najjab of the University of Exeter and Ghassan Khatib of Birzeit University have stated that the Iran-Iraq War "pushed the Palestinian issue to the bottom of the list of regional priorities" for Arab states, with the 1987 Arab League Summit focusing on "condemning Iran and reintegrating Egypt into the Arab fold after it had been kicked out of the Arab League for signing a separate peace with Israel. Many Palestinians felt that the international community and key Arab states had abandoned them."^[17]

Increased Palestinian awareness of Israeli politics

According to American sociologist William A. Gamson, in the years prior to the Intifada, "many Palestinians on-the-ground - that is, living in the territories - became highly informed observers of Israeli internal politics... As is typical in such situations, the growing familiarity was not mutual; most Israelis had little reason to pay attention to internal Palestinian developments."^[64] American anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has argued that the generation of Palestinians who grew up under Israeli occupation were more realistic in their aims than the PLO members in exile and had a stronger understanding of Israeli "intentions, policies, practicies, and powers."^[65] According to Emile A. Nakhleh of Mount St. Mary's University, "West Bank elites have become more cognizant of the moods and attitudes of the Israeli Jewish public and have endeavored, albeit on a limited basis, to communicate with its various sectors."^[54]

According to Eitan Alimi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "the opening of Israel’s market to Palestinian workers, the fact that many Palestinians became familiar with Israeli democracy and mastered the Hebrew language, yet the fact that the Israeli political system was totally closed to Palestinians’ participation, shaped, to a large extent, the forms and contours of any future self-generated Palestinian resistance."^[66] According to Erika G. Alin, "the majority of Palestinian migrant workers commuted daily to Israel, where they encountered new levels of economic prosperity and social and political liberties. At the same time, in relation to their Israeli counterparts, Palestinian workers were paid less, had fewer benefits, and were barred from more skilled and higher paying jobs."^[25]

Relations between Israeli and Palestinian leaderships

Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times referred to Palestinian journalist Ibrahim Karaeen in December 1987: "When the moderate nationalists of his generation were still ruling the West Bank as mayors or in other leadership positions, Mr. Karaeen said, they were a buffer between Israel and the more extremist and religious fundamentalists among the Palestinians. When a disturbance happened, they would mediate between the Israeli authorities and the youths to calm things down. But now this buffer group has been expelled or dismissed. In the last two weeks when the Israeli Army called in the Palestinian leaders they appointed in place of the moderate nationalists in the West Bank and told them to cool things down, these 'leaders' were not able to exert any influence."^[29] According to Marc D. Chaney of The New York Times, "Israelis maintain that Arab moderates who might agree to recognize Israel's right to exist in return for a homeland carved out of the occupied lands have been intimidated by the popularity of the militant positions of the P.L.O. The Israelis would prefer a state federated with Jordan, not an independent one. Moderate Palestinians say Israeli occupation policies have prevented the emergence of popular moderate leaders."^[67]

According to Ziad Abu-Amr of Birzeit University, during the first twenty years of the occupation, the Israeli government "failed to win the sympathy or support of any meaningful sector of the occupied population. Even those social classes which have traditionally allied themselves with foreign occupations in other colonial settings (the great landlords and the compadre in China during the Japanese occupation, for example) have found themselves at constant odds with the Israeli occupation. Under an active policy of land confiscation and Jewish settlement, major Palestinian landholders have been big losers. Even the leading Palestinian merchants are restricted and have to contend with unfair competition from their Israeli counterparts, who enjoy all kinds of support from their government."^[68] According to Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, "there were occaisonal, and quite unsuccessful, attempts to empower collaborationist Palestinians (e.g. the Village Leagues) who would perhaps be more amenable to doing the Israeli wish, but those never acquired anything like the credibility needed to swing a critical mass of Palestinians behind them. After a time, they were dropped and forgotten."^[18]

Changes in Israeli politics and society

Increasingly harsh Israeli government policies

Eitan Alimi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has argued that, beginning the late 1970s, the occupation policies of the Israeli government shifted towards becoming "much more dominant over the Palestinian population by imposing and maintaining order through force and violence," including use of the Defence (Emergency) Regulations leftover from British rule.^[69] Erika G. Alin has argued that the election of Menachem Begin's Likud in 1977 led to an Israeli government that intruded more and more into the everyday lives of Palestinians, leading Palestinians to increasingly perceive the occupation as a direct threat.^[25]

According to American-Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud, the grand coalition between Likud and the Israeli Labor Party following the 1984 Israeli legislative election "constituted the worst possible combination from the point of view of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. While Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres served the role of the hardliner and peace 'dove' respectively before the international community, both men and their government presided over a legacy saturated with violence, illegal annexation of Palestinian land and settlement expansion."^[70] British journalist Helena Cobban has argued that the 1985 establishment of the Iron Fist policy by Labor Party Minister of Defence Yitzhak Rabin, including a significant increase in the number of Palestinians deported from the occupied territories, "must be considered an essential seed in the germination of the intifada."^[45]

Increasing Israeli setttlement in the Palestinian Territories

The increasing rate of Israeli settlement in the Palestinian Territories has been cited as a significant factor contributing to outbreak of the First Intifada, particulary due to fears among the Palestinian population that growing settlement would eventually lead to their expulsion from Palestine.^[21] According to Marc D. Chaney of The New York Times, "at first, Labor Governments attempted to limit the pattern of settlement to one that more heavily reflected security concerns than links to history, appearing to leave room for territorial compromise. After 1977, when the right-wing Likud bloc came to power, encouragement was given to groups that seek to retain all the occupied territories as part of the ancient land of Israel."^[67] Prior to the outbreak of the Intifada, former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Abba Eban argued that Israeli settlers "have a totally different set of rights and immunities" to Palestinians, creating "a society in the West Bank and Gaza in which a man's rights are defined not by his conduct or by any egalitarian principle, but by his ethnic identity."^[71]

In 1988, Don Peretz of Binghamton University stated that "the population of the occupied territories has been increasing at a rapid rate, faster than anticipated by Palestinian or Israeli demographers, resulting in teeming villages, towns and refugee camps. Stifling pressures of life in this cramped environment have been exacerbated by policies that restrict the expansion of Arab urban areas and have placed some 50 percent of land and most water sources under Israeli control, frequently at the disposal of the new Jewish settlers."^[30] According to Mouin Rabbani of the Institute for Palestine Studies and Lisa Hajjar of the University of California, Santa Barbara, by 1988, "There are 2,500 Jewish settlers in Gaza, 0.4 percent of the total Gaza population. These Jewish settlers consume 19 times more water per capita than their Palestinian neighbors. These settlers have on average 2.6 acres each; Gaza Palestinians have .006 acres each."^[19] According to Ahsan I. Butt of George Mason University, the settler population in the West Bank almost doubled between 1984 and 1988.^[22]

Zeev Maoz of the University of California, Davis has argued that the emergence of violent settler extremism, notably the Jewish Underground, in the late 1970s "complicated matters in the occupied territories," noting that settlers in the territories were not subject to the Defence (Emergency) Regulations applied to Palestinians and that the members of the Jewish Underground convicted of murder were pardoned after serving relatively short sentences.^[72] Emile A. Nakhleh of Mount St. Mary's University wrote that Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories were at times manned by civilian settlers; "Many of these are teenagers, brandishing their weapons while the police watch. Indeed, one always sees a police car parked close to where these settlers search cars and check identity cards."^[54]

Imprisonment of Palestinians by Israel

Don Peretz of Binghamton University wrote in 1988 that "discontent with deteriorating economic and social conditions has been politicized in what the Israeli press has characterized as "schools of hatred": the Israeli prisons and detention centers where tens of thousands have been held, for periods ranging from a day to a decade or more.^[30] According to historian Mustafa Kabha, "during the period of 1967-1985, Israel had arrested nearly 250 000 people, 40 percent of whom were detained for longer than one night."^[73]

According to Francesco Saverio Leopardi of the University of Edinburgh, "the rise of activists arrested, notably since the 1985 launch of the Iron Fist policy, turned the Israeli prisons into veritable political schools where the detainees organized themselves according to their political affiliation. Younger detainees received training from more experienced militants in ideology, resistance activities and structure of the Palestinian national movement. The Israeli prisons thus shaped a new generation of leaders, the generation that constituted the backbone of the Intifada."^[36] According to Julie M. Norman, Palestinian prisoners increasingly adopted collective action in the years leading to the Intifada, including holding elections among themselves to create "multi-level representational committees, allowing for communication and coordination within and between prisons. Although communications were officially forbidden, prisoners managed to organize hunger strikes and utilize other nonviolent tactics such as banging on bars, using forbidden items, and refusing to address soldiers formally."^[74]

Unpreparedness of the Israeli government and military for an uprising

According to Mouin Rabbani, "the intelligence services failed to anticipate and prevent it. Then the military high command refused to recognize the scope and character of the mass demonstrations and thereby facilitated their transformation into a coherent popular rebellion. And in the ensuing months and years, the Israeli military, still recovering from defeat in Lebanon, consistently failed to quell the uprising or even regain its deterrent profile vis-a-vis the population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip."^[75] According to Israeli political scientist Yitzhak Reiter, "Israel was unprepared to deal with a popular uprising."^[76] According to Sergio Catignani of the University of Sussex, the Israeli military and government interpreted the increase in Palestinian demonstrations and stone-throwing during the 1980s as "individual and sporadic endaevours" that were "not thought to seriously challenge the Israeli occupation."^[77] According to Ido Zelkovitz of the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, "the fact that the Israeli government was not ready for this popular resistance gave Palestinians an early advantage and helped Palestinians create this alternative local leadership while challenging the old guard of the PLO and Fatah."^[78]

Emmanuel Sivan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has argued that "Israeli complacency and indifference to the situation in the territories, particularly in Gaza," contributed to the outbreak of the Intifada, pointing towards an ignored 1985 report by a committee led by General Avraham Tamir that warned that "the Gaza Strip is a demographic and economic — and therefore also a political and security — time bomb."^[79] According to Sivan, the report noted factors like high population growth, lack of skilled employment opportunities, an idea by the Israeli Civil Administration to establish a citrus juice factory that failed due to lobbying from the Israeli agricultural industry, and growing political collaboration between Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.^[79]

Israeli Brigadier General Amatzia Chen has argued that "In 1987, only a few hundred soldiers were stationed in Gaza and the West Bank. With such scant numbers of forces, local Arabs took advantage of this weakness to engage in violence. The Palestinians gained confidence and they felt like they had the upper hand. The IDF ended up shooting at civilians on a daily basis just to survive."^[61]

Increasing internal debates within Israel

According to Eitan Alimi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "the Israeli polity post-1967 ran into deep domestic conflict over the territories’ future status that gradually developed into a system-wide crisis, i.e. a sociopolitical division, which undermined the foundations of the regime’s framework and the bases of its authority, and was manifested in the rise of political violence, distrust in the system and unprecedented violation of the rule of law," a domestic conflict that was "collectively perceived by the Palestinians as an opportunity to increase contention."^[66]

According to Lev Luis Grinberg of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, there was " growing criticism within Israel’s civil as well as military society regarding the use of the IDF not for defensive purposes but for offensive and aggressive purposes, mainly aiming to maintain the occupation and expand the settlements in the OT."^[59]

According to Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, research on the Nakba by the Israeli New Historians caused the emergence of "a perceptible continuity between Zionist theories and actions before as well after 1967," claiming that this revelead an expanionist state philosophy instead of a defensive philosophy.^[18]

Global politics

Ian Lustick places the First Intifada in the context of the third wave of democratisation, saying that it was "the first of many mass-based, illegal, nonviolent or semiviolent challenges to nondemocratic governing structures to burst upon the world scene at the end of the 1980s. Algeria and Jordan erupted in 1988. Mass mobilizations subsequently appeared in Burma, in the Baltic states, and in most East European countries in 1989, then in China, South Africa, Kenya, and in many of the constituent republics of the former Soviet Union."^[12] Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has argued that the PLO's failure to liberate Palestine was becoming "accentuated in the 1980s by the liberation of oppressed people in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and South Africa."^[80]

According to Erika G. Alin, international criticism of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon led to an assumption among Palestinians that "relative to the international environment of the 1970s and early 1980s, a Palestinian initiative against the Israeli occupation in the late 1980s would be more likely to prompt some form of positive, or at the least not openly hostile, international response."^[25]

Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said has argued that increased American support for Israel under Ronald Reagan's presidency allowed the Israeli government to overlook increasing internal debates in Israeli society over its occupation policies.^[18]

Specific incidents

Israeli general Yitzhak Mordechai, head of the Southern Command when the First Intifada broke out, has cited the 1985 prisoner-exchange Jibril Agreement, the August 1987 murder of the commander of the Israeli military police in the Gaza Strip by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the November 1987 Night of the Gliders surprise attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command on an Israeli miliary base, as incidents having contributed to the outbreak of the Intifada. According to Mordechai, "morale among Palestinians rose significantly, as did their readiness to stand up to army soldiers."^[61] Ziad Abu-Amr of Birzeit University has listed the PIJ murder of the Israeli military police commander, a successful prison escape by six PIJ members in 1987 and resulting clash with the Israeli military, and the Night of Gliders attack as contributing to the breakout of the Intifada, saying that they "intensified already highly charged nationalist sentiments" and "demonstrated that Israel - even with its strong army, advanced weaponary, and elaborate security measures - was not invincible."^[68] Israeli author Nadav Shragai has argued that the Palestinians released in the Jibril Agreement "became the backbone of the first intifada."^[81]

Jamal Zakout, who acted as a member of the UNLU during the Intifada, has argued that the death of Intisar al-Attara, a 16-year-old girl from Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip who was murdered by settlers in November 1987, played a direct role in sparking the Initfada, saying that "this injustice was accompanied by conscious attempts to humiliate people. I remember the Jafaati and Golani military units, which would be deployed for a rest in Gaza after combat missions in Lebanon. These units would take pleasure in tormenting people in Gaza in an unbelievable manner. They would tip over stalls in the market. They would force elderly people to clean spray-painted slogans, or even order them to dance on their stalls. They deliberately humiliated people, and even threatened their lives. People felt no one was safe, and that everyone was a target."^[82]

The specific incident that is most widely agreed to have sparked the First Intifada is an accident at the Erez Crossing on 8 December 1987.^[83][84] That day, a truck driven by an Israeli accidentally crashed into a row of Palestinian cars, killing four Palestinians. In the aftermath of the accident, rumours spread throughout the Gaza Strip that it had been a deliberate attack, arranged in retaliation for the death of Israeli salesman Shlomo Sakal, who had been stabbed in Gaza several days earlier. The funeral for the four dead Palestinian workers was attended by thousands of Gazans, and developed into mass demonstrations.^[85] As the heated demonstration continued the next day, the Israeli military shot and killed Hatem Abu Sisi, a 17-year-old Gazan protestor, inflaming the protests in Gaza and sparking protests throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem. By 12 December, 6 Palestinian protestors had been shot and killed by the Israeli military, further inflaming the protests, which prompted a harsher Israeli crackdown, which in turn flamed further protests, which became increasingly organised and coordinated into an uprising, with the UNLU being formed in early January 1988.^[4][86]

See also

• Sumud