Sun after darkness: The First Intifada

The children of the stones
have scattered our papers
spilled ink on our clothes
mocked the banality of old texts ...
What matters about
the children of the stones
Is that they have brought us rain after centuries of thirst
Brought us the sun after centuries of darkness,
Brought us hope after centuries of defeat ...
The most important
thing about them is that they have rebelled
against the authority of their fathers.

Nizar Qabbani—Syrian poet

The First Intifada was one of the deepest and longest-lasting rebellions of Palestinians against Israeli oppression in history. It was known as the “uprising of stones”.

The emblematic figure of the Intifada was the youth, hurling rocks, head covered by a keffiyeh, standing defiant against Israeli tanks. This figure represented a break from the militarised forms of Palestinian resistance that had dominated in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Intifada involved hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and even inside Israel, and represented a broad and deep radicalisation of the Palestinian population. It involved resistance, civil disobedience, strikes and protests.

Stories from journalists at the time reveal the breadth of popular involvement. American Ramallah-based journalist Joe Stork described how a middle-aged working-class woman, after watching demonstrations on television for a month, eagerly joined a group of young boys building a roadblock.

Another article described a toothless 100-year-old woman admitted to a Gaza hospital after having her hand broken by Israeli soldiers. As she entered the ward, she sat up on the bed and gave a speech of defiance to the applause of other victims in surrounding beds.

Over the course of the six years, there were times when the Intifada managed to achieve something like dual power. Palestinian popular committees took over significant elements of civil society and social infrastructure. This was all in response to increased Israeli control and brutalisation of Palestinians in the preceding decades.

After Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank following the 1967 war, the intensification of military rule became unbearable. These conditions provoked extreme resentment amongst the Palestinians, and, throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, there was an increase in organisation. Students played a leading role, with universities starting community programs and organising protests. Strikes began to occur with greater frequency as all Palestinian factions turned toward organising workers.

The immediate event that sparked the Intifada occurred in Gaza on 9 December 1987. An Israeli army tank drove into a line of cars of Arab workers who had just passed one of the military checkpoints at the northern entrance to the Gaza Strip. Four were crushed to death and seven were seriously injured. The crime was witnessed by hundreds of labourers returning from jobs in Israel.

Three of the dead men were from the nearby Jabalia refugee camp. Their funerals turned into a huge demonstration of 10,000 camp residents. From this moment onwards, the residents of the camp referred to it as the “camp of the revolution”.

The killings sparked waves of similar actions across the refugee camps, home to the poorest and most oppressed Palestinians. One young resident in Gaza said: “We were waiting to do such an uprising. Everyone here has a demonstration inside their heart”.

The insurgence of the early demonstrations provoked a violent reaction from the Israeli military. Hundreds of young people were arbitrarily arrested. The military picked them up and imprisoned them. Eventually, the Israelis converted an army camp on the edge of Gaza city into a new place to hold young men. Palestinians dubbed it “Ansar II” after the notorious POW camp Israel set up in southern Lebanon. Ansar II became infamous for its sadistic treatment of Palestinians, which included clubbing prisoners while they were shackled to the ground.

Curfews were introduced; telephone lines, water and electricity were cut. Administrative detention was introduced, and activists were deported.

By 1988, Israel was sending 10,000 troops every day into the West Bank and Gaza, using more soldiers than in their conquest in 1967. By the end of 1988, more than 30,000 Palestinians had been detained and hundreds killed.

This initial phase of the uprising was primarily a war of the camps versus the army, but by mid-January 1988, the villages also became centres of resistance. Women and the young were at the centre of the rebellion. There were stories about boys, so young that they had to stand on their tiptoes to look through car windows, staffing the Palestinian checkpoints established by the uprising. Women routinely attacked Israeli patrols with pots and pans to release detained youths. Outside one Ramallah prison in late 1988, three women claimed an arrested youth, explaining: “They are all our sons”. This phrase became a refrain throughout the whole of the Intifada. Women even talked about protecting their “sons” as their profession.

All this resistance would have been significant enough, but the rebellion deepened and expanded in a variety of ways. Tax strikes were organised and Israeli goods boycotted.

Importantly, workers began to mobilise. Over the decades, the numbers of Palestinian workers working low-wage jobs in the West Bank and as day labourers inside Israel had increased. Wage workers became a larger part of the Palestinian population overall, and unions grew. One union official estimated in 1985 that, out of 150,000 workers in the West Bank, around 30,000 were members of a union.

Strikes became a regular feature of the Intifada. In late December 1987, a general strike of Palestinian workers occurred across all the Occupied Territories. Israeli profits collapsed in a variety of sectors, including hospitality, construction and fruit farming.

The organisation of workers was not, however, unified. There were several union federations and blocs organised along political lines—many of whom were competing for members.

Other committees were also established: youth committees, medical committees, popular and neighbourhood committees, and local defence committees.

The neighbourhood and popular committees became responsible for the running of basic infrastructure, including health, education and rubbish collection. When schools were shut down by military order, the committees established alternative schools with a whole new curriculum.

These committees did more than help organise different elements of society. They started to give political and social confidence in new ways. Many of the generational and class relations were shifting. The class forces that had dominated society, like intellectuals and professionals, began to seem marginal. There were open challenges to old leaders and old hierarchies.

The idea behind many of these committees was to disengage from existing Israeli structures and lay the basis for Palestinian statehood. Or, according to Salim Tamari, “To prepare the Occupied Territories to receive the national authority.”

While the early months of the Intifada were led by a combination of local spontaneous action and pre-existing formations, a more formal political leadership coalesced in early 1988. This was called the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU). Outside of the UNLU, and with growing influence, were the Islamist factions: Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

The UNLU directed the course of the uprising through a series of communiqués. These communiqués, particularly in the early years of the uprising, would give each day of the week ahead a particular focus. They were distributed at night, on the ground or tucked under car windshields or doors. The directives were assiduously followed.

The UNLU comprised both a political leadership on the ground in the Occupied Territories and also the leadership amongst the diaspora. The diasporic leadership developed a broader strategic orientation. The early articulated goals of the movement were to hold an international peace conference that could push for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The UNLU was mainly run by the organisations affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). This included the increasingly dominant Fateh, led by Yasser Arafat. Fateh was a compromised and conservative nationalist organisation. Its horizons were shaped simultaneously by its cosy relationships with despotic regional powers and a desire for a Palestinian mini-state. The other main factions were the Maoist-influenced leftist organisations of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Later, the Communist Party joined.

All these factions organised their own committees and trade unions. While there were often sharp disagreements between the factions on a range of questions, all held to a generally nationalist framework. In the unions, this meant that the class struggle should be frozen in the interests of a “nationalist alliance” between workers and bosses in the Occupied Territories. An independent Palestinian state needed to be established before the class struggle could begin. Such a political approach meant that, although the unions were a vital element of the Intifada, the workers movement did not fundamentally shape the political contours of the popular committees. This was a missed opportunity. By the end of the first year of the Intifada, there was such a consensus that the popular committees were the basis for a Palestinian state that there may well have been room to argue that an expanded and deepened version of popular power, workers power, was necessary.

But even if such a view was in a minority, it was the right argument to make. National independence, while important, does not bring genuine liberation for the nationally oppressed working class. Indeed, twentieth century postcolonial states have often become hell-scapes for workers. Workers needed to fight for the struggle for national independence to become a struggle for socialism.

The Intifada inspired other regional uprisings in Algeria, Jordan and the Gulf States. These rebellions weren’t just in solidarity with Palestine: they challenged the regional order. This was something that the Fateh leadership could not countenance. So much of their existence and power was dependent on funding and support from these regimes. They began to codify a policy of “non-interference” in the affairs of the Arab regimes.

The resilience of the popular movement was also considered potentially problematic by the Fateh leadership. While Fateh understood the popular committees as providing the infrastructure for a future Palestinian state, they did not approve of their radicalising dynamic. Fateh saw the mass movement only as a lever for its own power plays.

In the wake of the Intifada, the Israeli and US ruling classes felt that they were unable to continue ruling in the old way. Much better to find a collaborationist Palestinian leadership. Fateh happily obliged, thus beginning the disastrous Oslo Accords that ended in the establishment of the traitorous Palestinian Authority.

Both the DFLP and the PFLP, in differing ways and at different paces, challenged elements of this trajectory, while nevertheless maintaining their fundamental commitment to the PLO and its institutions. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, on the other hand, maintained a strident objection to the notion of a Palestinian mini-state, and this objection stood them in good stead for the later betrayals.

At the same time, between 1991 and 1993, the Israeli arrest and killing campaigns eliminated many leading activists. This repression occurred while Fateh was deliberately fragmenting the movement. Arafat allocated PLO funds to institutions and personnel according to political loyalty, much to the detriment of genuine resistance activities. These two factors ultimately contributed to the decline of the mass character of the Intifada.

Tragically, the promise of the Intifada was lost. It was crushed by an Israeli state that was determined to continue its rule over the Palestinians in whatever way it could, by violence and negotiation.

The Intifada was also betrayed by a Palestinian leadership that preferred to chase the dream of a Palestinian capitalist state in which its own power and prestige would be safeguarded. Finally, all that brilliant defiant energy was squandered by a left that refused to try to carve out a different, more radical path: a path that was certainly more difficult, but that centred working-class resistance in the Occupied Territories, that argued for regional revolution and looked to the power of the masses rather than the power of states.