Intifada
Zachary Lockman & Joel Benin
423 pages including index
published in 1989

During Israel's invasion of Gaza this January there was one of those stupid drummed up controversies that always happen whenever Israel's engaging in warcrimes again and hence coming under foreign pressure. In this case it was Dutch Socialist Party member of parliament Harry van Bommel who got into trouble after his call for Intifada was twisted from being a call to resistance into not just a call for armed resistance but fullblown terrorism. Various zionist pressure groups were keen to pretend that intifada invariably meant terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings while ignoring that the first Intifada had been characterised by non-violent protests and most socalled Palestinian violence only happened in self defence against IDF aggression. Nobody honest can call boys throwing stones at tanks terrorists, but that didn't stop our local zionists from pretending it was, helped by conflating the much more violent Second Intifada with the first.

Now I grew up in the eighties and I remember the first Intifada. I was barely in highschool when it started in 1987 and not very politically aware, but I did notice that by late 1988, early 1989 there were quite a lot older students wearing keffiyehs, usually as shawls, as a symbol of their support for the Palestinians; this at a not too leftwing Christian school. The Intifada had the same sort of stature as the ANC's struggle to end Apartheid had because everybody could see how the Palestinians were being oppressed and how justified they were in their (largely non-violent) resistance despite IDF agression. It was therefore a blatant rewriting of history to equate Intifada with terrorism and to confirm this, I read this collection of essays on the Intifada.

Published in 1989 and therefore largely written during the first year of the Intifada, this is a great snapshot of the uprising. It looks not just at the Intifada itself, but also puts it in context and in the ways it has transformed not just the whole Israel/Palestine conflict but also Palestinian society itself. No longer could the struggle for Palestinian independence be disparaged as mere terrorism and at the same time no longer was the struggle the exclusive domain of a small elite of armed men with the women and children as largely passive bystanders. Intifada pays attention to all these aspects of the struggle, as well as its reception in Israel and the United States. Each section is started off by various photos and poems fromt he Intifada. Also included in the appendices are the communiques from the United National Leadership of the Uprising, through which much of the Intifada was coordinated.

Intifada starts off with a short introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the context in which the uprising started. More than twenty years later it's hard to understand just how defeated the Palestinian cause was when the Intifada started. Ever since the foundation of Israel in 1948 the Palestinians had kept losing: first they were ethnically cleansed of what became the state of Israel, then in 1967 the West Bank and Gaza Strip were conquered by the IDF, followed not long after by the first Jewish settlers. The PLO, founded in 1964 to liberate the entirety of Palestinia from Israeli occupation got mired in often pointless terrorist attacks, powerstruggles first in Jordan and then Lebanon as well as internal conflict. The occupation of the Westbank and Gaza was barely contested and the PLO looked a broken organisation. There seemed to be little the Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories could do to change this. Everyday life was strangled by a thousand and one laws and security directives aimed at keeping the Palestinians in a subordinate position.

This situation could not be endured indefinitely, obviously and something like the Intifada was bound to happen sooner or latter. What was surprising was the scale and endurance of the uprising, which succeeded in uniting most of the Palestinians in a common cause. The spark that started the uprising was a traffic accident when an Israeli truck collided with a Palestinian car and killed four people. Interpretated as a revenge action, it led to a range of incidents and ultimately the uprising, against a backdrop of an already violent autumn. The uprising quickly spreads, first through the refugee camps on the Westbank, then through the cities and villages of the Ocucpied Territories and even into Israel itself. While most of the media attention is focused on teenage boys throwing rocks at Israeli tanks, this is only a small part of the Intifada. Strike action, both in Palestinian communities and in Israeli owned industries, demonstrations and other mass protests, mobilisations of entire communities to support the uprising are all part of it.

The Intifada in fact reorganises the entire Palestinian community, uniting the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories with those in Israel itself, as well as changing the various village and town communities internally. Mass arrests and deportations of men and teenage boys means a lot of the organisation of the Intifada has to be done by the women, changing the role of women from passive bystanders into active supporters and participants in the uprising. There have always been female PLO fighters, but this is the first time women are involved on such a massive scale. It's a massive change within a still often traditional society, as important as the Intifada itself.

This collection of essays on the Intifada was written when it was still in full swing, with the uprising already having lasted some two years. Obviously the outcome of the Intifada could not yet be known at the time; it wasn't even clear whether the Israelis would ever respond to it with anything but further repression or which side would be able to maintain the struggle the longest. We know what happened, how ultimately the Oslo agreements between the PLO and Israel would give the Palestinians some measure of freedom, slight as it is and how this would lead to a new status quo but still not a true victory for the Palestinians nor peace for Israel. But that even the limited gains of Oslo could not have been won without the Intifada, is undeniable.