The First Intifada (), also known as the First Palestinian Intifada, was a sustained uprising involving violent and non-violent protests, acts of civil disobedience, riots, and terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinian civilians and militants in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and Israel.Ruth Margolies Beitler, The Path to Mass Rebellion: An Analysis of Two Intifadas, p. 128. It was motivated by collective Palestinian frustration over Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as it approached a twenty-year mark, having begun in the wake of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War.Lockman; Beinin (1989), p. 5. The uprising lasted from December 1987 until the Madrid Conference of 1991, though some date its conclusion to 1993, the year the Oslo Accords were signed.
The Intifada began on 9 December 1987 in the Jabalia refugee camp after an Israeli truck driver collided with parked civilian vehicles, killing four Palestinian workers, three of whom were from the refugee camp. Palestinians charged that the collision was a deliberate response for the killing of an Israeli in Gaza days earlier.David McDowall,Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond, University of California Press, 1989 p. 1 Israel denied that the crash, which came at time of heightened tensions, was intentional or coordinated. The Palestinian response was characterized by protests, civil disobedience, and strikes, with excessive violence in response from Israeli security forces.Ruth Margolies Beitler, The Path to Mass Rebellion: An Analysis of Two Intifadas, Lexington Books, 2004 p.xi. There was graffiti, barricading,, on p. 190. and widespread throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails at the Israeli army and its infrastructure within the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These contrasted with civil efforts including general strikes, boycotts of Israeli Civil Administration institutions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, an economic boycott consisting of refusal to work in Israeli settlements on Israeli products, refusal to pay taxes, and refusal to drive Palestinian cars with Israeli licenses.
Israel deployed some 80,000 soldiers in response. Israeli countermeasures, which initially included the use of live rounds frequently in cases of riots, were criticized by Human Rights Watch as disproportionate, in addition to Israel's excessive use of lethal force. In the first 13 months, 332 Palestinians and 12 Israelis were killed.Audrey Kurth Cronin 'Endless wars and no surrender,' in Holger Afflerbach, Hew Strachan (eds.) How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender, Oxford University Press 2012 pp. 417–433 p. 426.Wendy Pearlman, Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement,Cambridge University Press 2011, p. 114. Images of soldiers beating adolescents with clubs then led to the adoption of firing semi-lethal plastic bullets. During the whole six-year intifada, the Israeli army killed at least 1,087 Palestinians, of which 240 were children.
Among Israelis, 100 civilians and 60 Israeli soldiers were killed,B'Tselem Statistics; Fatalities in the first Intifada. often by militants outside the control of the Intifada's UNLU,Mient Jan Faber, Mary Kaldor, 'The deterioration of human security in Palestine,' in Mary Martin, Mary Kaldor (eds.) The European Union and Human Security: External Interventions and Missions, Routledge, 2009 pp. 95–111. and more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and 1,700 soldiers were injured.'Intifada,' in David Seddon, (ed.)A Political and Economic Dictionary of the Middle East, Taylor & Francis 2004, p. 284. Intra-Palestinian violence was also a prominent feature of the Intifada, with widespread executions of an estimated 822 Palestinians killed as alleged Israeli collaborators (1988–April 1994).Human Rights Watch, Israel, the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Authority Territories, November 2001. Vol. 13, No. 4(E), p. 49 At the time, Israel reportedly obtained information from some 18,000 Palestinians who had been "compromised",Amitabh Pal, "Islam" Means Peace: Understanding the Muslim Principle of Nonviolence Today, ABC-CLIO, 2011 p. 191. although fewer than half had any proven contact with the Israeli authorities.Lockman; Beinin (1989), p. Years later, the Second Intifada took place from September 2000 to 2005.
Background
According to Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian American clinical psychologist, the Intifada was a protest against Israeli repression, including "beatings, shootings, killings, house demolitions, uprooting of trees, deportations, extended imprisonments, and detentions without trial".Ackerman; DuVall (2000), p 407. In the years prior to the Intifada, Awad had been "among the keenest advocates for nonviolent struggle", founding the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence. After Israel's capture of the West Bank, Jerusalem, Sinai Peninsula, and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt in the Six-Day War in 1967, frustration grew among Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories. Israel opened its labor market to Palestinians in the newly occupied territories, who were recruited mainly to do unskilled or semi-skilled labor jobs Israelis did not want. By the time of the Intifada, over 40 percent of the Palestinian workforce worked in Israel daily. Additionally, Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land, high birthrates in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the limited allocation of land for new building and agriculture created conditions marked by growing population density and rising unemployment, even for those with university degrees. At the time of the Intifada, only one in eight college-educated Palestinians could find degree-related work.Ackerman; DuVall (2000), p 401. This was coupled with an expansion of a Palestinian university system catering to people from refugee camps, villages, and small towns, generating a new Palestinian elite from a lower social strata that was more activistic and confrontational with Israel.Robinson, Glenn E. "The Palestinians." The Contemporary Middle East, Third Edition. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2013. 126–127. According to Israeli historian and diplomat Shlomo Ben-Ami in his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, the Intifada was also a rebellion against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Ben-Ami describes the PLO as uncompromising and reliant on international terrorism, which he says exacerbated Palestinian grievances.
The Israeli Labor Party's Yitzhak Rabin, then Defense Minister, added deportations in August 1985 to Israel's "Iron Fist" policy of cracking down on Palestinian nationalism.Helena Cobban, 'The PLO and the Intifada', in Robert Owen Freedman, (ed.) The Intifada: Its Impact on Israel, the Arab World, and the Superpowers, University Press of Florida, 1991 pp. 70–106, pp. 94–95.'must be considered as an essential part of the backdrop against which the intifada germinated'.(p. 95) This, which led to 50 deportations in the following four years,Helena Cobban, 'The PLO and the Intifada', p. 94. In the immediate aftermath of the 6 Day War in 1967, some 15,000 Gazans had been deported to Egypt. A further 1,150 were deported between September 1967 and May 1978. This pattern was drastically curtailed by the Likud governments under Menachem Begin between 1978 and 1984. was accompanied by economic integration and increasing Israeli settlements, such that the Jewish settler population in the West Bank alone nearly doubled from 35,000 in 1984 to 64,000 in 1988, reaching 130,000 by the mid-nineties. Referring to the developments, Israeli minister of Economics and Finance, Gad Ya'acobi, stated that "a creeping process of de facto annexation" contributed to a growing militancy in Palestinian society.Lockman; Beinin (1989), p. 32.
During the 1980s a number of mainstream Israeli politicians referred to policies of transferring the Palestinian population out of the territories, leading to Palestinian fears that Israel planned to evict them. Public statements calling for transfer of the Palestinian population were made by Deputy Defense Minister Michael Dekel, Cabinet Minister Mordechai Tzipori and government Minister Yosef Shapira among others. Describing the causes of the Intifada, Benny Morris refers to the "all-pervading element of humiliation", caused by the protracted occupation which he says was "always a brutal and mortifying experience for the occupied" and was "founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation."
Trigger for the uprising
While the catalyst for the First Intifada is generally dated to a truck incident involving several Palestinian fatalities at the Erez Crossing in December 1987, Mazin Qumsiyeh argues, against Donald Neff, that it began with multiple youth demonstrations earlier in the preceding month.M. B. Qumsiyeh Popular Resistance in Palestine; A History of Hope and Empowerment, Pluto Press; New York 2011.pp. 135 Some sources consider that the perceived IDF failure in late November 1987 to stop a Palestinian guerrilla operation, the Night of the Gliders, in which six Israeli soldiers were killed, helped catalyze local Palestinians to rebel.Shay (2005), p. 74.
Mass demonstrations had occurred a year earlier when, after two Gaza students at Birzeit University had been shot by Israeli soldiers on campus on 4 December 1986, the Israelis responded with harsh punitive measures, involving summary arrest, detention, and systematic beatings of handcuffed Palestinian youths, ex-prisoners and activists, some 250 of whom were detained in four cells inside a converted army camp, known popularly as Ansar 11, outside Gaza City.Anita Vitullo, 'Uprising in Gaza,' in Lockman and Beinin 1989 pp. 43–55 pp. 43–44. A policy of deportation was introduced to intimidate activists in January 1987. Violence simmered as a schoolboy from Khan Yunis was shot dead by Israeli soldiers pursuing him in a Jeep. Over the summer the IDF's Lieutenant Ron Tal, who was responsible for guarding detainees at Ansar 11, was shot dead at point-blank range while stuck in a Gaza traffic jam. A curfew forbidding Gaza residents from leaving their homes was imposed for three days, during the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha. In two incidents on 1 and 6 October 1987, the IDF ambushed and killed seven Gazan men, reportedly affiliated with Islamic Jihad, who had escaped from prison in May.Vitullo, p. 44 The first incident involved two unarmed men, one a well-known Gaza businessman, at a roadblock. The second occurred in a residential raid, where subsequently a small cache of weapons were found in the cars of four men. The army them bulldozed their homes. A general strike took place, and in response Israel arrested and ordered the deportation of Shaykh 'Abd al-'Aziz Awad, who was held responsible for the growth of popular support for Islamic Jihad, on 15 November. Some days later, a 17-year-old schoolgirl, Intisar al-'Attar, was shot in her schoolyard in Deir al-Balah by settlers in the Gaza Strip after allegedly throwing stones at them.Vitullo, pp:45-6. The settlers did not report the killing. An Israeli schoolteacher was arrested for the incident after a ballistics test was undertaken, but an Israel judge released him after a week, in the wake of Israeli settler protests. Settlers said she had been throwing stones. The Arab summit in Amman in November 1987 focused on the Iran–Iraq War, and the Palestinian issue was shunted to the sidelines for the first time in years.Shalev (1991), p. 33.Nassar; Heacock (1990), p. 31.
Timeline of the Intifada
Israel's occupation and Palestinian unrest