The First Intifada was a popular uprising by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation between late 1987 and 1993. A number of major events occurred related to the Intifada between those years.
Overview
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 its 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 Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) and its popular committees, representing a decentralised and clandestine coalition of grassroots organisations, including labour unions, student councils, and women's committees. Although it claimed allegiance to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and many of the grassroots organisations were affiliated with PLO factions (especially the Palestinian Communist Party, the DFLP, the PFLP, and Fatah), the UNLU operated outside of the direct control of the PLO leadership, who were mostly in exile in Tunisia or imprisoned (or had been killed by Israeli forces over the preceding years).
The Israeli government responded to the outbreak 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, closing all schools and universities, mass arrests, and demolitions of Palestinian houses. By 1990, as the Israeli crackdown severely damaged the Palestinian economy, institutions, and morale, as the extremist conservative Islamist Hamas emerged, as the PLO leadership in exile attempted to take on greater day-to-day control over the Intifada, and as many of the initial UNLU organisers had been arrested, the UNLU lost its ability to direct the course of the uprising. The uprising subsequently grew more and more disorganised and violent, including Palestinian internal political violence against rumoured collaborators and attacks against Israelis. 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 and around 350 Palestinians killed by other Palestinians.
The First Intifada would come to an end between 1991 and 1993, with a series of intensive peace negotiations starting with the Madrid Conference of 1991. These negotiations marked the first time that the Israeli government agreed to negotiate directly with Palestinian leaders. The negotiations culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Phases Prelude
A number of commentators have argued that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict saw a period of significantly heightened tensions beginning in late-1986 that directly fed into the outbreak of the Intifada. According to Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, "the greatest surprise, with hindsight, was that the uprising had not occurred before December 1987 ... from late 1986 on, there was definitely 'something in the air.'"Hiltermann, Joost R. Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women's Movements in the Occupied Territories. Princeton University Press, 1993. Page 7. According to Anita Vitullo, "one year before the Palestinian mass uprising began, the writing was on the walls."Beinin, Joel & Zachary Lockman. Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation. South End Press, 1989. According to Mouin Rabbani of the Institute for Palestine Studies and Lisa Hajjar of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Palestinian unrest had become "frequent and particularly intense during late 1986 and the spring of 1987," as "university campuses and large towns became the focus of an escalating spiral of resistance" that lead into the breakout of the Intifada. Aryeh Shalev of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, a former Brigadier General in the IDF, has argued that "the period immediately preceding the uprising saw a number of flagrantly unusual incidents." Ann M. Lesch of Villanova University has argued that "in the year before the intifada broke out, Gaza experienced a significant increase in both organizational activities and violent confrontations. Some of the tactics paralleled those used later in the intifada and indicated that for some Gazans the 'barrier of fear' was already broken."
Debates over the start and end dates of the Intifada The First Intifada is widely agreed to have started spontaneously and without any specific leadership in late 1987, catching both the Israeli government and the PLO by surprise. The large majority of commentators further agree that the start of the Intifada can be placed on 9 December 1987, the day of the truck accident in the Gaza Strip. Some commentators, however, have argued that the start date of the Intifada can be placed earlier, based on a number of high-profile incidents in the months immediately preceding December 1987. Members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad frequently claim that the Initifada began on 6 October 1987, the day of a shootout between the IDF and several PIJ militants who had escaped from an Israeli prison in May.
There also exists some debate over the end date of the Intifada.Catherwood, Christopher. One Hundred Years of Protest: Everything You Need to Know Series. Allison & Busby, 2015. Some commentators have placed the end date as the convening of the Madrid Conference of 1991, in late-October and early-November 1991. Other commentators have placed the end date as the signing of the Oslo I Accord in September 1993.
Phases of Palestinian tactics Several commentators have argued that the First Intifada can be charactised in distinct phases, including an earlier phase where the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) was able to effectively direct a primarily non-violent campaign of civil disobedience that was widely seen as legitimate among Palestinians, and a latter phase in which the UNLU's leadership and the cohesion of the uprising disintegrated, accompanied by a significant increase in acts of violence. Israeli historian Avraham Sela has written that "longer [the Intifada] lasted, the more it shifted from civil rebellion demonstrations, work strikes and a boycott of Israeli products to increasingly uncontrolled violence against both Israel and internal 'traitors.'" Israeli historian Uri Milstein has argued that the Intifada can be divided into two stages: a first marked by mass participation in demonstration and stone-throwing and a second marked by a Hamas terrorist campaign.
According to Aden Tedla of the Global Nonviolent Action Database, "as increasing numbers of leaders were placed in jail during the summer of 1988, the discipline needed to maintain the nonviolent campaign became increasingly hard to find.... After the summer of 1988, the old leadership of the PLO took command of the uprising and the latter years of the Palestinian intifada were characterized by armed struggle, which did not succeed in bringing about the end of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories."
Writing in mid-1990, Palestinian researcher Salim Tamari identified four stages of the Intifada: a first stage in December 1987 marked by spontaneous civil insurrection, a second stage from January to March 1988 marked by the coalescing of the uprising around the leadership of the UNLU and the popular committees, a third stage from February to June 1988 marked by Palestinian boycotts aimed at dismantling the Israeli Civil Administration, a fourth stage culminating in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in November 1988, a fifth stage marked by a renewed Israeli counter-offensive against the uprising in the first half of 1989, and a sixth stage from the second half of 1989 marked by a more violent Palestinian "anti-collaboration campaign". According to Audrey Kurth Cronin of Carnegie Mellon University, "by 1990, the Intifada had lost direction and Palestinian groups were mainly fighting among themselves: in 1991, the Israelis killed fewer Palestinians (about 100) than did the Palestinians themselves (about 150)."Kurth Cronin, Audrey. How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Ruth Margolies Beitler of the United States Military Academy has argued that the tactics used by Palestinians had shifted significantly by 1990, saying that "effective Israeli countermeasures and the fatigue of the rioters decrease the frequency and number of participants of large demonstrations, but led the dissidents to choose more violent methods over time. This change – the reduction of mass demonstrations – should not be perceived as a victory for the Israelis. On the contrary, it represented a radicalisation on the part of certain participants and an increase in the intensity of violence." Mary King of the University for Peace has argued that the uprising "would remain relatively coherent until March 1990, despite harsh reprisals... The movement would by its third year disintegrate into violence after Israel's incarceration, deportation, or discrediting of the very activist intellectuals who had sustained the uprising's nonviolent character and had throughout the 1970s and 1980s worked to bring about the new political thinking that produced the intifada."Stephan, Maria J. Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pages 121–129.
Phases of the Israeli response
Ruth Margolies Beitler of the United States Military Academy has described the Israeli responses to the Intifada in phases, including a first phase in which the Israeli military failed to recognise that the uprising was significantly different to previous waves of Palestinian unrest and resorted to its usual methods of restoring calm (including crowd dispersal, curfews, and mass arrests), followed by a second phase, beginning in mid-January 1988, in which the military attempted to restore its deterrence profile (including with the force, might, and beatings policy).Margolies Beitler, Ruth. The Path to Mass Rebellion: An Analysis of Two Intifadas. Bloomsbury Academic, 2004. Pages 85-114. Ralph Mandel of the American Jewish Year Book proposed a first phase of the Intifada in 1988 from its outbreak through to March 1988, characterised by "sheer force of numbers and the unleashing of pent-up fury" on the part of Palestinians and Yitzhak Rabin's "force, might, and beatings" policy on the part of Israelis, with a second phase emerging in mid-March 1988, characterised by the UNLU's attempts to set-up an "alternative government" and the Israeli authorities's attempts to suppress alternative governance.