Intifada and Independence

The Palestinian uprising or intifada on the West Bank and Gaza is said to have begun on December 9, 1987. A month earlier an Arab summit meeting in Amman had resolved the usual moral support for the cause of Palestine, although the various kings and presidents had also indicated that their primary interest was not Palestine but the Iran-Iraq war. This partial demotion of Palestine was gleefully noted by commentators in the United States who were led by the usual experts, (Daniel Pipes, Thomas Friedman et al.) ever ready to portray Yasir Arafat as a bumbling scoundrel, grinning his way from one failure to another. What seems to have escaped expert and official Israeli notice was that the Occupied Territories had already had twenty years of a regime designed to suppress, humiliate, and perpetually disenfranchise Palestinians, and that the likelihood of an outside force actually improving the situation had gradually disappeared. Instead the situation for Palestinians had gotten worse, and their sense of embattled loneliness, even abandonment, had increased. Capitulation was impossible. An intensification of resistance therefore seemed required and with it, greater discipline, more determination, enhanced independence of method, planning and action. In discussing the unfolding intifada (note that this is the only Arabic word to enter the vocabulary of twentieth-century world politics) we are in fact talking about two dynamics, one internal to Palestinian life under Israeli domination, the other external, in which the Palestinian exile presence has interacted dialectically with regional and international powers. Consider first the internal situation. Alone of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, the West Bank and Gaza remained in an unforgiving limbo of local repression and frozen political process. Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1980, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem were formally annexed by Israel, a change in status hardly welcomed by the Syrians and Palestinians who lived in those places, but at least the annexation represented a new dynamic. In the meantime, more settlements were established on the West Bank and Gaza, more land expropriated. After municipal elections on the West Bank (not in Gaza) in the spring of 1976 overwhelmingly returned pro-PLO candidates, the officials were summarily dismissed. Whenever leaders emerged they were either imprisoned, killed or maimed by Jewish terrorists, or they were simply expelled.