“The Unifying Impact of the Al-Aqsa Intifada,”
by Graham Usher

Overview:

The current uprising in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel has become the most sustained Palestinian revolt since the intifada of 1987-1993. There is no dispute, at least among Palestinians, that the uprising was spontaneous, sparked not by any strategic decision of the Palestinian leadership, but by the enormous frustration of the “Oslo” generation of Palestinian youth.

It was not simply former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s visit to Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem’s Old City on September 28 that sent this generation into the streets. The real spark was the September 29 killing of seven Palestinians by Israeli Border Police on the Haram al-Sharif and, above all, the televised murder the next day of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura in Gaza. The fuel was the frustration bred by the apartheid policies that are the Palestinians’ lot after seven years of the “peace process,” six of them under the authoritarian and incompetent governance of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Few would deny that the uprising marks a qualitatively new phase in the Palestinians’ long struggle for independence. First, the Israeli military has demonstrated disproportional and brutal force by using tanks, helicopters, gunboats, and snipers to crush what remains an overwhelmingly civilian protest. By October 30, 143 Palestinians had been killed and more than 5,000 wounded. This is equal to 15 percent of all casualties suffered in the earlier intifada, which lasted six years. The current “al-Aqsa intifada” has been going on for barely a month.

Second, an absolute Palestinian consensus now exists that the terms, agreements, and structures of the Oslo process must be overhauled and new bases for negotiations set, predicated on international legitimacy and UN resolutions 194, 242, and 338. Three main forces are motivating this transformation.

The Role of Fateh:

The leading political and military forces behind the revolt are grassroots cadres belonging to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fateh organization. These forces, known in Arabic as the tanzim (“organization”), consist mainly of Fateh’s “inside” leadership from the 1987 intifada and fighters from the PA’s security forces. Since the Oslo process began, the tanzim have assumed the contradictory functions of being the PA’s main political and military base, and increasingly its loyal opposition.

This opposition was born not just because of the PA’s woeful performance as a national authority. It also arose from the very terms of the Oslo process, in which Palestinian national aspirations were subordinated to a negotiating strategy based on U.S.-led diplomacy and “security cooperation” with the Israeli army.

Tanzim leaders have advocated options besides negotiations and diplomacy. One is popular and armed resistance against Israeli military outposts and settlements near Palestinian-controlled areas. Armed attacks against soldiers and settlements in or near Gaza, Nablus, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Hebron are now routine. This armed dimension most distinguishes the present revolt from the earlier intifada.

Another goal is to wrest the Palestinian struggle from the tutelage of U.S. diplomacy and Israeli hegemony and to return it to the forum of the UN and the Arab world. In particular, Fateh grassroots leaders have asserted that—in compliance with UN resolutions 194, 242, and 338—any end to the conflict must be conditional on Israel’s withdrawal from the territories occupied in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

A third goal is to resurrect genuine unity among all the Palestinian factions, including the non-PLO Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements.

The Role of the Islamists:

Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s presence in the uprising so far has been largely supportive. They have not challenged Fateh’s leading role on the political, diplomatic, or military levels and, like Fateh, have mobilized their supporters mainly in defense of Palestinian civilian areas. They have granted the PA/PLO unprecedented legitimacy by, for the first time, attending sessions of its leadership and joining the National and Islamic Forces (NIF), an umbrella body that sets the calendar of mass protests. Nor has the traffic been only one way. In the last month, the PA has freed 85 Hamas and Islamic Jihad political detainees, according to Hamas spokesperson Mahmoud Zahar. In contrast, during the 1987-1993 intifada, Hamas never joined the United Leadership of the Uprising, preferring to call its own strike days.

How long this unity will last remains unclear given the schisms that historically have divided Palestine’s nationalist and Islamist streams before, and especially after, Oslo. On October 26, Islamic Jihad mounted its first independently declared action of the uprising with a suicide attack on an army outpost outside the Gush Qatif settlement in Gaza. Fateh’s present position is to support popular and military actions against the occupation, but to oppose military actions on civilians inside Israel. The November 2 bombing in West Jerusalem, for which Islamic Jihad took responsibility, could strain the national unity forged by the uprising.

The Role of the Larger Arab World:

The third dimension of the uprising is its impact in the Arab world, especially among what had until now been a largely docile Palestinian diaspora. Palestinian refugees led the mass protests in Amman, Damascus, and Lebanon.

Solidarity has not been limited to the Palestinians. For the last month, Egypt has been rocked by the largest and fiercest student protests since the early 1970s. And on October 24, some 25,000 Palestinians and Jordanians staged a massive march on Jordan’s Allenby Bridge, leaving more than 100 wounded in clashes with the Jordanian army.

The first political fruit of this uproar came on October 21 and 22 with the first Arab summit meeting in four years. The meeting was significant in three ways. First, it lent practical and financial support to the uprising. Second, it affirmed that there would be no peace with Israel without the restoration of full Palestinian sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem. Third, the very fact that the meeting was convened under the direct pressure of Arab public opinion (and included Iraq, for the first time in more than a decade) demonstrated that Palestine can still mobilize and unite the Arab world like no other single issue.

Future Direction:

Neither this Israeli government nor any future one (especially if it is led by former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or includes Ariel Sharon) is going to accept an agreement based on the Palestinian and international consensus. Rather, Israel will try to impose by force of arms what it tried to achieve this summer by force of negotiation at Camp David: a unilateral separation from the Palestinian civilian areas in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, a blockade on the Jordan Valley, and annexation of the West Bank settlements in or near Jerusalem.

In such a scenario, it is hard to know how Palestinians could respond other than with a long-term war of national liberation (with or without a declaration of statehood), combining civilian protests and armed struggle, particularly against soldiers and settlers in the Occupied Territories.

Because the Palestinians cannot defeat Israel militarily, the real question is how the world would respond to a unilaterally imposed Israeli “solution” based on military force, apartheid structures, and Palestinian bantustans on about 40 percent of the West Bank and 70 percent of Gaza. Would the United Nations, the European Union, and the Arab states merely condemn Israel? Or would they finally use the enormous diplomatic, economic, and legal weapons at their disposal—including the dispatch of troops to provide international protection for the Palestinians—to force an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines?

Everything about the last 26 years, since the 1973 war, suggests they would do no such thing. Everything about the present Palestinian revolt and Israel’s ruthless repression suggests the alternative is going to be a “Lebanonization” of the conflict inside the Occupied Territories and, perhaps, a regional war beyond them.

Graham Usher is an author and journalist based in the Occupied Territories. The above text may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the author and to the Palestine Center. This Information Brief does not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine or The Jerusalem Fund.

This information first appeared in Information Brief No. 51, 3 November 2000.