Arabs (90 page)

B
y December 1987, the people of Gaza had spent twenty years under Israeli occupation. The Gaza Strip is a narrow finger of coastland 25 miles long and 6 miles wide, then populated by about 625,000 Palestinians. The residents of Gaza, three-quarters of whom were refugees from those parts of Palestine conquered by the new state of Israel in 1948, had suffered great isolation between 1948 and 1967. Gazans were confined to their enclave by the Egyptian authorities and cut off from their lost homeland by the hostile frontier with Israel.

With the Israeli occupation of 1967 came new opportunities for Gazans to cross into the rest of historic Palestine and meet the other Palestinians who had remained
on the land—in the towns and cities of Israel and the occupied West Bank. Gaza also enjoyed something of an economic boom after 1967. Under the occupation, Gazans were able to secure jobs in Israel and moved back and forth across the border with relative ease. Israelis shopped in Gaza to take advantage of tax-free prices. In many ways, life for the residents of Gaza had improved under Israeli rule.

Yet no people is happy under occupation, and the Palestinians aspired to independence in their own land. But their hopes for deliverance by the other Arab states were dashed when Egypt concluded a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, and their hopes for liberation at the hands of the PLO collapsed after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon dispersed Palestinian fighting units across the Arab world.

Increasingly, over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Palestinians within Gaza and the West Bank began to confront the occupation themselves. The Israeli government recorded an escalation of “illegal acts” in the West Bank alone, rising from 656 “disturbances” in 1977 to 1,556 in 1981 and 2,663 in 1984.
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Resistance within the occupied territory provoked heavy Israeli reprisals: mass arrests, intimidation, torture, humiliation. A proud people, the Palestinians found the humiliation hardest to bear. The loss of dignity and self-respect was compounded by the knowledge that their occupier saw them, in the words of the Islamist intellectual Azzam Tamimi, as “sub-human and not worthy of respect.”
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Worse yet, Palestinians felt complicit in their own subjugation through their cooperation with the Israeli occupation. The fact that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were taking jobs in Israel and attracting Israeli customers to their shops implicated them in the occupation. Given that the Israelis were engaged in land confiscation and settlement building on occupied Palestinian land, cooperation with the Israelis felt more like collaboration. As the Palestinian scholar and activist Sari Nusseibeh explained, “The contradiction of using Israeli paint to scribble our anti-occupation graffiti was becoming so insufferable as to make an explosion inevitable.”
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The explosion finally came in December 1987, sparked by a traffic accident near the Erez checkpoint in northern Gaza. On December 8 an Israeli army truck drove into two minivans carrying Palestinian workers home from Israel, killing four and wounding seven. Rumors spread throughout the Palestinian community that the killing was deliberate, raising tension in the territories. The funerals were held the next day and were followed by major demonstrations, which Israel troops dispersed with live fire, killing demonstrators.

The killings on December 9 sparked riots that spread like wildfire across Gaza and into the West Bank, rapidly transforming into a popular uprising against twenty years of Israeli occupation. The Palestinians called their movement the “Intifada,” an Arabic word that means both an uprising and a dusting off, as though the Palestinians were shaking off the decades of accumulated humiliation through direct confrontation with the occupation.

The Intifada began as an uncoordinated series of confrontations with the Israeli authorities. The demonstrators ruled out the use of weapons and declared their movement nonviolent, stone-throwing notwithstanding. The Israeli authorities responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. Israeli forces killed twenty-two demonstrators before the end of December 1987. Instead of quelling the violence, Israeli repression only served to accelerate the cycle of ad hoc protests and confrontations.

In the opening weeks of the Intifada, there was no central leadership. Instead, the movement developed through a series of spontaneous demonstrations across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As Sari Nusseibeh recalled, it was a grass-roots movement in which “every demonstrator did what he thought best, and the more established leaders raced to catch up with him.”
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Two underground organizations emerged to give direction to the Intifada. In the West Bank, the local branches of the PLO factions, including Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, the Popular and the Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Communists, combined to create an underground leadership that called itself the United National Command (UNC). In Gaza, Islamists associated with the Muslim Brotherhood created the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. The strength of Israeli repression made it impossible for these underground leaderships to meet or exercise their authority in open. Instead, they each published periodic leaflets—one series of leaflets by Hamas, and a totally independent series of communiqués by the UNC—to set out their objectives and to guide public action. The leaflets of the United National Command and Hamas were calls to action and news sheets. They also captured the increasingly bitter struggle between the secular nationalist forces of the PLO and the rising Islamist movement for control of the Palestinian national movement within the Occupied Territories.

The Muslim Brotherhood was the best-organized political movement in the Gaza Strip and was the first to respond to the popular uprising. Its leader was a paraplegic activist in his mid-fifties named Shaykh Ahmad Yassin. Like so many of its residents, Yassin had come to Gaza as a refugee in 1948. Paralyzed in a work accident as a teenager, he had continued his education to become a school teacher and religious leader. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s, becoming a great admirer of Sayyid Qutb, whose works he reprinted and circulated to reach the widest possible readership in Gaza. In the mid-1970s he established a charitable organization named the Islamic Center, through which he funded new mosques, schools, and clinics across Gaza that provided a network for the spread of Islamist values.

On December 9, 1987, the night the troubles broke out, Yassin convened a meeting of the leaders of the Brotherhood to coordinate action. They decided to transform the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza into a resistance movement, and Hamas was launched with their first leaflet on December 14.

The novelty of Hamas was to articulate Palestinian aspirations in strictly Islamist terms. From its first communiqué, Hamas set out an intransigent message that combined confrontation with the Jewish state and a rejection of secular Arab nationalism. “Only Islam can break the Jews and destroy their dream,” Hamas insisted. Following the arguments of Abdullah ’Azzam, who made the case for jihad in both Afghanistan and Palestine, the Palestinian Islamists declared their resistance against the foreign occupier on Islamic land rather than against authoritarian Arab leaders, as Sayyid Qutb advocated. “When an enemy occupies some of the Muslim lands,” Hamas asserted in its 1988 charter, “Jihad becomes obligatory for every Muslim. In the struggle against the Jewish occupation of Palestine, the banner of Jihad must be raised.”
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Though they were secular nationalists as had dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s, there was something new about the Unified National Command as well. For the first time, local activists in the West Bank were putting forward their own views without consulting Arafat and the leadership in exile. In the West Bank, the UNC issued its first communiqué shortly after the Hamas leaflet was released. Sari Nusseibeh recalled that the first UNC leaflet was authored by “two local PLO activists” who “were already in jail by the time their flyers hit the streets,” arrested by the Israeli authorities in a massive clampdown. The leaflet called for a three-day general strike—a total economic close-down of the Occupied Territories—and warned against attempts to break the strike or cooperate with the Israelis.

The UNC continued to issue newsletters every couple of weeks (it issued thirty-one in the first year of the Intifada alone) in which the group began to articulate a series of demands: an end to land expropriation and to the creation of Israeli settlements on occupied land, the release of Palestinians from Israeli prisons, and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Palestinian towns and villages. The leaflets encouraged people to fly the Palestinian flag, which the Israelis had long forbidden, and to chant “Down with the occupation!” and “Long live free Arab Palestine!” The UNC’s ultimate objective was an independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.
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The Intifada was quickly turning into an independence movement.

The outbreak of the Intifada caught the PLO leadership in Tunis completely by surprise. Recognized by all Palestinians as their “sole legitimate representative,” the PLO had long monopolized the Palestinian national movement. Now the initiative had passed from the “outside” leadership in Tunis to “inside” PLO activists working in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The distinction between “insiders” and “outsiders” put the PLO leadership at a distinct disadvantage. Suddenly, Arafat and his lieutenants looked redundant as the residents of Gaza and the West Bank launched their own bid for an independent Palestinian state.

In January 1988 Arafat moved to bring the Intifada under the PLO’s authority. He dispatched one of Fatah’s highest-ranking commanders, Khalil al-Wazir (better known by his nom de guerre Abu Jihad), to coordinate action between Tunis and
the West Bank. The UNC’s third leaflet of January 18, 1988, was the first to be authorized by the Fatah leadership in Tunis. Within a matter of hours, over 100,000 copies of the leaflet were distributed across Gaza and the West Bank. The residents of the Occupied Territories responded to the authoritative voice of Arafat’s political machine with alacrity. As Sari Nusseibeh observed, “it was like watching musicians take cues from a conductor.”
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Henceforth the Intifada would be managed by Arafat and his officials.

The Israeli government was determined to prevent the PLO from taking advantage of the Intifada to make political gains at Israel’s expense. Abu Jihad’s mission was cut short by Israeli assassins, who gunned down the PLO official at his home in Tunisia on April 16, 1988. Yet once the link between the UNC and PLO had been forged, Tunis was able to preserve its control over the secular forces of the Intifada.

The cycle of strikes and demonstrations, called in response to leaflets issued by the UNC and Hamas, continued unabated. The Israeli authorities had expected the movement to run out of steam. Instead, it seemed to be gaining in strength and posed a genuine challenge to Israeli control in the Occupied Territories. As the Intifada entered its third month, the Israeli authorities turned to extra-legal means to quell the uprising. Drawing on the Emergency Regulations drafted by British mandate officials long before the Geneva Conventions established international legal standards for the treatment of civilians under occupation, the Israeli army resorted to collective punishments such as mass arrests, detention without charge, and house demolitions.

International public opinion was appalled by the image of heavily armed soldiers responding to stone-throwing demonstrators with live fire, prompting Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s defense minister, to order the use of “might, force and beatings” instead of lethal fire. The brutality of this seemingly benign policy was exposed when the CBS television network in the United States broadcast images of Israeli soldiers meting out horrific beatings to Palestinian youths near Nablus in February 1988. In one particularly graphic segment, a soldier was seen to extend a prisoner’s arm and pound it repeatedly from above with a large rock to break the bone.
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Israel’s attorney general admonished Rabin to warn his soldiers of the illegality of such acts, but the Israeli army continued to subject Palestinian demonstrators to violent beatings. Over thirty Palestinians were beaten to death in the first year of the Intifada.
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Against this background of Israeli violence, it is remarkable that the Palestinians preserved the tactics of nonviolent resistance. Palestinian claims to nonviolence were challenged by Israeli authorities, who noted that protestors threw iron bars and Molotov cocktails as well as stones—missiles capable of inflicting serious injury or death. Yet the Palestinians never resorted to firearms in their confrontations with the Israelis, which did much to reverse decades of Western public opinion that had portrayed the Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as a beleaguered David figure. Israel
found itself in the unaccustomed position of dispelling a distinct Goliath image in the international press.