Intifada is Arabic for ‘a shaking off’. The term refers to the two Palestinian uprisings on the West Bank and Gaza (the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war). The first intifada arose spontaneously 1987 lasting until 1993 and the second began in 2000. It has been suggested that the emergence of the first intifada was a response to the realization that the Palestinian issue and the Arab-Israeli conflict was slipping as a key concern of Arab governments, and that Palestinians in the Occupied Territories would have to take matters into their own hands. The second intifada, known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, erupted when Ariel Sharon visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque symbolizing a provocative violation of the holy site.
The issue has been whether the Palestinian people of the West Bank and Gaza will be allowed self-determination or autonomy or statehood, or whether these territories will ultimately be incorporated into the state of Israel. The background to this issue goes back to the end of the First World War and the establishment of the authority of Great Britain over the Palestine Mandate with its provision for a national home for the Jews, though not to be at the expense of the local population. The key difficulty was maintaining an appropriate balance between these stipulations that would be acceptable to the parties concerned.
The decades before 1948 saw an inflow of European Jews into the Mandate together with a land-purchasing policy of the Jewish Agency (allowed by Britain) designed to alienate land from the Arabs (i.e. stipulating that it could not be resold to Arabs). Unable to resolve the intensifying conflict between the demands of the Jewish and Arab communities, Great Britain passed responsibility for the Mandate over to the new United Nations which 1947 decided on the partition of Palestine into two states—one for the Jews and another for the Arabs. The stage was set for the settlement of the issue. Instead, in 1948, an Israeli state emerged from the Palestine Mandate at the expense of the founding of a Palestinian state in the process creating 700,000 Palestinian refugees who were either ethnically cleansed or who had left temporarily in fear. Concurrently, the first Arab-Israeli war began ending in an armistice without a peace settlement. The state of Israel was seen, from the Arab point of view, as the last vestige of colonialism remaining in the Arab Middle East. From the Jewish point of view, carving out a state from the Mandate gave European Jews the opportunity to fulfil their nationalist aspirations to have a state of their own. From 1948 onward, Arab governments whether or not Pan-Arab Nationalist in ideology had taken up the Palestinian cause that came to symbolize for the Arab nations of the Middle East the injustices and frustrations engendered by its involvement with the West in recent history.
For the Palestinian people, there was a further complication. Amir Abdullah, the Hashemite ruler of Transjordan, had argued that Palestine and Transjordan should be united under Hashemite rule. He was unable to convince the British government of the desirability of this plan. Unable to achieve this aim, in 1947-8, Abdullah struck a deal with the Zionists that in the event of conflict his forces would occupy and annex the central area of Palestine, i.e., the West Bank, leaving the remainder of Palestine to the Zionists. As a result of this deal and annexation, Transjordan became the state of Jordan and the Amir a king. However, in 1948, no Arab government recognized Jordan's annexation of the West Bank. Nineteen years later, King Hussein of Jordan, the grandson of Abdullah, lost the West Bank to Israeli forces in the June war of 1967. Twenty-one years later, after the Intifada was under way, he relinquished the claim which Jordan and his dynasty had to the territory, paving the way for the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Proclamation of an independent Palestinian state in November 1988. The Gaza Strip results from the Egyptian military being able to hold it 1948 when the armistice was signed. It was later occupied by Israel in the 1967 war.
The first intifada began as a revolt of the Palestinian youth throwing stones against the forces of the Israeli occupation, but became a widespread movement involving civil disobedience with periodic large-scale demonstrations supported by commercial strikes. The response of the Israeli government was brutal repression of the whole population of the Occupied Territories. The persistence of the intifada is believed to have played a part in contributing to the Israeli government's eventual acceptance of direct negotiation with the Palestinians in the Madrid Peace Process launched by Presidents Bush and Gorbachev in October 1991 and, subsequently, its eventual willingness to recognize the PLO in the Oslo Accord of 1993. An autonomous Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza was shakily inaugurated in 1994.
The schedule for implementation of the Oslo Accord eventually broke down particularly after parties were elected in Israel which were hostile to the land for peace principle. The Oslo Accord called for a three-phased Israeli military withdrawal from the Occupied Territories after which there would be Final Status negotiations over the four most difficult items—right of return of refugees, Jerusalem, borders, and Jewish settlements. A series of Interim agreements (before the Final Status talks) then took place resulting in Palestinian authority being established in the main towns of the West Bank and Gaza, each of which were separated by a system of roads patrolled by Israeli forces. This provided Israeli settlements easy access to Israel proper at the same time isolating Palestinian communities from each other. In this way, Israeli settlements acquired a level of security while Palestinian unity was physically fragmented. As this arrangement began to take on an air of permanence and with continued settlement building, land confiscations, daily humiliations at frequent check points, sporadic Palestinian attacks were launched against Israeli settlements and occupying forces, and on occasion within Israel itself.
As a malaise set in resulting from a lack of progress in the Peace Process, the second intifada erupted. This intifada differs in many ways from the first intifada in that the economy of the West Bank and Gaza rapidly collapsed. The violence of the first intifada on the Palestinian side was mainly from stone throwing and only much later some use of small arms. This intifada encouraged the emergence of an Israeli government that was interested in a land for peace settlement of the issues between Israel and the Palestinians. The second intifada, on the other hand, has seen an escalation in the level of violence in which Israel has used its heavy military equipment, tanks, helicopters, missiles, and aircraft as well as snipers. It has targeted leaders of secular and religious groups and others that it has believed a threat, destroyed official buildings of the various security forces, and finally re-entered the towns with tanks to destroy family houses of those who had attacked it and any other buildings which it saw as part of the infrastructure of those attacking it. On the Palestinian side, once the intifada began, there was an escalation of attacks of settlements but more importantly, attacks inside Israel mainly by suicide bombers, not only by religious groups but by secular groups, which occurred in population centres throughout the country. It was believed by the Israeli government that these attacks were orchestrated by Yasir Arafat, the President of the Palestinian Authority. Eventually, in an escalating spiral of violence, the autonomous towns in the West Bank were reoccupied, Arafat was forceably restricted to a few rooms in his Ramallah headquarters until he would call off the Palestinian violence. Essentially, the gap between the two sides had become wider. The Israeli government wanted the violence to stop before negotiations could begin and was unwilling to consider the previous negotiations of Camp David II and the Clinton proposals as still on the table. Yasir Arafat, having lost the full support of the Palestinian population over the long years of what for them seemed fruitless negotiations, was unable to restrain the violence without having something positive to offer from the Israeli government which it was unwilling to give.
— Barbara Allen Roberson
