16

1987

‘This is a government with a heart of plastic, a brain of lead and a conscience of rubber. The whole world knows that the stone of the Palestinian David is defeating the oppression of the Israeli Goliath.’

Muhammad Miari1

‘THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS’

In the spring of 1987, the Israeli civil administration of Judaea and Samaria and the Gaza District published a glossy colour brochure to mark twenty years of its work. Its front cover was pleasantly pastoral, a photograph of a field of golden wheat with a typical hilltop Arab village in the background, simple stone houses clustered round a mosque. The booklet showcased clinics, housing and schools as well as statistics illustrating advances in employment, industry and agriculture. As Shmuel Goren, the government’s co-ordinator of operations in the territories, noted in the Introduction, Israel’s policy

was based clearly and consistently on two principles: an all-out war against terrorism which has been or is supported by a small minority, and maximal liberalisation and investment in development of living conditions for those members of the population who condemn terrorist acts and incitement and who want to live their lives in peace and tranquillity until such time as a political solution can be found.

The word ‘Palestinian’ appeared just once in its 110 pages – and that, tellingly, was with reference to refugee resettlement. Nablus was referred to by its biblical Hebrew name, Shechem. Goren expressed his ‘deepest gratitude’ to the civil administration staff, adding: ‘I am sure the population in the areas join me in thanking them.’2

The twentieth anniversary of the Six Days war provoked many publications as well as more profound reflection on both sides of the old green line. In Israel there was less emphasis than usual on the grave dangers the country had faced in 1967 and its triumphant, near-miraculous victory, and more about repression in what most Israelis now referred to simply as ‘the territories’ (shtahim). Most still knew little about them or their inhabitants, beyond shopping trips on Saturdays to Tulkarem or Bethlehem, repairing their cars in cheap Palestinian garages, visiting a dentist, or employing Palestinian builders to work on their homes. Novelist David Grossman, a rising literary star, wrote a series of articles that he turned into a book, The Yellow Wind, which became a surprise bestseller that summer. Grossman described the lives of Palestinians he met in the West Bank: kindergarten children in a refugee camp; a mother pleading for her child’s favourite doll not to be confiscated in a security check; Jewish settlers declaring their God-given right to what they unfailingly called Judaea and Samaria. Grossman’s focus was the daily humiliations of Palestinian life under military rule, as well as the moral price this was exacting from his own people: without an end to occupation, the country would face the legendary burning ‘yellow wind’ that blows up from hell every few generations and devours all those in its path. ‘Its appeal for many Israelis was that Grossman made them feel that he had undertaken the trip to the West Bank that each of them should have taken but knew they would never take’, commented the philosopher Avishai Margalit. Grossman did not predict that an uprising was imminent. But he did paint an unusually detailed and bleak picture of a reality most Jews knew little about.³ His final chapter was titled ‘The first 20 years’. It was hardly an optimistic choice, but it was a prescient one.

On the Palestinian side an entire generation had grown up by 1987 without knowing anything other than life under Israeli rule. Jonathan Kuttab, a lawyer, marked the anniversary of the naksa in an article in al-Fajr: ‘Palestinians count only on themselves and their fellow Palestinians in the Diaspora. Young Palestinians today make up their own minds, independently of parents and community leaders.’4 Yunis, a young man from East Jerusalem, explained what was different:

My father was in his 20s in 1967. ‘People benefited from the occupation, at least at first,’ he told us. ‘The Jordanians had put a lot of pressure on us, and wouldn’t let anything happen. Then the Israelis came and let us work in Israel. Suddenly there was more money. No-one wanted to revolt. It didn’t mean that we liked Israel. Things did get worse in the 1980s. When the Likud came to power, pressure built up, so the younger generation didn’t see things the same way that the fathers did.’⁵

Israelis agreed: ‘Palestinians had changed’, said one knowledgeable observer. ‘They spoke a different language than their parents, let alone their grandparents, and railed at them for their submissiveness during two decades of Israeli rule, and for shirking their national duty to rise up against the occupiers.’⁶ Economic conditions were deteriorating too: the number of jobs available locally was declining, especially for the growing number of university graduates; some 40 per cent of the total Palestinian workforce was now employed in Israel. Remittances from the Gulf had also dropped sharply in the preceding years as oil revenues went into sharp decline.⁷ The occupation was now part of ordinary Palestinian life, especially in East Jerusalem. ‘Israel is not simply the Knesset’, Bir Zeit professor Sari Nusseibeh argued in June 1987.

Israel is … the long queues of women standing in front of the post office in Jerusalem to collect their social security … Israel is the business licences, the building permits, the identity cards. It is the value-added taxes, the income taxes, the television licences … It is also Dedi Zucker, Meron Benvenisti, Yehuda Litani and Amnon Zichroni [Israeli peace activists, journalists and lawyers] commiserating with Palestinians at the National Palace Hotel. Israel is the Tambour [Israeli] paint used to scribble slogans attacking Hanna Siniora [a prominent Palestinian newspaper editor] on the walls.⁸

No one imagined that the conflict was over, though the preceding few months had seen a decline in the level of violence in the occupied territories. On 25 November 1987, however, an unusually serious incident occurred. A Palestinian from the Syrian-backed PFLP-General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril, flew a motorized hang-glider to an Israeli base in Galilee, just south of the Lebanese border, and managed to kill six soldiers before he was shot down. Palestinian media praised ‘a heroic operation which destroyed the myth of Israeli defences’.9 This helped create ‘the perception that the IDF was not invincible, and concomitantly, engendered an image of a new Palestinian hero’.¹⁰ Israeli soldiers were taunted by Palestinians chanting the score: ‘6–1’. In Amman, however, an Arab summit conference, preoccupied with mediation efforts to end the bloody grind of the Iran–Iraq war, then in its seventh year, had little to say about the Palestinian issue. And alone among the leaders attending, Yasser Arafat had not been received by King Hussein on arrival. ‘Not only, then, was the Palestine problem ignored in the international arena, it did not even command the attention of the Arab “brothers”’, one analyst noted.¹¹

GAZA FIRST

On 8 December, near the Erez checkpoint at the northern end of the Gaza Strip, close to Jabaliya refugee camp, an Israeli truck crashed into two taxis bringing Palestinian workers home from Israel. Four were killed and seven seriously injured. Rumours quickly spread that this was no accident but a revenge attack, that the driver of the truck was the brother of an Israeli salesman who had been stabbed to death two days earlier in Gaza City. It was not true, as the Fatah activist who deliberately spread the story admitted later.¹² In any event, during the following days the funerals of three of the victims triggered demonstrations in which IDF soldiers were met by a barrage of petrol bombs, stones and iron bars; in Jabaliya seventeen-year-old Hatem al-Sissi was killed and scores injured by live army fire.¹³ Thus began the most widespread and sustained disturbances seen in twenty years of occupation.

Unrest spread quickly. Another Palestinian was killed the next day in Nablus when an army patrol was attacked by youths throwing stones and iron bars. Four more died the day after that in Balata, the area’s biggest refugee camp, two of them eleven-year-old boys. Underlining the seriousness of the situation General Amram Mitzna, the West Bank military commander, rushed to the scene and conferred with senior officers and armed Israeli civilians who looked like Shin Bet officers to the journalists arriving to cover what was rapidly becoming a big story. In the city’s al-Ittihad hospital, three young men with bullet wounds in their legs lay dazed and shivering, the road outside blocked by burning tyres and rubble. Others, faces masked in keffiyehs, grasped rocks and bottles in case the Israelis came. By the end of the first week there were seven dead; fifteen after a fortnight. Palestinians were soon talking of an intifada, a popular uprising against Israeli rule. The word – used to describe anti-British protests in Iraq in the 1920s – promoted the kind of semantic debate beloved of Arabists. Its root meant ‘to shake off’ – passivity, inertia, outmoded ideas, foreign occupation. It did not require academic expertise to see that something unusual was happening.

‘One should expect such things after 20 years of miserable occupation,’ said the former mayor of Gaza, Rashad al-Shawwa. ‘The people have lost all hope. They are absolutely frustrated. They don’t know what to do. They have lost hope that Israel will ever give them their rights. They feel that the Arab countries are unable to accomplish anything. They feel that the PLO, which they regarded as their representative, had failed to accomplish anything.’14 Palestinians and Israelis alike were struck by the spontaneity of the outburst. ‘Even the local grassroots committees, activists and leaders were caught off guard’, wrote Sari Nusseibeh. The Israeli civil administration tried persuading local mukhtars to use their influence to end the violence, to no avail. Mass arrests failed to calm things down. In Tunis, the PLO leadership was just as surprised. Abu Jihad told Arafat that this outbreak of resistance was unplanned. ‘When the intifada broke out we were afraid’, Abu Iyad admitted later. ‘We remembered that the 1936 uprising lasted only six months. At the start we didn’t estimate that the intifada would last beyond six months.’¹⁵ Indeed, a statement issued by the PFLP to mark the twentieth anniversary of its founding made no mention of the protests in the occupied territories several days after they began.¹⁶ Yitzhak Rabin, the defence minister, who was visiting the US in the second week of the unrest, kept pointing out that the PLO had been taken aback by the spontaneous eruption, as if that excused Israel’s surprise and discomfort. Ariel Sharon, now back in public life as minister of trade, threw a lavish housewarming party at his new home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City to underline the ‘deteriorating security situation’ – and to make a none-too-subtle bid to replace Rabin.17

Nameless Palestinians kept up the momentum of protests. ‘We don’t have a timetable, but we already have a custom, waves of people going out at 3 in the morning, at midday, early evening’, related an anonymous Gazan activist.

From the evening until 3am we sleep and organise. Sometimes … we even go out at 10pm because during the night the army doesn’t effectively control the streets and doesn’t know the local topography, so we are in control. For instance … in Jabaliya, there were demonstrations all night and there was not a single soldier, even though there was a curfew. The soldiers simply fled, because thousands of people formed a sort of moving human wall and nothing will work against something like that, neither an iron fist nor bullets.¹⁸

Israeli soldiers in Gaza described going out in armoured personnel carriers (APCs) to clear a road of burning tyres when they were suddenly stormed by hundreds of Palestinians with bricks, iron bars and petrol bombs. ‘The soldiers started firing into the air and then they used gas grenades. But it didn’t help. The Arabs stormed the APCs like a swarm of bees and when one of the soldiers got a rock in the face they had no choice but to fire,’ said one. ‘Two demonstrators were killed and several wounded.’ Palestinians quickly noticed how the Israelis had been surprised. ‘An old woman told me that she saw that the Israeli soldiers were afraid of demonstrators for the first time’, a journalist reported. ‘There’s a strange joy. Those who die, people will remember for ever. We used to call this sort of thing a strike, but that word is too small. Then we would call it a demonstration but that’s too small too. This is something different. It’s an intifada.’¹⁹

GUIDING WORDS

Over the next few weeks more centralized guidance and co-ordination became evident, though it remained clandestine to avoid arrest by the Israelis and to avoid upstaging the PLO. Spontaneous actions were transformed into organized ones that sustained and expanded the scope of the uprising. On 8 January 1988, a month into the unrest, an Arabic-language leaflet appeared calling for a three-day general strike. It was signed by ‘Palestinian nationalist forces’ and was the work of Fatah and DFLP activists who included a journalist, a Christian priest and a university lecturer. A second followed days later, this time signed by the United National Command for the Escalation of the Uprising. The third, on 18 January, was signed by the PLO/United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) – thus uniting Palestinians ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Using the same terminology, leaflets (bayan/bayanat in Arabic) appeared at roughly ten-day intervals after that, numbered sequentially from three onwards. Typically they called for protests and strikes, an end to the occupation, boycotts of Israeli goods and the resignation of policemen and other officials employed by Israel. Many referenced famous figures in Palestinian history – Sheikh Izzedin al-Qassam, Abdul-Qader al-Husseini – or significant dates, ranging from the Balfour Declaration to the Nakba. ‘Reactionary’ peace initiatives by Israel, the US or Jordan were attacked. Forty-three more leaflets had appeared by the end of 1989. Others were issued regularly by Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, a newcomer to the Palestinian political scene. The bayanat were composed centrally but their content transmitted by phone or fax to be typed up or printed in different places.20 Occasionally the Israelis would raid a printing shop and confiscate its presses and leaflets or the Shin Bet would produce their own fake ones to sow doubts and confusion. Leaflets of dubious provenance that accused prominent figures of embezzling funds or involvement in personal disputes were dismissed as psychological warfare by the Israelis. Militants were warned not to issue leaflets under any name other than the UNLU to ‘block the enemy’s attempts … to split … national ranks and sow confusion and mutual suspicions’.²¹ In Nablus, printers were ordered to hand over samples of their inks to help identify who was behind the leaflets.²² Distribution, however, came to matter less, since the Israeli media took to reporting the contents of the leaflets the moment they appeared. Two leaflets were printed in Nazareth and the Triangle area with the help of Israeli-Arab sympathizers.²³

By the first week of 1988 the IDF had doubled its forces in the West Bank and tripled them in the Gaza Strip. Gaza City was festooned with miniature Palestinian flags that hung from electricity poles; the streets were covered in stones and the air reeked of burning tyres and the acrid residue of tear gas. It looked and felt like a war zone. Israeli efforts to defuse the violence expanded to include plans for mass expulsions of ‘leading activists in terrorist organizations’, starting with nine key mid-echelon figures, including Jibril Rajoub, targeted ‘because of their very presence here and the effect of their views and personalities on their supporters and admirers amongst the young generation that has not yet graduated from the university of the revolution’.24 International criticism of these moves – banned under the Geneva Conventions – was ignored by Israel. On 21 January Rabin reportedly announced a policy of ‘force, might and beatings’ as an alternative to using live and rubber bullets and tear gas – after angry cabinet exchanges between the Likud and Labour wings of the unity government about the continuing unrest. The justification was brutally simple: ‘A detainee sent to prison will be freed in 18 days unless the authorities have enough evidence to charge him,’ a military source explained. ‘He may then resume stoning. But if troops break his hand he won’t be able to throw stones for a month and a half.’ Near Nablus an American television crew filmed four Israeli soldiers systematically beating and breaking the arms of two bound Palestinians; two of the soldiers were later sentenced to short prison terms but one of them told Israel TV that the incident was a routine one. Palestinian labourers from Gaza refused to work for a Tel Aviv wood merchant who received an order from the IDF for 10,000 lacquered boxwood batons.²⁵ By the end of February the Palestinians counted 80 dead and 650 injured.

CHILDREN OF THE STONES

Part of the novelty of the intifada was the role of Palestinian children, organized into groups with specific tasks. Small children poured petrol on tyres and set them alight, older ones placed large rocks on roads to block traffic or made and used homemade slings. Teenagers took on a command role, working with spotters to identify cars and movements of soldiers. ‘To throw a stone is to be “one of the guys”; to hit an Israeli car is to become a hero; and to be arrested and not confess to having done anything is to be a man,’ explained the journalist Daoud Kuttab.

They stand at an elevated point and direct the stone throwers as to when and how far to retreat when the soldiers advance. They decide on the moment of a countercharge, which is carried out with loud screams and a shower of stones. The leaders know the range of the Israeli weapons and are able to differentiate between rubber bullets and real bullets … Leaders also seem to have the ability to determine whether soldiers plan to shoot in the air or at the demonstrators.26

These ‘children of the stones’ – immortalized in a work by the famous Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani – were a powerful personification of Palestinian resistance, and a neat reversal of the traditional ‘David versus Goliath’ image that Israel had once cultivated and enjoyed. They attracted intense international media attention, which was uncomfortable for the Israelis. In areas that were closed off to the press when the IDF imposed curfews or declared a military zone, Palestinian activists provided videotapes of Israeli actions that looked brutal on TV. ‘The Palestinians’, Anton Shammas said of Rabin, ‘should be deeply grateful to the man who brought the conflict to its real, simple dimensions: either peace or a struggle over land (not to mention his offering the best television exposure the “Palestinian cause” has ever had).’²⁷ Using stones as a weapon, ‘was a reversion to an Islamic stance: rajm or throwing stones against evil spirits is what pilgrims to Mecca do from the top of a mountain’, explained another Palestinian commentator.²⁸ ‘The stone is sacred,’ exhorted Sawt al-Quds, a clandestine radio station that began broadcasting from southern Syria, ‘use it well.’²⁹ Stone-throwing became ‘the renowned international signifier’ of the intifada.³⁰

Comparisons were often made with the great rebellion of the second half of the 1930s, which became a touchstone for heroism and sacrifice, largely absent from the harsher memory of 1948. The appeal of the intifada was that it was led by an alliance of different social classes and interests, rather than a semi-feudal elite, so that it was characterized ‘by greater national unity and political savvy’.³¹ Mass-mobilization was another striking element. Distinctions of gender, class and age were broken down. ‘In Ramallah, a middle-aged professional woman, after watching demonstrations on television for a month, eagerly joins a group of young boys building a roadblock; in a Gaza hospital a 100-year-old woman, her hand broken by soldiers, toothlessly murmurs defiance to the applause of other beating victims in surrounding beds.’32 Israeli prosecutors joked that it was easier to catch overweight middle-aged Palestinians, bystanders who did not take part in demonstrations, than younger ones who did.³³ After years of passivity, there was a heightened awareness of the importance of involvement, urged on by the language of resistance employed by the UNLU. ‘The uprising has created a new way of daily life, economically and socially’, declared leaflet No. 15 in April 1988. ‘Your way of life derives from the fact that the uprising is a lengthy and protracted revolutionary process that entails hardships, victims and a reduced income. But it has produced achievements that have deepened national unity amongst all segments of our people.’³⁴ These morale-boosting messages were highly effective. ‘Smuggling food into the refugee camps and the creation of voluntary popular committees in streets and neighbourhoods is more important than the violence’, argued a leading radical. ‘People have gone beyond ideology and have come down to the practical issues. They have learned that dependence is a two-way street and become much more aware of their ability to harm Israel.’³⁵

STRIKING FACTS

Repeated strike days took their toll on both the Israeli and Palestinian economies. In normal times, 120,000 men from the West Bank and Gaza worked across the green line (providing 7 per cent of the entire Israeli workforce). Attacks on buses and other forms of intimidation meant problems for the kitchens, garages and building sites of the Tel Aviv area. One enterprising dishwasher salesman seized the opportunity to try to persuade a restaurant owner to finally buy a machine, since the usual Arab staff had stayed away en masse. On the eve of May Day 1988, Palestinians were urged to ‘boycott completely work in Zionist settlements’ and find substitutes for work inside the green line. On another occasion a leaflet warned Palestinians ‘not to submit to the pressures of Zionist factories to sleep over inside the green line on the eve of strikes, ostensibly out of concern for their lives in case of revenge, as happened to three of our workers from Gaza’.36 Underlining the importance of the issue, the IDF published daily figures on the numbers of Palestinians who were still coming to work as usual despite the drastically changed circumstances.

Attacks on collaborators were another feature of these turbulent times. Names of Palestinians suspected of working with the Israelis were broadcast on Sawt al-Quds, although many, especially in rural areas, were already well known, and disappeared, sometimes to be given weapons or relocated by their handlers in the Shin Bet or the military to an old Jordanian army camp near Jenin. A seedy hotel on Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Street, near the US embassy, became a temporary bolt-hole for some of the more valuable collaborators before they were relocated with new identities abroad. Late February saw the killing of Mohammed Ayad, who had a rare gun licence issued by the Israelis. He was hanged in Qabatiyeh after killing a four-year-old child and injuring thirteen others who were marching on his home.³⁷ The act was praised in a leaflet as ‘a lesson to those who betray their country and their people’.³⁸ Another leaflet gave out the addresses of collaborators and urged the ‘shock squads’ to ‘continue purging the internal front of the filth of those who sold their soul and honour to the occupation and betrayed their people and their homeland’.³⁹ In September a spate of killings – victims included a petty criminal involved in land deals and another man who had been an informer in prison – appeared to reflect successes by the Shin Bet, which had been caught off guard in the first months of the intifada but had since been able to rebuild its network of informers. Collaborator killings were one of the features of the uprising that led to comparisons with the darker side of the great rebellion of 1936–39.

By the time the intifada marked its hundredth day, some one hundred Palestinians had been killed. Israel suffered its first intifada fatality at the same time when a soldier was shot in Bethlehem. Momentum was maintained on 30 March when Palestinian Israelis came out en masse to mark the anniversary of Land Day, expressing solidarity with their kinfolk – UNLU leaflet No. 11 was dedicated to the occasion. But the police stayed away from protests inside Israel – a marked contrast between operating procedures on the different sides of the green line. In Bartaa, half in Israel, half in the West Bank, the Israeli side remained calm while the intifada raged a few hundred yards away.40

If they were disoriented by the novel challenge of mass rebellion, the Israelis found it easier to fight the more familiar clandestine war against the PLO. In February, Mossad agents planted a bomb in a car that killed three PLO officials in Limassol, Cyprus. The three were officers of the ‘occupied homeland command’ who were involved in planning attacks⁴¹ and had been deported from Jordan under US pressure.⁴² The next day a limpet mine disabled a Greek passenger ferry that Palestinian activists had planned to sail to Haifa in support of the intifada – and to echo the Jewish refugee ships that ran the British naval blockade in the late 1940s. Retaliation came quickly: in March three Palestinian gunmen who crossed the border from Egypt hijacked a bus travelling to the Dimona nuclear plant and were killed after shooting three unarmed civilians. Next month the Israelis struck again – spectacularly.

LONG ARM, LONG BURST

In a combined IDF–Mossad operation special forces were sent all the way to Tunis to assassinate Arafat’s military commander, Khalil al-Wazir, universally known as Abu Jihad. Wazir was targeted because he was responsible for the occupied territories and was believed by Israel to be the key link between the organization and the intifada, providing it with financial and logistical support and political guidance on the basis of detailed knowledge of local conditions. ‘Abu Jihad became the manager, the brain in exile, of the spontaneous movement,’ commented a Palestinian admirer. ‘Hard-working, methodical and selfless, he was the right choice.’⁴³ Israelis remembered him for planning the Coastal Road massacre of 1978.⁴⁴ ‘On the strategic level’, observed two well-connected Israeli experts, ‘the elimination of Abu Jihad was almost incidental to the intifada and certainly did not extricate the army from the difficult pass in which it was caught in the territories.’45 And following the killing, protests erupted in which at least sixteen Palestinians were killed by army gunfire – the intifada’s worst single day of violence to date – while curfews were imposed over almost the entire West Bank. It was almost twenty-five years before Israel would admit responsibility for the Abu Jihad assassination by allowing publication of a long-censored interview with the officer who ‘fired a long burst’ that killed him in his Tunis villa as his wife watched in horror.⁴⁶ Palestinian accounts of the aftermath suggest that Wazir’s death allowed Arafat to establish closer personal control of what was happening in the occupied territories.⁴⁷ By early May, when the uprising was six months old, the toll was 180 dead and 7,500 detained, many in harsh conditions at the recently opened Ketziot detention camp in the Negev, nicknamed Ansar III after prison facilities used by the Israelis in Lebanon. But there was no sign that steam was going out of now-routine protests, or that Israeli counter-measures were proving any more effective.

Elements of the crackdown verged on the absurd: Jad Ishaq, an agronomist from Bethlehem University, was warned by the civil administration when he teamed up with colleagues to sell seeds and agricultural equipment and dispense advice on ‘backyard farming’. A craze for kitchen gardening saw middle-aged Palestinian housewives hoeing barren patches of land, in line with UNLU calls for economic self-sufficiency and boycotts of Israeli goods. When a Hebrew magazine ran a story about it, it was headlined ‘RABIN VERSUS THE CUCUMBER’. Efforts were made to produce ‘intifada milk’ from eighteen cows bought from an Israeli kibbutz. But when the army tried to impound the animals they were hidden in Bet Sahour, including at the home of the local butcher. Years later the story was retold in an animated film.⁴⁸ Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian-American psychologist, was credited with inspiring acts of non-violent resistance to the occupation.

Palestinian spokesmen exuded pride and defiance during this period. ‘If the Israelis say that the Palestinians are tired, they are not wrong’, argued a leading PLO supporter.

But the Israelis are more tired than we are. I do believe that the uprising has taken on new forms. There is a deep belief we must minimise our dependence on the Israelis. We know we can’t break it. In the popular committees, in the alternative systems we are creating more awareness of the possibility of being under occupation. This is the ingenuity of the intifada.

Such confidence, however, sometimes seemed exaggerated: the resignation of Palestinians serving with the Israeli police was not followed by the departure of 18,000 others employed by the civil administration.49

As this war of attrition continued on the ground, the political consequences began to be apparent. In June, at an emergency summit conference in Algiers, Arab leaders pledged ‘all possible support’ for the intifada, as well as an additional $23 million per month, to be exclusively controlled by the PLO, which meant a weakening of Jordan’s role. It also endorsed the creation of an independent Palestinian state. That was a striking contrast to the previous Arab summit in Amman, when the Palestinian issue had been all but ignored. In late July King Hussein, irritated and weary, announced his ‘disengagement’ from the West Bank. This involved dissolving the lower house of the Jordanian parliament and ending representation for people living under occupation. It also halted Jordan’s $1.3 billion development plan for the West Bank (though by late 1987 it had spent only $11.7 million on projects, partly because of difficulties raising money from Gulf donors).⁵⁰ Jordan had accepted at the 1974 Rabat summit that the PLO was the ‘sole legitimate representative’ of the Palestinian people, though its stances, not least a long history of clandestine contacts with Israel, had long belied that formal position. Mutual suspicions remained strong. Now, even if the king’s men were deeply sceptical about the prospects of Arafat entering negotiations in the face of determined American and Israeli opposition, it was clear that Jordan would not provide the Israelis with a solution. Hussein did not consult the PLO, which was caught off guard, fearing a trap. Arafat, however, began to think hard about how to respond.⁵¹ But the idea of change was in the air. Bassam Abu Sharif, one of his closest advisers – and a man with a flair for publicity – had already floated the notion of direct negotiations with Israel that summer.⁵² In East Jerusalem, Fatah’s Faisal Husseini had been in contact with Israeli doves exploring dialogue with the PLO before and after being released from administrative detention. Husseini had drawn up a document calling for a unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence within the boundaries established by the UN in November 1947 – which was flatly rejected at the time by Palestinian leaders.

Israel’s general election in October 1988 was fought against the background of continuing unrest. The intifada did not, however, figure prominently in the campaign because both Labour and Likud, unwilling partners in the national unity government, were jointly responsible for policy. Rabin boasted that he had killed and gaoled and expelled more Arabs than any Likud defence minister. Even the most hawkish Likud minister – Ariel Sharon – found it hard to attack Rabin on the grounds of being ‘soft’ on Arabs. On the eve of the poll, a young Israeli woman and her three infant children were burned to death when Palestinians threw petrol bombs at a bus on the outskirts of Jericho. It was the worst single attack on civilians since the intifada began. Unlike the 300 or so Palestinian deaths at the hands of the Israeli security forces, it brought home to Israeli Jews the human cost of the conflict. Likud supporters seized the opportunity. ‘Hawatmeh, Habash, Arafat and Jibril and all the other PLO terrorists will be waiting in their lairs … wavering between hope and fear – hope for a victory after which Shimon Peres will return Israel to the 1967 borders, and fear that the Likud under Yitzhak Shamir will triumph and stand firm,’ warned one candidate.53 The election saw losses for Labour and significant gains for religious parties – and the creation of another unity coalition, this time led by the Likud. Lesser gains were also recorded by the small peace camp. Israel’s Palestinian challenge remained the number one problem facing the country.

A STATE IS BORN

Even before the new Israeli government was formed, the PLO marked a great leap forward, building on the gains and the sacrifices of the intifada. It understood that it needed to fill the vacuum left by Jordan’s disengagement and pre-empt possible annexation by Israel – as well as signal a change to the US.54 On 15 November 1988 the Palestine National Council convened in Algiers for a meeting that was named grandly ‘the session of the intifada and independence, the session of the martyred hero Abu Jihad’. Arafat formally announced the creation of a state of Palestine – four decades since the creation of Israel and the Nakba. It was a landmark moment and the document rose to the occasion, politically, legally and emotionally. Written by Mahmoud Darwish, the widely admired Palestinian ‘poet laureate’, the declaration referenced the UN partition resolution of November 1947. It did not explicitly recognize Israel, though an accompanying document made reference to UN Resolution 242, which had always been seen as implying recognition. It embodied the notion of independence alongside Israel, for better or worse. And for some dejected veterans it was nothing less than an act of surrender: ‘Thank God my father did not live to witness this day’, commented Shafiq al-Hout, a refugee from 1948. ‘I do not know what I could say to him if he asked me what was to become of his home city of Jaffa in this state that we have just declared.’⁵⁵ The declaration referred too to Palestine as ‘the land of three monotheistic faiths’ – a tolerant nod to religious pluralism rather than excoriating the ‘Zionist invasion’ in the uncompromising language of the Palestine National Covenant of 1968. The Palestinians had seized the initiative and the moral high ground as well.

On the day of the declaration, thousands of Israeli troops were deployed to stop Palestinians celebrating – and to keep the press away. The West Bank was at its gorgeous early winter best: pale almond blossoms sparkling against the stony hill terraces, sacks of fat green olives waiting to be shipped out. In Hawara, south of Nablus, an old peasant shuffled along behind his donkey, oblivious to the helmeted soldiers bivouacked by the side of the road, and the green, red and white tatters of a plastic Palestinian flag overhead. Under the surface calm, a frisson of excitement was palpable. ‘We have always said we wanted peace and now we hear the news from Algiers,’ muttered a wizened sweet vendor near where the declaration was read out at 4.30 p.m., the time designated by the latest PLO leaflet for popular celebrations. ‘A state for us and state for Israel, that’s how things should be.’⁵⁶ Troops were stationed all over East Jerusalem to try to silence the chimes of Arab freedom. Later, in Abu Tor a lone firework streaked across the night sky. In Bethlehem and elsewhere, the electricity was cut off to prevent people watching the event on TV.

Israel flatly refused to recognize that any advances had been made. Official statements dismissed the declaration as ‘ambiguity and double talk … employed to obscure violence and the fact that it [the PLO] resorts to terrorism. No unilateral step can substitute for a negotiated settlement, no gimmick can mask the tragedy inflicted upon the Palestinian people time and again by the absence of a reasonable, realistic and peace-seeking leadership.’ The initials PLO, gloomy Israeli officials quipped, had come to stand for ‘peace-loving organisation’. But Arafat’s stance was paying off, since the PLO looked moderate and Israel stubborn. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s highly articulate former ambassador to the UN and a recently elected Likud MP, was drafted in to help with the PR. ‘We’re in the middle of a PLO propaganda offensive,’ Netanyahu said.

The whole world is focused on what Arafat is going to say, but they have ignored the PLO’s grand strategy, which is a staged, salami policy to liquidate Israel. They are signing declarations of peace as tools of war. They are issuing a stream of vague, circumlocutious statements that echo round the western press – statements which imply to the untrained ear that the PLO has really changed and accepted Israel, whereas if you look at these statements a little closer, you will see that they have not.57

Israel was resigned to the fact that most Arab and Muslim countries and many Third World ones would recognize Palestine. Its greatest concern, however, was that the US would decide that the PLO had met its conditions for recognition, thus allowing it to drop its 1975 pledge not to deal with the organization until it recognized Israel and renounced terrorism.

In Geneva a month later, Arafat went further. Under US pressure, and with European mediation, he declared explicitly at UN headquarters that he accepted ‘the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security … including the state of Palestine, Israel and their neighbours, according to resolutions 242 and 338 … we totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism, including individual, group and state terrorism’.58 Across the occupied territories, Palestinians crowded round radios to hear his speech, broadcast live. The next day – following complaints from the Americans about lingering ambiguities and after intensive consultations with colleagues – he spelled out the message even more explicitly in front of eight hundred journalists, concluding the press conference with the words: ‘Enough striptease.’⁵⁹ As a result the US then declared that it was prepared to hold ‘substantive dialogue’ with PLO representatives.⁶⁰ The first talks got under way in Tunisia just two days later. Yitzhak Shamir’s response was adamantine: there would be no Israeli recognition of, nor negotiation with, the PLO. It was, he insisted, ‘a terrorist organisation aimed at undermining our national existence and bringing about the destruction of the state of Israel’.⁶¹ The mood in Israel combined defensiveness and rancour, drawing on decades of suspicion about the ‘true’ intentions of the Palestinians. ‘Once they talked about throwing the Jews into the sea,’ Shamir said.

And then they [the rest of the world] said the Jews were heroes. Today they don’t say that any more. Now they say self-determination for the Palestinians. Now sympathy is with the Palestinians. But nothing has changed. Arabs are Arabs. They control 22 states in this region. And the Jews are the Jews. And they have one small state with a lot of problems. The sea is the same sea and the goal remains the same.⁶²

It was not the last time he would use this phrase.

ENTER HAMAS

Not all Palestinians were happy with the change in the PLO’s line. Even as it was counting the gains of the intifada and taking the historic step of recognizing Israel, it was clear that the political map was changing. The decade before the uprising had witnessed advances for the long-established Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, known in Gaza as al-Mujamma al-lslami. It had been granted informal recognition by Israel in 1978 in the wake of the Sadat initiative and was led by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the quadriplegic, wheelchair-bound son of a widowed refugee mother. Like other Islamist movements it had been influenced by the 1979 Iranian revolution and the Muslim response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Unlike the PLO, Yassin focused not on fighting Israel, but on promoting Islam by building mosques, schools, health-care institutions, charitable bodies and kindergartens – ‘seeds planted early with a view to later harvesting hearts, minds and souls’.63 In some ways, though, this was a false distinction, as politics and religion were inextricably linked. ‘When oppression increases,’ Yassin liked to say in his high, reedy voice, ‘people start looking for God.’⁶⁴

Echoing the practice in Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan, the Israelis initially promoted the Islamists as a counter-weight to the PLO and the Communists, or at least turned a blind eye to their religious, social and educational activities. The founding of the Islamic University in Gaza in 1978 had been an important milestone in this respect. In periods of tension Islamists were conspicuously not arrested, or, if arrested, released first. In 1980 Mujamma activists had burned down the offices of the Palestine Red Crescent in Gaza, run by Dr Hayder Abdel-Shafi, the veteran left-wing nationalist. Cafes and video shops were favourite targets, and gender segregation was enforced at the Islamic University. In 1981 the Brotherhood beat Fatah in student elections in the West Bank and Gaza. Brotherhood activists were able to operate with ‘relative impunity’.⁶⁵ In June 1986, when attacks took place in Jabaliya, residents reported seeing a car full of Shin Bet agents parked across the road when fundamentalists went wild in the camp. ‘The Israelis say these things are a domestic matter,’ complained one PLO supporter. ‘Why should they bother to intervene when someone else is doing their dirty work for them?’⁶⁶ Israel did not, as has sometimes been claimed, ‘create’ an Islamist movement, though some Israeli officials believed it could be used to put pressure on Fatah. It was a mistake however, and they realized it. Yassin was arrested in 1984 and sentenced to thirteen years in prison for possessing weapons and explosives. But he was released a year later as part of a prisoner exchange.⁶⁷ ‘The fundamentalists had indeed sapped the strength of the PLO in Gaza’, noted the Israeli writers Zeev Schiff and Ehud Yaari. ‘But they soon surpassed it in indoctrination towards fanatic zeal; which from Israel’s standpoint was far more menacing than anything the nationalists could show for their efforts.’68 The Islamists attracted support because of their conservative piety and social and welfare activities that created a sense of solidarity and dignity – as well as boosting resistance to occupation. The Israelis were worried about the smaller Islamic Jihad movement, founded by a Gaza-born refugee named Fathi Shikaki. It was affiliated with Fatah and espoused armed struggle to liberate all of Palestine, and it had links to Iran. It was well organized with a cell structure and secret communications. In May 1987, six Islamic Jihad prisoners staged a sensational escape from Gaza gaol and mounted several attacks before being gunned down themselves, their status as heroic martyrs blurring political differences with rival factions. ‘I welcome the fact that there are fundamentalists who are making it a priority to fight the occupation,’ said Abdel-Shafi, in a pointed but diplomatic reference to mutual animosity. ‘Our differences can wait.’⁶⁹ In November the Israelis deported Sheikh Abdulaziz Odeh, the group’s spiritual mentor.

Late 1987 saw the appearance of a new Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-muqawama al-islamiyya or Hamas, in its Arabic acronym) led by Yassin and composed of supporters who had been radicalized by the uprising. It was in fact secretly founded earlier, according to Khaled Meshaal, later the Hamas leader, so its first communiqué, in mid-December, was ‘an announcement of the birth rather than the date of birth’.⁷⁰ It specified strike days and other activities that were not co-ordinated with the UNLU. Its language, replete with Quranic references, was religious and intolerant – calling Jews monkeys and apes – and uncompromising. Throughout the intifada, Hamas took a harder line than the UNLU. ‘The blood of our martyrs shall not be forgotten’, read a leaflet in January 1988.

Every drop of blood shall become a Molotov cocktail, a time bomb, and a roadside charge that will rip out the intestines of the Jews. Only then will their sense return. You who give the Jews lists containing the names of youngsters and spy against their families, return to the fold, repent at once. Those who die in betrayal have only themselves to blame.⁷¹

Hamas made clear that Muslim values were a vital component of its worldview: ‘The Jews asked: will these people act without outside support?’ said another leaflet:

They expected the generation that grew up after 1967 to be wretched and cowed, a generation brought up on hashish and opium, songs and music, beaches and prostitutes, a generation of occupation, a generation of poisoners and defeatists. What happened was the awakening of the people. The Muslim people is avenging its honour and restoring its former glory. No to concessions, [not] even a grain of dust from the soil of Palestine.72

Sentiments like these were codified in the Hamas charter, which was published in August 1988 and designed as an alternative to the PLO covenant.⁷³ Its thirty-six articles defined the movement as a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, hailed the martyr Izzedin al-Qassam, and described Palestine as a religious endowment (waqf), ‘consecrated for Muslims until judgement day’. In the face of the ‘Jews’ usurpation of Palestine’ no part of it could be surrendered. Its liberation was a religious duty. ‘There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavours. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.’ It referenced anti-Semitic notions about Jewish world domination, responsibility for the French and Communist revolutions, control of the media and the aspiration to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates in a plan embodied in a notorious Russian forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It opposed the PLO’s support – though that had never been formalized – for the creation of a ‘democratic secular state in Palestine’.⁷⁴ Yassin’s own view was more guarded, but there was no mistaking his vision of the future. ‘It is not enough to have a state in the West Bank and Gaza,’ he declared. ‘The best solution is to let all – Christians, Jews and Muslims – live in Palestine, in an Islamic state.’⁷⁵ It was no surprise that Hamas – weakened by arrests and deportations of leaders and activists – was also adamantly opposed to the sort of compromises Arafat was making as a momentous year drew to a close.