Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 2 - 8 November 2000 Issue No. 506
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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The Intifada this time

By Graham Usher

The Al-Aqsa Intifada has already become the most sustained Palestinian revolt in the occupied territories since the Palestinian uprising of 1987-1993. And, there is no dispute -- at least among Palestinians -- that the outbreak of the uprising was overwhelmingly spontaneous, driven more by the enormous frustration of the "Oslo" generation of Palestinian youth than by any strategic decision by the Palestinian leadership.

This generation took to the streets in thousands, not so much because of the deliberate sacrilege of Ariel Sharon's visit to Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City on 28 September. The spark, rather, was the killing of seven Palestinians by Israeli Border Police on the Haram Al-Sharif [the Temple Mount] on 29 September and, above all, the televised murder the next day of 12-year old Mohamed Al-Dorra by continuous Israeli fire at the Netzarim junction in Gaza.

But the fuel that powers the uprising is the systematic policy of national oppression and geopolitical containment that has become the Palestinians' lot despite seven years of the "peace process," six of them under the authoritarian and incompetent governance of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Whatever the causes, few would deny that the current uprising marks a qualitatively "new phase" in the Palestinians' long struggle for independence. The first cause is the unprecedented savagery of the Israeli response. The current repression is no mere dusting down of the "iron fist," used with such brutal ineffectiveness in the 1987 uprising. It is a surgical military operation, honed in the army's long war against Hizbullah in south Lebanon and "practiced" in military exercises throughout the occupied territories over the last four years under code names like "field of thorns" and "molten lead."

To quell the Palestinian protests -- which still consist overwhelmingly of unarmed civilians throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails -- the Israeli army has deployed tanks, helicopter gunships, gunboats and missiles to raze apartment blocks, sweep vast swathes of Palestinian land and launch strikes against PA installations. It has unleashed armed settlers against Palestinian communities to terrorise, vandalise and sometimes kill. Most lethally, it has employed snipers, equipped with sights and sometimes silencers, to pick out and take out Palestinians in virtually every town, camp and village in the occupied territories.

It is actually a reversal of the 1987 uprising, where Goliath takes on David. And the difference between the advanced weaponry and planned precision of a colonial army in occupation and the ad hoc and disorganised reaction of a people in revolt is reflected in the body count. By 30 October -- according to statistics compiled by the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC) -- 144 Palestinians had been killed (33 per cent of whom were under the age of 18) and 6,000 wounded. Of the fatalities, a staggering 98 per cent had been hit in the head and upper bodies, clear proof of army directives to shoot to kill or at least seriously maim (the UPMRC estimates that 1,000 of the injured will be permanently disabled). The Israeli toll so far is 12, most of them soldiers or settlers.

It is a repression that has Ehud Barak's fingerprints smeared all over it. As then Israeli Defence Force (IDF) chief of staff, he used similar methods to some effect in Gaza in the spring of 1993 to crush Hamas's emerging military struggle, wipe out the last remnants of Intifada and bludgeon the Palestinian population into accepting the terms and conditions of the Oslo accords. The political aim is similar here, though for Oslo read the Israeli-US proposals on a final status settlement submitted to Yasser Arafat at the Camp David summit in July.

The difference this time is that Palestinians have refused to be cowed. Rather, what is evolving seems increasingly to be a mass revolt united by an inchoate national consensus that the terms and structures of the Oslo process must be overhauled and new bases for negotiations set, predicated on international legitimacy and UN resolutions 242, 338 and 194. This is not wholly spontaneous. It has also been directed by three main factors.

The leading political and military forces behind the revolt are grassroots cadres belonging to Arafat's Fatah organisation or the tanzim (organisation). These consist mainly of Fatah's "inside" leadership that emerged during the 1987 Intifada and include, since Oslo, fighters who were or are in one or other of the PA's myriad of security forces. It is this legacy and role that, since Oslo, has increasingly bestowed on the tanzim the contradictory function of being at once the military basis of the PA's rule and also its most loyal opposition.

The opposition has been born not only because of the PA's woeful performance as a "national authority," causing a real seepage in popular support for Fatah, whether inside the PA or as the leading PLO faction outside it. It also involves the slow evolution of a political critique of the very terms of the Oslo process, where Palestinian national aspirations have been suborned to a negotiating strategy based on US-led diplomacy and "security cooperation" with the Israeli army.

In its stead, Fatah "field" leaders have increasingly advocated "other options" aside from negotiations and diplomacy. The first is that the Palestinians must deploy popular and armed resistance against Israeli military outposts and Jewish settlements implanted deep within the Palestinian controlled areas "to increase the cost of the occupation to Israel," in the words of one Fatah leader.

The current revolt has created the conditions for that vision to be put into practice, with armed attacks now being routinely deployed against soldiers and settlements in or near Palestinian areas everywhere in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem. It is this armed dimension that most distinguishes the present revolt from the 1987 Intifada.

The second is to return the Palestinian struggle from the tutelage of US diplomacy and Israeli hegemony to the forum of the United Nations and Arab world. In particular, there has been the political reassertion that any "end of conflict" must be conditional on Israel's full withdrawal from the territories occupied in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem, and acknowledgment of the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. In the words of West Bank Fatah General-Secretary and leading Fatah ideologue Marwan Barghouti, "the Palestinians will not accept, and Mr. Arafat cannot accept less than what Egypt and Jordan received and what Syria will receive from Israel."

David and Goliath ( photo: Reuters)

The third there has been the resurrection of a genuine (as opposed to symbolic) national unity among all the Palestinian factions, including the non-PLO Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements, due to the de facto collapse the revolt has caused to Oslo's trilateral security agreements between the PA, Israel and the CIA.

Although lending the uprising a certain religious imagery -- due mainly to the role Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque played in its ignition -- Hamas and Jihad's presence (so far) has largely been supportive. They have not challenged Fatah's leading role on either the political, diplomatic or military levels and, like Fatah, have mobilised their supporters mainly in defence of the Palestinian civilian areas.

They have also 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 unites all the factions and increasingly determines the type of mass protests in the uprising and their timing.

This participation is seen as particularly novel. In the 1987 Intifada, Hamas never joined the United Leadership of the Uprising, preferring instead to follow its own calendar of strike days and, from the Madrid Conference on, forming a clear political alternative to mainstream Palestinian nationalism. In return for the present unity, the last month has seen some 85 Hamas and Jihad political detainees freed from PA jails in Gaza and the West Bank, the clearest evidence yet of the breakdown in the PA's security cooperation with Israel and the CIA.

It is unclear how long this unity will last, given the schisms that have historically divided Palestine's nationalist and Islamist streams, both before and especially after Oslo. On 26 October, Jihad mounted its first independently declared action of the uprising, with a suicide attack on an army outpost outside the Gush Qatif settlement bloc in Gaza. Hamas so far has refrained from claiming responsibility for any armed operations, partly perhaps to maintain national unity with Fatah and partly also because of the blows its military cadres has received in recent years.

Should this discipline be maintained -- and Hamas and Jihad remain in the Palestinian consensus -- there would be nothing to prevent Hamas from participating in a new Palestinian government of national unity, the formation of which would clearly spell the end of the Oslo era. This is particularly so as, following the Jihad operation, Barghouti stated that Fatah's position was to support all actions -- popular and military -- "against the occupation" but to oppose military attacks on civilians inside Israel proper.

The third dimension is the impact the revolt has had in the Arab world, especially among what had until now been a largely docile Palestinian diaspora. It was Palestinian refugees who led the mass protests in Amman, Damascus and Lebanon, with the latter providing the necessary diversion for Hizbullah to abduct three Israeli soldiers on 7 October.

But the solidarity has not been confined to Palestinians. For the last month, Egypt has been rocked by the largest and fiercest student protests since the early 1970s. And on 24 October some 25,000 Palestinians and Jordanians staged a massive "march of return" on the Allenby Bridge in Jordan, leaving over 100 wounded in clashes with the Jordanian army.

The political fruit of these protests came on 21 and 22 October with the convening of the first Arab summit in four years and the first in over a decade to include Iraq. Both were in response to "the direct pressure of Arab public opinion," admits one veteran Egyptian diplomat. Although the decisions taken were meagre by way of action -- and condemned as such by much of the Arab public -- the summit was significant in three ways.

First, the summit affirmed there would be no comprehensive peace with Israel without the "restoration of full Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem," a clear rebuttal of Israel and the US designs for the city as presented at Camp David. Second, it lent practical and financial support to the uprising, signalling that it cannot be stopped without tangible political gains for the Palestinians.

Finally, it demonstrated that Palestine remains the key to Israel's integration and acceptance in the Arab world. In the month of the revolt, no less than three Arab countries -- Oman, Tunisia and Morocco -- have terminated whatever diplomatic relations they had with Israel. It is clear the longer the Intifada continues, the deeper its Arab dimension will become, a factor that can only strengthen the Palestinians if and when negotiations resume.

The immediate future of the uprising will be determined by two dates: the US Presidential elections on 7 November and the meeting of the PLO's Central Council on 15 November.

On 30 October Barak was given a month's reprieve from the need to form a national emergency government with Likud by the decision of the orthodox Shas movement to support from "outside" his minority coalition. This effectively clears the way for a meeting between Barak and US President Bill Clinton immediately after the US elections. Yasser Arafat, too, has signalled he would be prepared for another meeting with Clinton around the same time. Everything depends on what the US proposes as a way out of the crisis.

The Palestinian leadership has already rejected any solution based on Israel's recognition of a Palestinian "state" over the areas the PA currently "controls" -- about 39 per cent of the West Bank and 70 per cent of Gaza. But were the US to propose a state be established on 90 per cent of the West Bank and all of Gaza in exchange for a deferral of issues like Jerusalem, refugees and settlements, certain elements of the Palestinian leadership (including perhaps Arafat) could be amenable to another interim agreement.

Likud (whether under Sharon or Netanyahu) would of course refuse a trade-off along these lines, as, almost certainly, would Barak. But a future Labour-led government under new leadership may not be adverse to such a solution, especially if the alternative is war within and/or beyond the occupied territories.

In the absence of such an exit, it is difficult to see how the uprising could go anywhere other than a long war of attrition (with or without a declaration of statehood on 15 November), combining both civilian protests and increasing use of guerrilla forms of armed struggle. There are already signs of this evolution.

Fatah has now made two calls to separate the armed actions from the mass demonstrations, partly to minimise the scale of Palestinian casualties and partly (in the words of one military commander) to change the locus of confrontations from the Palestinian civilian areas to the old Green Line. On 30 October, as an example perhaps of what Fatah meant, the first armed operation occurred inside occupied East Jerusalem, with the killing of one Israeli guard and wounding of another outside an Israeli National Insurance office.

Israel will respond to any such development in this direction with massive military might (it bombed three Fatah and PA offices in Gaza and the West Bank the night after the East Jerusalem hit). The aim will be to impose by force of arms what it tried to achieve by force of negotiation at Camp David summit in July. A "unilateral separation" from the Palestinian civilian areas in the West Bank and Gaza, a blockade on the Jordan Valley and the formal or de facto annexation of the West Bank settlement blocs in or near Jerusalem.

What happens then depends to a great deal on the extent of the Palestinians' success in "internationalising" the conflict. In such a scenario, would the UN, EU and the Arab states merely "condemn" a unilaterally imposed Israeli "solution" to the Intifada based on military force, apartheid structures and sealed off Palestinian "Bantustans" in the West Bank and Gaza? Or would they finally use the various and vast diplomatic, economic, legal and perhaps military instruments they have at their disposal (including the dispatching of troops to provide international protection to the Palestinians) to force an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines?

Everything about their actions in recent years 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 "Lebanonisation" of the conflict inside the occupied territories and, perhaps, the real prospect of a regional war beyond them.

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Related stories:
Shifting borders
The Intifada this time
'Those times are over'
Snipers, gunships and now death squads
'Our blood is sacred too'
Blaming the victim
Exporting typhoid and guns
It's war -- virtually
Arab journalists join the fray
Blinded by the truth
Deciphering ZNN
The message is the medium
Also see Focus on Intifada 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000
and Focus on Intifada 19 - 25 October 2000

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