Quicknation    Israel First Intifada

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First Intifada refers to a series of violent incidents between Palestinians and Israelis between 1987 and approximately 1993, when the Oslo accords were signed and the Palestinian National Authority was established. It is variously referred to also as the "war of the stones." The Second Intifada, also known as the al-Aqsa Intifada, is considered to have been between 2000 and early 2005. The First Intifada is also referred to simply as the Intifada, since that is how it was called before the Second Intifada.

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As with all incidents within the Arab-Israeli conflict in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the context and causes for this event are heavily disputed.

Most accounts point to a growing sense of frustration among Palestinians, particularly on the West Bank, but also in Gaza, at the lack of progress in finding a durable resolution for their humanitarian and nationalistic claims after the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967. The Palestine Liberation Organization had failed to make any significant headway against Israel since the 1960s, and had in 1982 been forced to establish its offices in Tunis. Although all Arab states with the exception of Egypt maintained an official state of war with Israel, rhetoric was toned down in the mid-1980s, and Palestinians found advocacy on their behalf weakened. Israeli military control over Southern Lebanon and the continued Israeli military administration of the West Bank and Gaza fed a growing discontent with the status quo.

Muslim clerics used their pulpits to speak against the Israeli government, and when an Israeli was stabbed to death on December 6, 1987 while shopping in Gaza, tensions grew. When four Palestinian refugees from the Jabalya camp were killed in a traffic accident in Gaza the following day, rioting broke out in Jabalya. One Palestinian was killed by Israeli soldiers during these riots, sparking further riots.

Palestinians maintain that the Intifada was a protest of Israel's brutal repression which included extra-judicial killings, mass detentions, house demolitions, indiscriminate torture, deportations, and so on.

In addition to the political and national sentiment, further causes to the Intifada can be seen in the Egyptian withdrawal from their claims to the Gaza Strip as well as the Jordanian monarchy growing weary of supporting Jordanian claims to the West Bank.

Rapid rates of birth (common in poor areas) and the limited allocation of land to new building or agriculture under the Israeli rule contributed to the increasing density of population. Unemployment was growing, and while income from jobs in Israel allowed Palestinians to provide university education for their children, few jobs were available for the graduates afterwards.

Others point out that Palestinians felt abandoned by their Arab allies and the PLO had failed to destroy Israel and establish a Palestinian state in its stead as promised. However, it did manage to block the Israeli attempts to call for an election inside the territories (beginning with 1974), and as it seemed to many of them, they would spend the rest of their lives as second class citizens, without full political rights.

Considering all of the above and the mass scale of the uprising, it is of little doubt that it was not initiated by any single man or organization. However, the PLO was very quick to take matters into its hands, sponsoring riot provocateurs and enhancing their presence in the territories (called the "tandhim", or "organization") that was to guarantee the continuation of riots. The PLO was not uncontested, however, competing in its activities for the first time with radical Islamic organizations - Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which also had a share in inducing further violence.

The uprising of the Palestinians in the First Intifada is generally understood to have been a spontaneous phenomenon. The PLO later claimed that it had organized it, but most historians view this as an attempt to create an appearance of having more control. On October 1, 1987 Israeli military ambushed and killed seven men from Gaza believed to be members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. Several days later an Israeli settler shot a Palestinian schoolgirl in the back. On December 4, 1987 Shlomo Sakal, an Israeli plastics salesman, was stabbed to death in Gaza. Two days after that, there was a traffic accident in which an Israel Defense Force truck crashed into a van, killing 4 Palestinians from Jabalya.

Under these already heated circumstances, many rumors began to spread. The mere presence of stories, reinforced by the real incidents above, caused wild panic and street fights against Israeli policemen and soldiers.

On December 6, a riot began in Jabalya where hundreds burned tires and attacked the Israel Defense Forces stationed there. The riot spread to other camps and eventually Jerusalem. On December 22, the United Nations Security Council condemned Israel for violating Geneva Conventions due to the number of Palestinian deaths in these first few weeks of the Intifada.

Much of the intifada was low-tech; dozens of Palestinian teenagers would ambush small patrols of Israeli soldiers, showering them with large rocks, attempting to kill with brute force and vastly superior numbers. However, this tactic soon gave way to using thousands of Molotov cocktail attacks, over 100 hand grenade attacks and more than 500 attacks with guns or explosives. Many Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed this way.

Additionally, over 1,000 alleged informers were killed by Arab death squads, though Palestinian Arab human rights groups contend many were not "collaborators" but victims of revenge murders.

In 1988, middle-class Christian merchants initiated a nonviolent movement to withhold taxes - the legality of which under international law is disputed - collected and used by Israel to pay for the administration of territories. When time in prison didn't stop the activists, Israel crushed the boycott by imposing heavy fines while seizing and disposing of the equipment, furnishings, and goods from local stores, factories, and even homes.

On April 19, 1988, a leader of the PLO, Abu Jihad, was assassinated in Tunis. During the resurgence of rioting that followed, about 16 Palestinians were killed. In November of the same year and October of the next, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolutions condemning Israel.

Attempts at peace began at the Madrid Conference of 1991, prompted by the US and USSR.

By the time the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, 1,162 Palestinians and 160 Israelis had died [1]; in the first thirteen months of the intifada, 332 Palestinians had been killed, as opposed to only 12 Israelis in the same period. This initially high fatality rate on the Palestinian side was due largely to the Israel Defense Force's lack of resources and inexperience in pacification and crowd control. Often when facing demonstrators IDF soldiers had no riot control munitions and would feel compelled to shoot unarmed demonstrators with live fire.

As the intifada progressed, Israel progressively introduced various riot control methods (some, including a machine that broke up rocks and spat them at crowds, being rather exotic) that had the effect of reducing Palestinian casualties, although they still remained fairly high. Another possible contributor to the high initial casualties was Yitzhak Rabin's aggressive stance towards the Palestinians (notably including an exhortation to the IDF to "break the bones" of the demonstrators). His successor Moshe Arens subsequently proved to have a better understanding of pacification, which perhaps reflects in the lower casualty rates for the following years.

The Intifada was never a military endeavour in either a conventional or guerrilla sense. The Palestinian leadership (who had limited control of the situation in any event) never expected the uprising to make any direct gains against the Israeli state. However, the Intifada did produce a number of positive results for the Palestinians:

olBy engaging the Israelis directly, rather than relying on the authority or the assistance of neighbouring Arab states, the Palestinians were able to globally cement their identity as a separate nation worthy of self-determination. The era marked the end of the Israelis referring to Palestinians as "South Syrians" and largely ended Israeli discussion of a "Jordanian solution".The harsh Israeli countermeasures (particularly during the earlier years of the Intifada) resulted in adverse media publicity for Israel. The fact that 159 Palestinian children below the age of 16 (mostly stone throwers) had died was especially concerning for international observers. Significantly, numerous American media outlets openly criticised Israel in a way that they had not previously. Furthermore, the conflict succeeded in putting the Palestinian question back on the international agenda, particularly in the UN, but also for Europe and the United States as well as the Arab states. Europe became an important economic contributor towards the nascent Palestinian authority, and American aid and support of Israel became more conditional than it was previously.The intifada also dealt a heavy economic blow to Israel. The Bank of Israel estimated it cost the country $650 million in lost exports. The impact on the services sector, including the important Israeli tourist industry, was notably bad.The uprising lead directly to the Oslo accords, and thereby to the return of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation from their Tunisian exile. Although the negotiations failed to fulfill their potential, it is notable that prior to the first Intifada, it was doubtful whether there would ever be a Palestinian state. After the Oslo accords, an independent Palestine of some sort, at some time in the future seemed relatively certain.

Ultimately, Israel was successful in containing the Intifada. As the Palestinians' force was inferior in relation to the well equipped and trained Israel Defense Forces, and were generally unarmed. However, the Intifada pinpointed numerous problems with the IDF's conduct in the operative and tactical fields, as well as the general problem of Israel's prolonged control of the Palestinian territories. These problems were noticed and widely criticized, both in international forums (in particular, when humanitarian questions were at stake), but also in Israeli public opinion, in which the Intifada had caused a split.