Don G. Dinsdale Loc: El Cajon, CA (San Diego County)

(Part 3)


The First Intifada


In December 1987, the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza began a mass uprising against the Israeli occupation. This uprising, or intifada (which means “shaking off” in Arabic), was not started or orchestrated by the PLO leadership in Tunis. Rather, it was a popular mobilization that drew on the organizations and institutions that had developed under occupation.


The intifada involved hundreds of thousands of people, many with no previous resistance experience, including children and teenagers. For the first few years, it involved many forms of civil disobedience, including massive demonstrations, general strikes, refusal to pay taxes, boycotts of Israeli products, political graffiti and the establishment of underground “freedom schools” (since regular schools were closed by the military as reprisals for the uprising). It also included stone throwing, Molotov cocktails and the erection of barricades to impede the movement of Israeli military forces.


Intifada activism was organized through popular committees under the umbrella of the United National Leadership of the Uprising. This broad-based resistance drew unprecedented international attention to the situation facing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and challenged the occupation as never before.


Under the leadership of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israel tried to smash the intifada with “force, power and beatings.” Army commanders instructed troops to break the bones of demonstrators. From 1987 to 1991, Israeli forces k**led over 1,000 Palestinians, including over 200 under the age of 16.


Israel also engaged in massive arrests; during this period, Israel had the highest per capita prison population in the world. By 1990, most of the Palestinian leaders of the uprising were in jail and the intifada lost its cohesive force, although it continued for several more years.


During the first intifada, Israel instituted a secret policy of targeted k*****g in the Occupied Territories. These operations were conducted by undercover units who disguised themselves as Arabs to approach and execute their targets, or by snipers who k**led from a distance. To evade war crimes allegations, for years Israel’s targeted k*****g policy was staunchly denied.


Political divisions and violence within the Palestinian community escalated, especially the growing rivalry between the various PLO factions and Islamist organizations (Hamas and Islamic Jihad). Palestinian militants k**led over 250 Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the occupation authorities and about 100 Israelis during this period.


The intifada made clear that the status quo was untenable and shifted the center of gravity of Palestinian political initiative from the PLO leadership in Tunis to the Occupied Territories. Palestinian activists demanded that the PLO adopt a clear political program to guide the struggle for independence. In response, the Palestine National Council (the PLO’s leading body) convened in Algeria in November 1988, recognized the State of Israel, proclaimed an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and renounced terrorism. The Israeli government did not respond to these gestures, claiming that nothing had changed and that the PLO remained a terrorist organization with which it would never negotiate. The US did acknowledge that the PLO’s policies had changed, but did little to encourage Israel to abandon its inflexible stand.


The Negotiation Process


US and Israeli failure to respond meaningfully to PLO moderation resulted in the PLO’s opposition to the 1991 US-led attack on Iraq, which had occupied Kuwait. After the 1991 Gulf war, the PLO was diplomatically isolated. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia cut off financial support they had been providing, bringing the PLO to the brink of crisis.


The US sought to stabilize its position in the Middle East by promoting a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The administration of President George H. W. Bush pressed a reluctant Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to open negotiations with the Palestinians and the Arab states at a multilateral conference convened in Madrid, Spain, in October 1991. Shamir’s conditions, which the US accepted, were that the PLO be excluded from the talks and that the Palestinian desires for independence and statehood not be directly addressed.


In subsequent negotiating sessions held in Washington, Palestinians were represented by a delegation from the Occupied Territories. Residents of East Jerusalem were barred by Israel from the delegation on the grounds that the city is part of Israel. Although the PLO was formally excluded, its leaders regularly consulted with and advised the Palestinian delegation. Although Israeli and Palestinian delegations met many times, little progress was achieved. Prime Minister Shamir announced after he left office that his strategy was to d**g out the Washington negotiations for ten years, by which time the annexation of the West Bank would be an accomplished fact.


Human rights conditions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip deteriorated dramatically after Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister in 1992. This development undermined the legitimacy of the Palestinian delegation to the Washington talks and prompted the resignation of several delegates.


Lack of progress in the Washington talks, human rights violations and economic decline in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip accelerated the growth of a radical Islamist challenge to the PLO. Violent attacks against Israeli military and civilian targets by Hamas and Islamic Jihad further exacerbated tensions. The first suicide bombing occurred in 1993.


Before the intifada, Israeli authorities had enabled the development of Islamist organizations as a way to divide Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. But as the popularity of Islamists grew and challenged the moderation of the PLO, Israel came to regret this policy of encouraging political Islam as an alternative to the PLO’s secular nationalism. Eventually, Rabin came to believe that Hamas, Jihad and the broader Islamic movements of which they were a part posed more of a threat to Israel than the PLO.


The Oslo Accords


The fear of radical Islam and the stalemate in the Washington talks brought the Rabin government to reverse the long-standing Israeli refusal to negotiate with the PLO. Consequently, Israel initiated secret negotiations directly with PLO representatives. The talks were conducted in Oslo, Norway. They produced the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles, which was signed in Washington in September 1993.


A porter at Surda checkpoint near Birzeit in the West Bank. (Rula Halawani)


The Declaration of Principles was based on mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO. It established that Israel would withdraw from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, with additional withdrawals from further unspecified areas of the West Bank during a five-year interim period. The key issues—such as the extent of the territories to be ceded by Israel, the nature of the Palestinian entity to be established, the future of the Israeli settlements and settlers, water rights, the resolution of the refugee problem and the status of Jerusalem—were set aside to be discussed in final status talks.


In 1994 the PLO formed a Palestinian Authority (PA) with “self-governing” (i.e., municipal) powers in the areas from which Israeli forces were redeployed. In January 1996, e******ns were held for the Palestinian Legislative Council and for the presidency of the PA, which were won handily by Fatah and Yasser Arafat, respectively.


The PLO accepted this deeply flawed agreement with Israel because it was weak and had little diplomatic support in the Arab world. Both Islamist radicals and some local leaders in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip challenged Arafat’s leadership and rejected the negotiations. Hamas introduced the tactic of suicide bombings in this period. Some were done in retaliation for Israeli attacks, including a 1994 massacre by an American-born Israeli settler of 29 Palestinians who were praying at the Ibrahim mosque in Hebron. Others seemed motivated by a wish to derail the Oslo process.


The Oslo accords set up a negotiating process without specifying an outcome. The process was supposed to have been completed by May 1999. During the Likud’s return to power in 1996–1999, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoided engaging seriously in the Oslo process, which he fundamentally opposed.


A Labor-led coalition government headed by Prime Minister Ehud Barak came to power in 1999. Barak at first concentrated on reaching a peace agreement with Syria, a strategy aimed at weakening the Palestinians. When he failed to convince the Syrians to sign an agreement, Barak turned his attention to the Palestinian track.


During the protracted interim period of the Oslo process, Israel’s Labor and Likud governments dramatically escalated settlement building and land confiscations in the Occupied Territories and constructed a network of bypass roads to enable Israeli settlers to travel from their settlements to Israel proper without passing through Palestinian-inhabited areas. These projects were understood by most Palestinians as marking out territory that Israel sought to annex in the final settlement. The Oslo accords contained no mechanism to block these unilateral actions or Israel’s violations of Palestinian human and civil rights in areas under its control.


Final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians only got underway in earnest in mid-2000. By then, a series of Israeli interim withdrawals left the Palestinian Authority with direct or partial control of some 40 percent of the West Bank and 65 percent of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian areas were surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory with entry and exit controlled by Israel.


In July 2000, President Bill Clinton invited Barak and Arafat to Camp David to conclude negotiations on the long-overdue final status agreement. Before they met, Barak proclaimed his “red lines”: Israel would not return to its pre-1967 borders; East Jerusalem with its 175,000 (now about 200,000) Jewish settlers would remain under Israeli sovereignty; Israel would annex settlement blocs in the West Bank containing some 80 percent of the 180,000 (now about 360,000) Jewish settlers; and Israel would accept no legal or moral responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The Palestinians, in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 242 and their understanding of the spirit of the Oslo Declaration of Principles, sought Israeli withdrawal from the vast majority of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including East Jerusalem, and recognition of an independent state in those territories.


The distance between the two parties, especially on the issues of Jerusalem and refugees, made it impossible to reach an agreement at the Camp David summit. Although Barak offered a far more extensive proposal for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank than any other Israeli leader had publicly considered, he insisted on maintaining Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem. This stance was unacceptable to the Palestinians and to most of the Muslim world. Arafat left Camp David with enhanced stature among his constituents because he did not yield to American and Israeli pressure.


Barak returned home to face political crisis within his own government, including the departure of coalition partners who felt he had offered the Palestinians too much. But the Israeli taboo on discussing the future of Jerusalem was broken. Some Israelis began to realize for the first time that they would never achieve peace if they insisted on imposing their terms on the Palestinians; the majority came to believe that if that was the case, Israel would have to learn to live with the conflict indefinitely.


The Second (al-Aqsa) Intifada


The problems with the “peace process” initiated at Oslo, combined with the daily frustrations and humiliations inflicted upon Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, as well as corruption in the Palestinian Authority, converged to ignite a second intifada in late September 2000. On September 28, Likud candidate for prime minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount (Noble Sanctuary) accompanied by 1,000 armed guards. In light of Sharon’s well-known call for maintaining Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, this move provoked large Palestinian protests in Jerusalem. The following day, Palestinians threw rocks at Jews praying at the Western Wall. Israeli police then stormed the Temple Mount and k**led at least four and wounded 200 unarmed protesters. By the end of the day Israeli forces k**led three more Palestinians in Jerusalem.


These k*****gs inaugurated demonstrations and clashes across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In October there were widespread solidarity demonstrations and a general strike in Arab and mixed towns inside Israel, in the course of which police k**led 12 unarmed Palestinian citizens of Israel.


The second intifada was much bloodier than the first. During the first three weeks of the uprising, Israeli forces shot 1 million live bullets at unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. It was a conscious escalation in the use of force designed to avoid a protracted civil uprising, like the first intifada, and the international sympathy it won the Palestinians. On some occasions, armed PA policemen, often positioned at the rear of unarmed demonstrations, returned fire.


Israel characterized the spreading protests as acts of aggression. Soon, the use of force expanded to include tanks, helicopter gunships and even F-16 fighter planes. The Israeli army attacked PA installations in Ramallah, Gaza and elsewhere. Civilian neighborhoods were subjected to shelling and aerial bombardment.


Officials justified waging full-scale war on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories by arguing that the law enforcement model (policing and r**t control) was no longer viable because the military was “out” of Palestinian areas, and because Palestinians possessed (small) arms and thus constituted a foreign “armed adversary.” Officials described the second intifada as an “armed conflict short of war,” and claimed that Israel had a self-defense right to attack an “enemy entity,” while denying that those stateless enemies had any right to use force, even in self-defense.


In November 2000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and then later the PFLP and the Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, began conducting suicide bombings and other armed operations. There were over 150 such attacks from 2000 through 2005, compared to 22 incidents from 1993 to 1999 by Islamist opponents of the Oslo process.


Palestinian-Israeli negotiations resumed briefly (importantly, with no US presence) at Taba (in the Sinai) in January 2001. The parties came “painfully close” to a final agreement, according to the lead negotiators, before they were called off by Barak in advance of the early e******ns he had called for prime minister to forestall a likely v**e of no confidence in the Knesset. Ariel Sharon handily won the 2001 e******n.


Sharon’s first term as premier coincided with a particularly violent stretch of the second intifada. A cycle of targeted k*****gs of Palestinian militants and Palestinian attacks inside Israel culminated in a suicide bombing in Netanya on March 27, 2002, during the Passover holiday. The attack k**led 30 Israelis. In retaliation, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, a full-scale tank invasion of the West Bank that lasted for several weeks. Armored Caterpillar bulldozers razed swathes of the Jenin refugee camp and tanks ringed the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Meanwhile, Israeli forces imposed all-day curfews in seven of the West Bank’s eight major towns.


Israel justified this offensive as hot pursuit of terrorist suspects, with the full backing of the George W. Bush administration in Washington. The US bucked the trend of international opinion, which was generally critical of Israel’s operation. A second, shorter tank invasion occurred in June.


The Likud Party dominated Israeli politics for the next decade. Its ascendancy marked the end of the Oslo “peace process” for all practical purposes, since the Likud unequivocally opposed establishing a Palestinian state or making “territorial compromises.” Many, if not most, Palestinians also came to reject the limitations of the Oslo Declaration of Principles and its two decades of “process” without peace or a Palestinian state. Nonetheless, the term “peace process” continues to be used, primarily as a vehicle for asserting US control over Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.


The 2002 Arab Peace Plan


Israeli Settlements: Population Growth and Concentration, 1995–2011 (Jan de Jong)


In 2002, at the Beirut summit of the Arab League, all the Arab states except Libya endorsed a peace initiative proposed by Saudi Arabia. The plan offered an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, including recognition of Israel, peace agreements and normal relations with all the Arab states, in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Golan Heights, “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194,” and establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab League renewed its peace initiative in 2007.


By 2002 the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty was in place for nearly a quarter of a century. In 1994 Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel; in 1994 and 1996 Israel established mutual “interest sections” with Morocco and Tunisia; in 1994 an Israeli delegation visited Bahrain; in 1996 and 1998 Oman and Qatar initiated trade relations with Israel. On the Arab side, these steps were undertaken in anticipation of a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement. Only the treaties with Egypt and Jordan survived the outbreak of the second intifada.


The offer of recognition and normal relations was a substantial innovation in the Arab diplomatic lexicon. Just as important was the proposal for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.” While the Arab League document refers to the UN resolution calling on Israel to allow Palestinians who wish to live in peace to return to their homes, it does not use the term “right to return” and therefore implies that peace would not require the return of all the refugees. Nonetheless, Sharon rebuffed the Arab initiative and Benjamin Netanyahu, who became prime minister in 2006, rejected it again in 2007.


Mahmoud Abbas, who succeeded Yasser Arafat as Palestinian Authority president, enthusiastically supported the Arab League proposals and urged the US to embrace them. In 2009 President Barack Obama announced that he would “incorporate” the Arab proposals into his administration’s Middle East policy. But no public statement by the Obama administration suggests any substantive step in this direction.