Katie Atalla's List: Intifada 1987

• Four Palestinian workers from Gaza were killed in a traffic accident on Dec 8, 1987. The rumour quickly spread that they had been deliberately murdered by Israelis.

  • Redundant, already know with common knowledge
• The Gaza Strip erupted in riots, which quickly spread to the West Bank.

  • Continuation of timeline of events
• The uprising, which raged for the best part of five years before petering out in the early 1990s, was a broad campaign of daily riots, strikes and boycotts.

  • Specific time. Good for intro
• The daily scenes of soldiers shooting stone-throwers was for many in Israel a deeply disquieting, if not revolting, spectacle.

  • This was one of the greatest achievements of the Intifada. It showed the world that the Israeli's weren't being completely fair, if at all, in the way they were treating the Palestinians.
    

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  The most powerful armed forces in the Middle East, the embodiment of everything that was considered noble in Zionism was reduced to chasing, beating and shooting poverty-stricken Arabs through the slums of Gaza and the villages of the West Bank.

  • More proof of unfair military might against 'poverty-stricken' stone throwing Palestinians. *Important word here: Slums..
• The Intifada was often more damaging to Palestinians than to Israelis, but it forged a powerful sense of national awakening among Palestinians under Israeli occupation who had until then been on the sidelines of the upheavals undergone by exiled Palestinians.

  • *always more damaging.. how was it ever more damaging to the Israelis unless it was to their reputation? ^Not necessary
• he start of the Intifada saw the birth of a new Palestinian faction, Hamas, the acronym of Islamic Resistance Movement.

  • Important for Significance. Hamas was creating during and through the Intifada
• By bringing Palestinian grievances once more to the daily television bulletins, the Palestinian youth, or shebab, gave the PLO a new lease of life.

  • Again, significant because it brought the Palestinian cause back to a global scale.
• n June 1988, Jordan renounced all links with the West Bank.

  • Because of the Intifada? If so good for significance.
• In November, the PLO proclaimed a Palestinian state (without specifying its borders) and Arafat set about a new diplomatic initiative in which he recognised Israel's right to exist and, to widespread scepticism, publicly renounced terrorism.

  • Significane

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• Israel has tried killing, beating, gassing, mass arrests,   deportation, destruction of houses, curfews and other forms of harsh   collective punishment.

  • Events leading up to the Intifada. Cruelty from Israel
• Nothing has succeeded in enforcing obedience or   eliciting a violent response. The Palestinian uprising is a remarkable   feat of collective self-discipline.

  • Intro material
• Even   nonviolent actions -- political efforts and merchant strikes, for   example, even verbal and symbolic expression -- have long been   repressed by force, failing for lack of support from outside, not   least among those who laud the virtues of such means

  • To show that the Intifada is not the first thing the Palestinians have tried. Even without violence nothing has succeeded. Intro material
• If the British   had treated the Jews of Palestine in the manner of the Israeli   repression over many years, there would have been an uproar in England   and throughout the world.

  • There is a double standard. The Palestinians are treated one way which is fine however the rest of the world can not be treated in such a manner.
• harp contrast between the restraint of   British forces and Israeli brutality in response to Palestinian   resistance
• There is a double standard, as commonly alleged by apologists for   Israeli violence; it is just the opposite of what is claimed, and has   been so for many years.

  • *
• efense Minister Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor Party: that brutal   beatings are "necessary...to restore the soldier's honor in the face   of the challenge from Palestinians.

  • So he justified beating the Palestinian people because he wanted to restore honor in his military? Wow..
• Soldiers beating Arabs on a main street in West   Jerusalem shout that "they dare to raise their heads.

  • "They dare raise their heads" as if they are slaves.. or animals.
• occupation for 20 years has been "degradation" and "constant   harassment...for its own sake, evil for its own sake."

  • The theme of occupation has been degradation and "constant harassment... for its own sake, evil for its own sake". good quote
• A man walks in   the street and [soldiers and settlers] call him: `come here, donkey'."   A Hebrew phrase that Arabs quickly learn is "you are all thieves and   bastards."

  • Racial Discrimination. Leading factors to the Intifada. They are not people they are animals.
• A woman returning from study in the United States is   insulted and mocked by soldiers at the border, who laugh at the "fine   clothes this one has" as they display them to one another during   baggage inspection

  • Even those with a proper education are ridiculed. Its all about humiliation.
• These are the conditions of everyday life, more telling than the   corpses and broken bones

  • The worst part is not all the dead that happen every once in a while, its the humiliation that happens everyday in their homes, on their own land.
• the town was placed under a two-week   curfew after two young Palestinians were killed by Israeli settlers in   response to stones thrown at a bus.

  • Extreme responses for little things.
• In further punishment, the   authorities banned a wholesale vegetable and fruit project that was to   be the key to the town's development. Several months later, after   settlers claimed that stones had been thrown, the inhabitants of the   town, including women and children, were held outdoors through a cold   rainy night for "interrogation.

  • They can't develop because everything is run by the Israelis who don't exactly have their best at heat. After settlers claimed that stones had been thrown, the inhabitants of the town, including women and children, were held outdoors through a cold rainy night for "interrogation".
• During the many hours that hundreds of people were kept in   the mosque square, they were ordered to urinate and excrete on one   another and also to sing Hatikva [the Israeli national anthem]   and to call out `Long Live the State of Israel.' Several times people   were beaten and ordered to crawl on the ground. Some were even ordered   to lick the earth. At the same time four trucks were commandeered and   at daybreak, the inhabitants were loaded on the trucks, about 100 in   each truck, and taken like sheep to the Administration headquarters in   Hebron. On Holocaust Day, ...the people who were arrested were ordered   to write numbers on their hands with their own hands, in memory of the   Jews in the extermination camps."

  • They kept them in a mosque without letting them go out. They were ordered to do foul things like urinate on one another while singing the Israeli national anthem. People were beaten and ordered to crawl on the ground. Some were even ordered to lick the earth. Afterwards cvilians were loaded onto trucks, about 100 people each, and taken like sheep to the Administration headquarters in Hebron. On Holocaust Day, the people who were arrested were ordered to write numbers on their hands with their own hands, in memory of the extermination camps in the Holocaust.
• The report describes torture and humiliation of prisoners by   soldiers and settlers allowed into the jails to participate in   beatings, brutal treatment of Arabs by settlers, even murder with   impunity

  • Even settlers of Israel were allowed to go into the jails to participate in the beating of the Arabs. Sometimes, even murder.
• "the slave   markets of Ashkelon, Jerusalem, Ramat Gan and other places."

  • Palestinians were sold as slaves in some places.
• The basic principle, often   openly expressed, is that the Araboushim must understand who rules   this land and who walks in it with head lowered and eyes averted. If   shopkeepers try to open their stores in the afternoon as a gesture of   independence, the army compels them to close in the afternoon and open   in the morning. If a remote village declares itself "liberated,"   meaning that it will run its own internal affairs, the army attacks,   and if stones are thrown as villagers try to keep the soldiers out,   the result will be killings, beatings, destruction of property, mass   arrests, torture.

  • This is the mentality of an Israeli soldier and even civilian. Araboushim is a term like the word "niger" except for Arabs. They can not show any freedom or independence. Any independence declared and stones thrown ends in killings, beatings, destruction of property, mass arrests and torture.
• The key feature of the occupation has always been humiliation: they   must not be allowed to raise their heads
• "If I tell him to jump, he will jump. Run, he will   run. Take your clothes off, he will take them off. If I tell him to   kiss the wall he will kiss it. If I tell him to crawl on the road,   won't he crawl? ... Everything. Tell him to curse his mother and he   will curse her too." They are "not human beings." The Guards then   searched the lawyer, slapped him, and ordered him to remove his shoes,   warning that they could order him to remove his clothes as well. "My   Arab," Segev continues, "kept silent and sat down on the ground" as   the Border Guards laughed, saying again "Really, not humans,"

  • Describing Arabs as animals.
• detention without charge

  • Jailed without a trial or a charge.
• "within the politics of honor and   humiliation it is difficult even to talk of a political settlement."   That may be true of Israeli society; it is easy to talk of a political   settlement among the Palestinians, and its general form is clear   enough and widely accepted. There is little point continuing to evade   these central facts, as is commonly done, even by the most critical   commentators in the United States, for example, Anthony Lewis, who   condemns Israel for attempting to deport a Palestinian advocate of   nonviolence on grounds that he wants "Israel to end its occupation --   which is the goal long sought by the United States and virtually every   other government on earth."¹⁶   In fact, this is the goal long blocked by the United States and   its Israeli Labor Party allies, a goal that has yet to be expressed   clearly even by Peace Now after many years of advocacy of a political   settlement by the PLO and widely under the occupation.¹⁷   As long as such illusions persist, nothing will change.
• on a visit to the village of Beita,   closed under military blockade that bars all contact with the outside   world; gas, water and electricity were cut off, and there were   shortages of milk, flour and vegetables

  • They starve out villages that aren't behaving.

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• The Palestinians "were stateless, living under the humiliation of identity checks, body searches and verbal abuse that were the rule of the Israeli army, watching helplessly as Israel expanded Jewish settlements on what had been their land,"

  • Great quote as to whats going through a Palestinians mind 
• The Intifada "galvanized Palestinians everywhere, and it created an enormous amount of sympathy for the Palestinian cause,"

  • Significance 
• The Israeli army would seize Palestinian stone-throwers and literally break their arms. As these scenes were broadcast to the world,
• the Intifada led to the breakdown of Israel's unity government in 1990.

  • Significance 
• "Labor reached the conclusion that one cannot suppress the Intifada and must give the Palestinians some form of statehood because the Intifada cannot be beaten just militarily," Morris says. "Whereas the Likud preferred basically a military solution to the Intifada."

  • Split the government so that the right was saying to continue suppressing them with military force and the left was saying give them a state. 

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• The Palestinians were largely unarmed, so the enduring picture of the intifada is one of young men and boys throwing stones and rocks at Israeli troops.

• Since the invention of the word, the oppressed have located manifold ways to express their suffering:
• The Palestinians are no exception to this, and have persisted, on many occasions, in spite of the censor's suppression and blackening pen, in inscribing and expressing the levels of oppression and domination through sometimes simple descriptions of the daily and the mundane
• The Intifada (or "shaking off" in Arabic) was a popular civil uprising that took place between 1987 and 1990 as a response to the Israeli occupation

  • again specific times. Good for intro
• Hence the Intifada was, psychologically speaking, a resistance to oppression and an effort to create independent institutional structures, in order to make the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza more self-reliant and autonomous.
• These expressions of freedom, which were sporadic at the outset but subsequently became organized, were met with great resistance and opposition from both external and internal sources.
• Israel as the occupying power relentlessly pursued a policy of suppression that was threefold in nature: 1) repression of any organization which threatened to unite the Palestinians in an effort to oppose the occupation; 2) a policy of divide and rule, inherited from the British Mandate, in which divisions were fomented between the various groups that aimed at resisting the occupation; 3) promotion of alternative structures with an accommodating and compliant leadership, in order to undermine the leaders selected by the people.

  • Policy of suppression. Thats good. Use
• dministrative detentions without trials, deportations, intimidation, assassinations, sanctions (the closing of shops, for example), the uprooting of ancient olive orchards, the constant changing of bureaucratic procedures (e.g., for acquiring and renewing ID papers and licenses) to disrupt the daily lives of workers, the banning of youth and student committees, the demolition of houses, trade restrictions, curfews, the confiscation of land, as well as the practice of torture in prison.

  • Consequences for the Intifada
• Since 1967, the year in which Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza, generations of Palestinians have grown up knowing that they were under occupation

  • Grown up with hopelessness
• The Intifada was an attempt to change their lives. It was a turning point that produced new Palestinian leaders among those living under the occupation. It made Israel realize the high costs of the status quo of occupation, while paving the way for a peace agreement that transformed world opinion about the Palestinians as a people in control of their fate.
  

  • This is the significance more than a description 
• the Intifada represents the first sustained, mass-based popular revolt of the Palestinians.

  • GOOD for intro!
• objective: ending the occupation and paving the way for self-determination

  • also good for intro
• Its character results from the historical development of an oppression/resistance dialectic structured by the political, economic and social realities
• artists were prohibited from painting in the four colors of the Palestinian flag, curricula in the schools were interfered with, and the free flow of information was curtailed, as were most cultural activities. Schools and colleges were closed at a moment's notice, since they were suspected of being breeding grounds for the expression of a national consciousness.

  • Some small methods of Israeli oppression 
• Women prisoners were subject to torture and rape in Israeli jails.

  • ^^ Important
• The Israeli military authorities were cognizant of the role that family honor plays in Palestinian families, and utilized these methods in an effort to break family cohesiveness.
• All that was needed at this juncture was one additional spark to produce an explosion, and that took place in Gaza on 9 December 1987, when an Israeli military vehicle rammed into a crowd of demonstrators, killing several Palestinian civilians

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