The roots of the Intifada run deep. As early as 1948, it seemed almost inevitable that there would be violence around the issue of Israel, and there were violent outbreaks. However, the Intifada is called the first Intifada for a reason. But I do want you to be aware: the questions of armed resistance, or nonviolent resistance, were constantly on the minds of Palestinians through the years leading up to the first Intifada.

Intifada Roots

The Palestinian Intifada was not a coordinated uprising. It began and spread very quickly from the West Bank to Gaza. Over time, local committees and neighborhoods coordinated to make a very decentralized movement, but it never began as a centrally organized uprising.

The immediate cause of the Intifada, or the spark, appears to have been when an IDF vehicle crashed into a truck in Gaza. This happened on December 8, 1987, and the truck was carrying Palestinian laborers home from work. 4 were killed, 7 wounded. The previous week, an Israeli had been stabbed to death, and rumors spread amongst Palestinians that it was an act of vengeance. However, this was, again, the immediate cause. All the tinder for the fire was prepared: the Intifada was as much an expression of outrage by the poor, young, and underprivileged as it was a rebellion against Israeli rule. Now, the cause was more than just the accident. The rumors ended up compounding and growing more intense, and when thousands turned out for the workers' funerals, it turned into an angry protest. The IDF dispersed the demonstration with tear gas, and live ammunition, as they routinely did. This resulted in the first death, that of Hatem al-Sisi (20 years old).

This is where most scholars officially mark the start of the First Intifada. The Israelis had thought that this was nothing more than a routine demonstration as always happened, and didn't expect that it would lead to an uprising by 1.5 million Palestinians. Since 1967, the occupied territories had been tinderboxes in and of themselves. As one person described it:

Life in the territories featured “stone throwing, Molotov cocktails, strikes, demonstrations, [and] refusal to pay taxes," while enduring "large-scale arrests, imprisonment without trial, deportations, punitive destruction of homes and property, beating, and the use of tear gas and live ammunition against crowds."

From 1968-1975, the IDF had counted 350 acts of "rebellion" per year, about one a day. The number doubled in the 1970s and early 80s, and then in the mid-late 80s there were roughly 3,000, or 8 a day. But when the Intifada began, it was a totally different ball-game. In the first few months, there were over 42,000 incidents. Left feeling abandoned by the rest of the Arab world, noting the failure of the PLO to advance the idea of Palestinian sovereignty, the people rose up to fight the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As Palestinians put it:

“We support the PLO because we are the PLO.”

The conditions in the occupied territories were, as I mentioned, one of the main contributors to the tinder that caught flame. Though in the 1970s there was an increase in wages and living conditions, the 1980s brought a sharp economic decline for all of Israel. The territories faced greater peril financially, because the Israeli shekel devalued rapidly, and the Palestinian territory economy was tethered to the shekel.

There were other factors as well as those economic and political ones. Settlement activity had picked up through the late 1970s-1980s. 770 settlers per year moved to settlements in the occupied territories between 1967-1977, but this number moved to 5,690 from 1978-1987. The number of settlers was viewed directly as a provocation, and contributed to the bad sentiment. The Palestinians saw it as direct colonization, as 20,000 settlers tripled to 60,000 in the West Bank between 1982-1986, among the Palestinian population of 800,000.

Life in the territories also included things like driving through checkpoints, constant searches, curfews, and school closures. Strikes, demonstrations, and clashes were the response by the Palestinians, and the increased pressure by the Israelis as a response led to increased Palestinian actions as well. The older generations, though they'd begun to move from passive to active resistance, were not nearly as active as the youth. Youth would go out, throw stones and iron bars at IDF soldiers, and otherwise show active opposition to Israeli policy on a regular basis. However, Palestinians at the local level were aware that this would be a public relations fight as much as a direct confrontation with the IDF, and attempted to outlaw guns and knives in protests, because the image of IDF soldiers using guns on stone throwing Palestinians would be a public relations outrage. Kids would even tie checkered headscarfs around their heads, from the age of 7 to teenage years, and go out to throw stones.

The IDF responded to the uprising by adopting more violent methods. Palestinians were confronted by armed troops, and Israeli forces levelled homes on the suspicion that Palestinian stone throwers lived there.

What I've told you up to here is the Palestinian view of the Intifada. What I'll try to explain now is how the Israeli government saw the Intifada and its origins.

The Israelis saw the root of the Intifada as November 25, 1987. On that day, two hang gliders flown by members of the PFLP (Popular Liberation Front for Palestine) landed outside the headquarters camp of an IDF infantry brigade. One person ran past a sleepy guard, and shot everyone in his path, throwing grenades as well. 6 soldiers died, 7 were wounded, before he was shot dead. Two weeks later, the Intifada would erupt.

Israelis see this as the spark because of the slogans used in some cases by Palestinians. The cry "six to one" was used quite often, and 6:1 was written on the walls of alleyways in Gaza.

Israelis recognize that the uprising began as a political struggle, and that it had its roots in economic conditions that were poor in the territories (and throughout Israel). As Morris puts it:

The main energizing force of the Intifada was the frustration of the national aspirations of the 650,000 inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, 900,000 of the West Bank, and 130,000 of East Jerusalem, who wanted to live in a Palestinian state and not as stateless inhabitants under a brutal, foreign military occupation.

Israelis, however, don't see the rule as being as brutal as it was made out, particularly before the Intifada.

Israeli rule had allowed institutions of self-rule and political resistance to grow throughout the occupied territories. Universities were licensed and set up, despite being hotbeds of resistance, and the Islamic Association (a front for the Muslim Brotherhood and later Hamas) was also allowed. Israeli indifference allowed other things to arise by default. The local "popular committees", and trade unions, professional associations, newspapers, and resistance groups were formed before the Intifada, and Israelis were indifferent to them for the most part. Thus, Israelis saw Palestinians as becoming capable of organizing themselves more effectively, and though Israel had determined that it would not negotiate with the PLO or Palestinians, it didn't see itself as repressing the Palestinians as badly as they made out, in a political sense.

Fatah's youth wing (the Shabiba) and the Islamic Association warrant some extra discussion. These were primarily youth-oriented groups, and with membership in the tens of thousands in Shabiba, there were numerous community activities and social services (like repairing sewers, for example) that allowed Palestinians some degree of autonomy in their affairs. The Islamic Association, as the Muslim Brotherhood hoped, was trying to revive Islamic values among the youth and general Palestinian populace. As Morris writes:

The members, keeping to their mosques and clubs, appeared to be innocuous; the GSS [Shin-Bet, General Security Service] ignored their anti-Semitic teachings...During the 1970s the return to the Strip of graduates of Egypt's increasingly Islamicized universities supplied fresh energy and cadres. At the same time Gazan students enrolled in the universities in Nablus, Hebron, and Bir Zeit and spread the word of Allah to the West Bank...[Sheik Ahmad Ismail Hassan] Yassin [a prominent Islamic organizer] stayed clear of explicit political incitement, though his movement's publications often struck a crude anti-Semitic note. (One fundamentalist detainee told his Israeli interrogators that "the resurrection of the dead at the End of Days was conditional upon every last Jew being destroyed.")

Israelis, too, feel that part of the problem was the loss of Israeli control to increased violence from Palestinians. In May 1987, 6 Islamic Jihad insurgents broke out of prison, and only 1 of 6 was caught quickly. The rest joined guerrilla cells, and conducted operations, including the killing of an IDF military police captain on August 8th, and a subsequent ambush of a GSS vehicle and grenades being thrown at the military government headquarters in Gaza. At the beginning of October, the luck of the militants ran out violently and publicly. A squad of Islamic Jihad gunmen tried to break through an IDF roadblock, and all three passengers died in the subsequent exchange of gunfire (one was an escapee). 5 days later, GSS agents and police ambushed two cars carrying the rest of the fugitives, and 2 other people. 2 of the escapees (and the other two people) were killed, and 2 escapees managed to get away into Egypt. The tale turned to one of resistance, and demonstrations began. The Israeli authorities responded by leveling the homes of the escapees. As an Islamic Jihad spokesman said, things would never be the same again, and he dated the Intifada as starting on October 6 (the date of the above). In any case, the loss of Israeli control was palpable.