Tragically, these horrific events in Lebanon – and this is always true about the correlation between regional developments and Palestine – did not affect Sharon’s strategy in the Occupied Territories.

  Out of that particular ministry and in command of other ministries, Sharon intensified the strangulation policies in the Occupied Territories well into the mid-1980s. The facts he established on the ground drove home the message of what life would be like in years to come. If the occupied people looked for guidance to their principal representative body, the PLO, they would have found very little response. Since the destruction of its headquarters in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, it was too far away in Tunis and too disempowered to assist. In the immediate years preceding the first Intifada, it was busy looking for a rapprochement with Jordan, but to no avail, as the Hashemite dynasty was distancing itself from any involvement in the West Bank, as were most of the member states of the Arab League.21

  Inspiration came from elsewhere – from the resistance in Lebanon, by both Palestinian and Shi’ite fighters. At the beginning of 1985 policymakers in Israel were deeply involved in the Lebanese quagmire. Although the Occupied Territories were relatively calm, the constant interchange of Israeli troops on duty from occupied southern Lebanon, where there was active fighting, to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where they just had to police the areas, has blurred the boundaries of the two arenas. The time was ripe in both occupied areas to try a more active resistance: the armed one in Lebanon was more successful, the non-violent one in Palestine was less effective.

  From 1985 to 1987 the Israeli army treated the two occupied areas in the same way. Even before the first Intifada, the Israeli army employed what it called an ‘iron fist’ policy towards any sign of resistance. The open-prison model was slowly collapsing. The iron fist policy was executed not by the Likud alone: in 1984 the Likud and Labour formed a unity government that would hold power until 1989. The callous, punitive policy of that government preceded the uprising. Gad Yaacobi, who was the Minister of Finance in that government, said years later that the policy was not really a retaliation against Palestinian activity, since there was very little activity. The unity government, he asserted, wanted to accelerate what he called the ‘creeping de-facto annexation’ policy. In hindsight he regretted that policy, writing that it ‘contributed to a growing militancy of the Palestinian society’.22 Thus the Israelis themselves could not stick for too long to the open-prison model.

  The only feature of the open prison that remained in place until the first Intifada was the right to work in Israel. Already by 1977, half of the occupied areas’ hired workers were employed in Israel (it grew from 5000 in 1969 to about 100,000 in the 1980s) and the Palestinian areas became, after the US, the second preferred destination of Israeli exports.23

  This ‘privilege’ was actually the right to participate in a modern-day slave market – working with no social rights or health insurance, no unions or labour rights. The privilege, so to speak, was still granted until the outbreak of the second Intifada. The first Intifada produced some fifty instances of frustrated Palestinian employees venting their fury on their employers, or random people in the street, more often than not using a knife. This wave of violence reached a peak in 1989 and it was the pretext for the beginning of a new policy of barring and limiting Palestinian workers in Israel. The labour market preferred young males, but the security system now barred more and more young men in Israeli building companies, agricultural markets and in other non-skilled occupations in which a labour force was needed.

  Israeli experts, who were surprised by the outbreak of the first Intifada, put some of the explanation down to the socio-economic conditions in the Occupied Territories, which they deemed to have dramatically improved under Israeli rule.24 Their Palestinian counterparts disagreed vehemently. They claimed that the Occupied Territories’ economy was run very much like that of a colony during the colonial period. Such policies created a total dependency of the colony on the colonist, and in the case of the Palestinian areas led to the ruination of both agriculture and industry. Even if wage earners briefly had a 15 per cent rise in their monthly earnings, compared to the pre-occupation period, with no infrastructure for investment or savings and the rise of the cost of living, this did not mean much at the end of the day. To this can be added the lack of access to traditional Arab export markets and unrestricted competition from cheap Israeli products. Israeli restrictions on Palestinian economic activity and the Israeli claims for land and water resources during the expansion of settlements rendered the additional income insignificant in the long run for most Palestinians.25

  And yet, this was still a more complex reality, as long as the open-prison model persisted. The most troubling aspect of it was that any rights to work in Israel, or even to earn a reasonable wage in the Occupied Territories, were not rights at all – they were rewards. ‘Rewards’ for good behaviour only exist in the world of the prison and detention centres. But within this context it is important to note that the open-prison model enabled daily commuters such as merchants, students and workers to move freely on the main roads.

  But it was still a prison, and as much a part of this everyday reality was the Israelis’ constant and systematic punitive policy against the Palestinian people. From 1967 to 1982 Israel’s military government demolished 1338 Palestinian homes on the West Bank. Also over this period, more than 300,000 Palestinians were detained by Israeli security forces without trial for various lengths of time.26

  It is indicative of the official Israeli mindset that the oppressive side of the open-prison model never seemed to register in the Jewish State’s overall strategy. In the analysis of the first Intifada by both mainstream politicians and academics, the collapse of the open-prison model was almost exclusively attributed to what were deemed to be faulty prisoner exchanges back in 1985. This was a deal struck with Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP organization in the wake of the successful Palestinian abduction of Israeli soldiers in Lebanon. The theory, put forward in the most widely read book in Israel about the first Intifada, by Ze’ev Schiff, the late Haaretz chief military correspondent, and Ehud Ya’ari, Israeli television’s leading orientalist, was that those released in the deal incited the population and instigated violence.27 One reason for the Israeli retrospective attempt to explain the uprising on the Jibril deal, was a genuine inability to grasp the level of Palestinian suffering and the evil nature of the Israeli oppression, as the main causes for the uprising. This is why the Minister of Defence at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, did not bother to interrupt his visit to the USA and return home when the Intifada broke out. He assumed it was a routine disruption that would soon be over.

  Finally, in this period it is possible to provide a fine distinction between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Human rights organizations took their time in providing a better idea of the living standards and conditions under the occupation. The first reports suggested that overall conditions in the Strip were incomparably better and this is confirmed by a kind of oral history of the Strip that one can intuitively refer to; there were, in the words of one report, ‘lesser levels of distress’. This could be attributed to stronger traditional structures of society and a greater sense of cohesiveness and solidarity.28

  In August 1987 the Israeli military in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip published a booklet proudly announcing how successful its rule in the last twenty years had been. Colour photographs of happy Palestinians were juxtaposed with black and white pictures of gloomy Palestinians from the pre-June 1967 period. The main reason for such pride was the increased standard of living in comparison to the 1950s. Who is to say it would not have grown under Jordanian rule as well, but that was hardly the point. When, four months later, the first Intifada erupted it was clear that the improved standard of living, if indeed this is what it had been, was part of the open-prison concept against which the Palestinians rose. The booklet was withdrawn hastily from bookshops at the beginning of the Intifada.29

  But anyone with an eye for the future – and there were a few, men such as the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem turned independent researcher and observer, Meron Benvenisti – understood that the ‘facts on the ground’ policy dramatically changed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to such an extent that one uprising could not turn the clock back – as it turned out, two uprisings could not do it either.30 What changed most was the physical landscape of the Occupied Territories in a way that fundamentally limited the living space of their inhabitants. It wasn’t just the geography that was altered beyond recognition; the demography was transformed as well. Intensive Jewish colonization was accompanied by the stealthy transfer of Palestinians who left and were not allowed to return. The number of people deported for political activity – quite often without any official charge – was, in 1987 alone, around 1500.31 Ostensibly, the reason for issuing a deportation order was to pre-empt any terrorist activity from the individual being deported. In practice, however, deportation more than once served as a punitive action.

  Deportation of residents from their homes in occupied territory, whether to another place in the occupied territory or to somewhere outside the territory, is prohibited by international humanitarian law. However, international humanitarian law provides small exceptions by which the occupying state may evacuate residents from their homes, for ‘imperative military reasons’ or for the greater security of the local population. In such cases, the evacuation must be temporary and, during that time, the occupying power must ensure the basic needs of the evacuees. Israel’s previous deportation policy failed to meet either of these criteria and therefore was flagrantly in breach of international humanitarian law (not that anyone who drafted that law could seriously have believed occupation could continue for more than four decades!). On top of that, quite often deportees had no idea why they were being treated in such a way.32

  With the coming to power of the Likud, the Labour party would become more vociferous about such violations. A new reality developed on the Israeli political map: a voice (which had a party or two representing it in the parliament) that wanted to see nothing less than an unconditional end to the occupation, and which was aroused when blatant violations of human rights were reported, succeeded in enlisting the support of about 100,000 Jews on a good day, and half of that for the rest of the year. This was the anti-occupation Zionist left, as ineffective then as it is today. It never associated the occupation with the ills of Zionism itself and therefore could not provide an alternative policy to the centre and right of the map – the one that faithfully implemented the strategic decisions described in the opening pages of this book.

  A few of them did make the connection. The most Zionist among them was Boaz Evron, who left his comfort zone of power and influence for the sake of fighting the occupation; his was one of the lone voices crying in the Zionist wilderness. I make no mention of the others here because I feel they are already well known, but for some reason Evron does not appear among those who deserve to be recorded as part of a more genuine, and less Zionist, dissident movement.33

  Evron was a senior journalist who wrote for a number of newspapers, including Haaretz, and a well-known publicist. What made him cross the line should have alerted many others, but alas it did not. He was moved by the monologue of a soldier who wrote in his kibbutz journal (every kibbutz in Israel has a kind of ‘village voice’) of what he had seen and done in the occupied West Bank. The soldier told how he and his comrades entered a Palestinian school, locked about twenty eight-year-old boys in a classroom, threw in some gas grenades and kept the children in there for quite a while, causing such panic that at least half of them jumped out of the windows, breaking their legs in the fall. This was a punishment for stone throwing by students from a nearby college, who were not caught. What drew Evron’s attention was not so much the horrific story itself, but the fact that the soldier who published the story in a kibbutz publication seemed to believe that telling the story absolved him and his friends from his actions. The same applied to a group of soldiers in a famous publication, soon after the June 1967 war, entitled Conversations Between Soldiers. The uneasiness Evron felt in 1967 became a review of liberal Zionism and its role in sanitizing and disguising the horrors of Zionist colonization and occupation since 1882.34

  And maybe at the end of the day, given the randomness of the event that eventually triggered the first Intifada, a road accident in the Gaza Strip, it was the daily abuse of basic human and civil rights that became both the hallmark of the ‘enlightened occupation’ and the most hated aspect of it.

  Chapter Ten

  The First Intifada, 1987–1993

  On 8 December 1987 a truck that killed four inhabitants of the Jabaliyya refugee camp in Gaza became the event that signalled the beginning of the first uprising, or the Intifada. Later, historians would point to other discrete violent events before and around that date which signalled the ‘official’ beginning of the revolt. With historical hindsight we understand better today that it was not these particular incidents themselves that were so significant but, rather, the local and popular reaction to them; a reaction that for a while transformed radically the reality on the ground. The way the occupied people reacted to the December 1987 accident triggered a response unprecedented in its intensity and scope. Not since 1937 had Palestine witnessed such mass popular participation against oppression and dispossession.

  A week later, six Palestinians had already been killed in the brutal Israeli retaliation to the stone throwing, demonstrations and makeshift roadblocks. The number of dead Palestinians rose dramatically in the first few months of the Intifada, most of them killed in non-violent demonstrations. This was followed by mass arrests and a punitive policy aimed at paralysing life in the Occupied Territories: schools were forced to shut down, shops and businesses were closed and people stayed at home.1

  The international community responded as never before to the occupation. The Palestinians were virtually and visually depicted as brave ‘Davids’ confronting ruthless ‘Goliaths’ and the images of young boys slinging a stone at a tank became a hallmark of this uprising. Condemnation was heard everywhere and the UN Security Council was obliged to intervene when the repertoire of punitive Israeli actions started to include mass expulsions as well as other means of coercion. Resolutions 607 and 608 of the Security Council ordered Israel to stop these actions, to no avail.2

  It is hard to define chronologically the Intifada, but it lasted more or less for six years. One thousand Palestinians were killed by the Israelis and more than 120,000 were arrested, many of them under the age of sixteen.3

  As mentioned in the previous chapter, the open-prison model gradually collapsed. Several causes contributed to this. The scholarly and popular literature summarized well the reasons for the initiation of what was overall a campaign of civil disobedience and demonstrations. The uprising was attributed first and foremost to the abuse described so far in this book. Other factors were the economic oppression, the suppression of national rights, the frontal attack on the PLO inside the territories and outside in 1982, the indifference of the Arab world and a peace process that insisted on finding a way of partitioning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Israel.4

  The uprising was initiated by activists on the ground. A new body, the Unified National Leadership, directed the uprising; so impressed were they with its effectiveness in coordinating the non-violent resistance (namely, an alternative to the PLO) that two Israeli scholars defined this as the ‘alternative leadership’.5 This leadership worked mainly through the dissemination of leaflets – the same way, twenty years later, that activists would use Facebook and Twitter for similar purposes. The new body included representatives of the four main PLO factions of the time: Fatah, the PFLP, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian People’s Party. This body formulated the strategy in the early days of the Intifada, in tandem with local ad hoc organizations and a certain level of coordination with the PLO headquarters in Tunis. This synergy propelled a campaign that wanted to compel the world to notice the occupation and one that hoped to induce the international community to act against the continued oppression and occupation.

  The uprising began in the Jabaliyya refugee camp in Gaza in December 1987. At least, this is the accepted historiographical version: it actually seems that it erupted in different places at the same time. It was a composition of civil action and resistance: general strikes, boycott of Israeli goods, refusal to pay Israeli taxes, the famous stone throwing at the occupation forces and here and there Molotov cocktails. It also included, alas, account settling with collaborators, a painful reminder of the venom that occupation injects into the bodies and minds of the occupied.6

  Israel reacted to this basically non-violent uprising with great violence. From the very start the Israeli political and military elite was directed by one basic impulse – anger – and hence most of the Israeli actions in the first year of the Intifada were punitive in nature. The metaphor of prison wardens acting against rebellious inmates seems particularly relevant for our case study. This was graphically instructed by Yitzhak Rabin, the Defence Minister, when he toured the Jalazone refugee camp near Ramallah. He stated: ‘The first priority of the security forces is to prevent violent demonstrations with force, power and blows . . . We will make it clear who is running the territories.’7 These blows and the force were translated in many cases into a killing spree that left a large number of demonstrators dead.8

 

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