Word of the Quarter: “Intifada”

By Ruy Martinez

Socialists Must Fight for the Next Intifada – a Bottom-Up and Democratic Struggle – to Be Victorious

Intifada ( انتفاضة) literally means “tremor” or “shuddering,” to shake off an oppressor. In the Nakba of 1948 – the catastrophe when war was waged on Palestinains – many were killed and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven off their land. Perhaps even since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Palestinian people have been oppressed, with an oppressor set to take their land, to destroy their prosperity, and make even the concept of a Palestinian people disappear. To shake off the yoke of this oppressor and to defeat the Zionist political project is something which any self-respecting socialist must support.

To understand the history of the intifada in the Palestinian context, one has to understand the horror of the Nakba, both in its banality and barbarity. In 1917, the British government proclaimed that Palestine would be a nation for Jewish people in what would become known as the Balfour Declaration. The end of the First World War in 1919 and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire let the British impose their will over Arabia broadly. Indeed, the first High Commissioner over Mandatory Palestine was Zionist Herbert Samuel, who began to implement the triple strategy of Zionists at the time: to take their land, to take their jobs, and to take their produce. In 1969, Israeli Labor Party leader David Hacohen wrote the following:

“I had to fight my friends … to defend that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there. […] To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the skies the Kereen Kayemet [Jewish Fund] that sent Hanlon to Beirut to buy land from absentee effendi [landlords] and to throw the fellahin [peasants] off the land – to buy dozens of dunams [of land] from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited…”

Zionist paramilitaries like the Haganah and Irgun were also used to oppress the Arab people during the Great Arab Revolt of 1936 to 39, along with fascist paramilitaries like Lehi. These groups would later go on to commit atrocity after atrocity, committing more than 70 massacres of Palestinian people from 1947 to 48, depopulating 530 settlements, killing 15,000 people, and forcing 750,000 to leave on pain of death. After various failed Arab state coalitions failed to defeat Israel, they occupied all of Gaza and the West Bank. 

In 1987, an Israeli tank crashed into a convoy of cars carrying Palestinian workers outside of the Jabaliya refugee camp on the edge of Gaza, though resistance had begun earlier due to the “iron fist” repressive response of Israel. This policy, begun by Labor Minister of Defence Yitzhak Rabin, was reportedly meant “to make life so difficult for the Arabs that they leave the territories.” Nowhere else in the world but Gaza under Rabin did the state organize the demolition of the homes of protestors, for example. Indeed, one could argue that Rabin’s policies of ethnic cleansing fueled the intifada.

First Intifada

The first intifada, which had begun after dramatic Israeli escalations to Palestinian protests, was characterized by the organization of Palestinian people from the bottom up. While the leadership of the intifada nominally included the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the more realistic assessment is that this leadership was tenuous. A unique mobilization of all of Palestinian society – from clerics to workers, students to farmers – began, armed with little more than stones and Molotov cocktails. Demonstrations and strikes gripped the nation.

What is shocking about the first intifada is that by all accounts the disparity in forces was extreme. The Palestinian people were faced with modern military machinery, mass collective punishment, deportations, and house demolitions, not to mention beatings, arrests, and death. Yet the collective action of the Palestinian people was uniquely able to force Israel, amid growing international ire, to negotiate with the PLO. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and promising a two state solution, were a response to the powerful upheaval. However, the negotiations between the PLO and Israel, brokered by the US, ended in a disastrous failure, a premature surrender of the movement that demoralized the people of Palestine.

The first intifada was a mass uprising, with protests, rallies and strikes, with thousands of democratic committees on all levels organizing this resistance, directed against the military oppression by Israel.

Second Intifada

In 2000, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon flagrantly visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Seven protestors were shot by Sharon’s security forces, followed by the murder of Muhammad al-Durrah, a twelve-year-old boy who was shot in his father’s arms on video for the world to see. This would inspire the second intifada – also known as the Al-Aqsa intifada. Israeli forces responding to the protests fired more than 1,300,000 bullets in Gaza alone. As one of the IDF commanders morbidly noted, the operation should have been called “one bullet for every child.” Mass bombing of neighborhoods became a feature of the IDF’s criminal behavior. 

The primary goal of this intifada was not to expose the Israeli occupation to the world or to carry out acts of vengeance; above all, its purpose was collective self-defense and the dislodging of the Israeli military. Unfortunately, the democratic character of the first intifada – with thousands of bottom-up committees formed in the struggle – was no longer present. The methods were much more akin to terrorist attacks that indiscriminately targeted military and civilian targets in Israel. 

While the second intifada was able to force Israel to leave Gaza, it also led to the building of the Green Wall and spurred more Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

Still, the Palestinian people have not lost their fighting spirit or hope. Throughout the 2010s, mass uprisings of students and regular people have erupted in Gaza, such as the March of Return of 2018, or the ‘firecracker intifada’ of 2014. Israel’s response has continuously been marked by extreme violence, mass arrests, and terror. Thus, the current siege of Gaza has to be understood in this context.

We are in a unique moment in history where public support for Israel in the US is beginning to crater. Our task as socialists in the US is to press the moment as far as we can, to not only fight to defend Palestinian people today with a ceasefire, but organize such that the US government no longer supports Israel. This will not be accomplished today or tomorrow, but we must diligently and urgently organize so that in the future, the next uprising along the lines of the first intifada – a democratic mass movement of Palestinian people supported by the working class internationally – will be a victory.