Palestinian Intifadas “shaking off civil disobedience movements”: 1936,1987, 2000, and 2011

I still cannot believe how this Palestinian people managed to survive as an entity after a century of continuous pogroms and programs to wipe this tenacious people out from the consciousness of world community, as a people entitled for a State and the dignity of a special community that lived for centuries in the same land of Palestine.

Starting in 1918, and for over 18 years, the British mandated power over Palestine refused to hold any election of any kinds (even local and municipal elections) for the Palestinian people.

France had already executed democratic elections for parliaments in Syria and Lebanon since 1920! Why England failed to emulate democratic processes in its mandated States? The Jews represented one tenth of the population.  The Zionist organization refused to have any sort of democratic elections in Palestine until the immigrant Jews reached a majority of the population.

In 1936, Sheikh Al Qassam was assassinated and the Palestinian civil disobedience lasted three years.

The mandated British power dispatched 100,000 soldiers to quell the uprising, using harsher new military laws, new torture techniques, new terrorist methods…

All the modern Torture techniques that Nazi Germany studied and applied…

All the terrorist methods that the Zionist State retained in its laws and legal books, applied and went even further until today…

All of the movement containment methods that Israel transferred to the US domestic security forces after 9/11 attack, on the ground of fighting “terrorists” and are still applied on the protesters of Occupy Wall Street

During the WWII, the British mandate refused to enlist Palestinians in its army, but strongly encouraged the Jews in Palestine to enlist, learn how to fight, do war, learn terror tactics, and amass weapons for the next phase after the war.

In 1948, the State of Israel executed its plans and programs that it worked upon in the late 30’s, with the facilitation of the British in providing all kinds of intelligence pieces and data on the Palestinian towns and villages.

The Palestinians were forced by random violence and genocide tactics to flee, transfer, and evacuate their homes, villages and lands…Over 400,000 Palestinians fled to temporary refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria…

Temporary camps that evolved to be permanent shantytown residence for the next 60 years…

In 1973, the hideous Golda Meir PM, proclaimed: “Palestinians? There is no Palestinian people, period...”

In 1982 and 2003 Ariel Sharon committed two genocides against the Palestinian civilian refugees. In the Sabra and Shatila (Chatila) camps (Beirut), the genocides that lasted three nights and three days: 2,000 were buried hastily in dug up graveyards, less than a meter deep, and another 1,000 were carried away, never to reappear.

Solemn U.S. security guarantees for safeguarding the unarmed Palestinians in the camps were proven untrustworthy, as Ambassador Philip Habib of President Reagan acknowledged.

In 2003, The camp of Jennine in the occupied West Bank, the genocide lasted an entire week.  Over 5,000 civilians were buried in a crater larger and deeper than Ground Zero in New York.  Tanks rolled over live children, women, and elderly people…

Of the many genocides committed on Palestinians, the “advanced” democracies in Europe and the USA didn’t bat an eyelid…

Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, put siege on West Beirut, cut off water supply, electricity, food supply… for 3 months and bombarded the city by air, sea and land.  Israel entered the Capital Beirut and forced the PLO to vacate Lebanon to Tunisia and Yemen…

Israel  carried out assassinations of the Palestinian leadership in Tunis (October 1985).

In the spring of 1987, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) met in Algeria and a significant unity in the ranks was accomplished and the decision to getting the Palestinians inside the occupied land to rise and confront their occupiers.

As the Arab Summit held in Amman (Jordan) in the fall 1987 virtually ignored the plight of the Palestinian people under occupation, the spirit of the occupied Palestinians rose to the challenge:  This spirit of determination moved on the ground, using civil disobedience, stones, rocks and bare flesh…all that they ever had…

The catalyst for the First Intifada movement started as a protest after 4 Palestinians in Gaza were killed when an Israeli truck collided with two vans carrying Palestinian workers.

On that first day, the Israeli authorities shot and killed a number of Palestinians, including an infant, Fatmeh Alqidri of Gaza City. The protests spread immediately to Nablus on the West Bank the next day, where the Israeli authorities shot and killed more unarmed Palestinians, including eighteen-year-old Ibrahim Ekeik.

Protests broke out in East Jerusalem on December 13, and by the end of the first week, a general strike had paralyzed all of the Occupied Territories. Ensuing clashes spread throughout the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

The protests occurred in the context of increasing violence by heavily armed settlers in the Occupied Territories against the unarmed Palestinian people, growing unemployment and rising national consciousness, and the political mobilization which had taken place in the Diaspora since the 1960s, and especially since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982, entering Capital Beirut and forcing the PLO to vacate Lebanon to Tunisia and Yemen…

The Intifada was a popular, national rebellion, carried by the youth (some 60 per cent of the society was under the age of 15) with the active participation of Palestinian workers and all sections of the society.

Palestinians resigned from the local police forces and from the civil administration, and Palestinian shopkeepers attempted to set their own hours and prices.

The Intifada organized “people committees“, many of them publishing their own information and news bulletins, exposing the day-to-day reality of life under occupation and spreading the communiques of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising — a coalition of the main political parties — with the goal to end the Israeli occupation and establish Palestinian independence.

The response of the State of Israel was characteristic of its entire policy since before it was created in 1948:  Random acts of violence, terrorism,  closing the Palestinian universities and schools, deporting activists, scorching and destroying homes, and firing live ammunition and “rubber” bullets into crowds, especially of youth.

By July 1, 1988, the Israeli Central Command declared all the Palestinian popular committees to be illegal.

In 1989, the number of soldiers deployed by Israel to the West Bank was more than 3 times the number used to conquer it during the Six Day war (1967), when vast numbers of Palestinians were driven from their homes; some four hundred thousand Palestinians were displaced, about half of them displaced for the second time.

By the end of the first year of the Intifada the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces was 218, the injured were over 20,000, over 15,000 were arrested, 12,000 jailed and 34 deported under the pretext that they were “committee activists. 

Over 1,500 Palestinians died and thousands more were maimed during the first Intifada, brought to an end by the Oslo process.

In November 1988, the Palestine National Council adopted its Declaration of Independence and announced the establishment of the State of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, initially recognized by 55 countries.  The number of States recognizing the Palestinian State has increased to 120 today.

At the end of the first war on Iraq in 1991, the US administration realized that the Palestinian problem must reach a resolution if any kinds of stability is to be sustained in the Middle East.  President George Bush Senior inaugurated  the “New Arab Order”: A conference was held in Madrid.

The Palestinians were inspired by the heroic resistance of the Lebanese people during Lebanon invasion in 1982.  The First Palestinian Intifada in turn inspired the resistance of the Lebanese people to resume resistance against Israel’s illegal occupation of South Lebanon throughout the 1990’s.

The Oslo Accords of September 1993 refused to recognize the right of the Palestinians to their own sovereign State and the right of return of five million people in the Diaspora, who had been deported since 1948.  As Rabin PM was assassinated by one of his Jewish bodyguard, the Oslo Accord faltered and stopped.  Israel implemented its greatest expansion of colonial settlements into Palestinian territory (doubling between 1983 and 1991) — its policies of “Transfer and dispersal of the Palestinians”.

On September 28, 2000, candidate Ariel Sharon visited the Mosque, supported by thousands of security forces armed to the teeth, deployed in and around the Old City in Jerusalem.  The Palestinians spontaneously unleashed their second popular Intifada (also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada), in response to the calculated provocations of Ariel Sharon’s “visit” to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Ensuing clashes with protestors, armed only with stones, left in the first two days alone five Palestinians dead and over 200 injured. The incident sparked a widespread uprising in the Occupied Territories, inside Israel and the Arab World, anger throughout the world and brought the peace process to a halt.

The Second Intifada forced Israel to build the Wall of Shame (strongly condemned by the UN) and vacating all Jewish settlements and Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip. In 2011, even the insipid Mahmoud Abbas (President of the Palestinian Authority) gave a speech in the UN demanding the recognition of a Palestinian State.

On the first Intifada on December 9, 1987, the Palestinian people gave political form and content to their more than 100-year-old struggle for self-determination and national independence, reflecting new levels of national unity not seen since the Great Revolt of the mid-1930’s.

Palestinian resisting and steadfast people , I salute you.

Note:  Last week, Gingrich, the Republican Presidential candidate, proclaimed that there is no Palestinian people for any homeland. 

Worse, every Palestinian is necessarily a terrorist…

Is Gingrich running in the US or in Israel? Gingrich has Alzheimer disease?  The Washington Post published a piece claiming that Gingrich is technically Not off the mark!