Intifada

Intifada (انتفاضة, intifāḍa, from the Arabic root nafaḍa, “to shake off”) names two specific Palestinian uprisings against Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza: the First Intifada of 1987 to 1993, and the Second Intifada (also called the al-Aqsa Intifada) of 2000 to 2005, the latter marked by mass suicide bombings. The word entered Hebrew as a loanword, אינתיפאדה, transliterated rather than translated, because Hebrew had no existing term for the phenomenon. Literally the word means shaking something off the way one shakes dust from a garment or fruit from a tree; politically it came to mean a mass uprising, short of full war, combining strikes, protest, stone-throwing and (in the second wave) organized terrorism.

The First Intifada began on 9 December 1987 in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza after a traffic accident involving an Israeli truck killed four Palestinians, a spark that ignited years of accumulated friction under the post-1967 occupation. It was largely a civilian revolt: strikes, boycotts, graffiti and stone-throwing, organized locally by a Unified National Leadership rather than directed from abroad, though the PLO in Tunis moved to claim and shape it. Israeli and Palestinian casualty figures, and the uprising’s timeline through the 1991 Madrid Conference and the 1993 Oslo Accords that formally ended it, are documented in Jewish Virtual Library’s First Intifada record.

The Second Intifada began in late September 2000, after the collapse of the Camp David summit that July and Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa Mosque, which Palestinian factions used as the pretext for a campaign already being prepared. Unlike the first, it was armed from the outset: Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades ran a sustained suicide-bombing campaign against Israeli buses, cafes and markets that killed over 1,000 Israelis by the time it wound down around 2005. Israel’s response included the construction of the West Bank security barrier, whose effectiveness against the bombing campaign is documented by the Washington Institute’s study of the northern West Bank fence. Background, timeline and the shift from the first uprising’s stone-throwing to the second’s bombings are covered in the ADL’s Second Intifada backgrounder and Jewish Virtual Library’s overview of the al-Aqsa Intifada. The fuller course of both uprisings, including who escalated first, is at Who started the intifadas.

Misuse today. The word has drifted from a historical label into a rhetorical weapon detached from either 1987 or 2000. “Globalize the intifada,” chanted at rallies since October 2023, exports the term’s association with armed uprising to a global audience with no West Bank or Gaza in view; see Globalize the intifada for how that slogan functions and how it has been read by courts and platforms as incitement rather than protest. The activist outlet The Electronic Intifada borrowed the word as a brand in 2001, aligning itself explicitly with the uprising model rather than negotiation. Accurate usage keeps the term anchored to its two historical referents, an unarmed-turned-partly-armed 1987 uprising and a bombing campaign that began in 2000, both against a specific occupation, not as a generic synonym for “resistance” applicable anywhere Jews live. The armed, suicide-bombing character of the second wave is also the throughline critics point to when the word resurfaces in slogans after events like October 7: the historical intifada was not symbolic.

Intifada

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