Who started the intifadas?

1987 · 2000 · The intifadas

“Intifada,” Arabic for “shaking off,” names two distinct Palestinian uprisings against Israeli rule, and treating them as one continuous story is the first distortion to correct. The First Intifada (December 1987 to 1993) was a mass civil uprising fought mostly with stones, burning tires and general strikes. The Second Intifada (September 2000 to February 2005) was an armed campaign built around suicide bombings that killed over a thousand Israeli civilians on buses, in cafes and at a Passover seder. Both are called by the same word today, which is exactly how the deliberate planning behind the second gets folded into the spontaneity of the first.

What triggered each uprising

The First Intifada began on 8 December 1987, when an Israeli truck collided with cars carrying Palestinian laborers in Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp, killing four. False rumors that the crash was deliberate revenge for a stabbing days earlier spread through Gaza overnight, and mass rioting broke out the next morning. It was two decades of occupation since the Six-Day War, stalled diplomacy and no political horizon that supplied the fuel; the accident supplied the spark. Hamas was founded that same month by Gaza’s Muslim Brotherhood as a rival to Fatah and the PLO leadership then based in Tunis.

The Second Intifada’s trigger looks similar on the surface and is not. On 28 September 2000, opposition leader Ariel Sharon made a coordinated, daylight visit to the Temple Mount, escorted by police and cleared in advance with Palestinian security officials; no violence accompanied the visit itself. Riots began the next day, after Palestinian Authority radio called on residents to “defend al-Aqsa.” Weeks earlier, Yasser Arafat had walked away from statehood at the 2000 Camp David summit, where Prime Minister Ehud Barak, with President Clinton mediating, offered Gaza and roughly 92 percent of the West Bank with a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat rejected it and made no counter-offer. PA communications minister Imad Falouji admitted it twice, in two separate venues. In a 6 December 2000 interview with the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam: “The PA had begun to prepare for the outbreak of the current intifada since the return from the Camp David negotiations, by request of President Yasir Arafat.” And in a 3 March 2001 speech at the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, reported in Al-Safir and picked up by AP and the Jerusalem Post: “Whoever thinks that the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong. This intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat’s return from the Camp David negotiations.” Sharon’s visit was the pretext; the collapse of Camp David was the cause.

The course of the First Intifada

For nearly six years, Gaza and the West Bank were gripped by strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, and confrontations where Palestinian youths threw stones and firebombs at Israeli soldiers, who responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and, increasingly, live fire. It was a low-technology uprising by design, meant to demonstrate that occupation carried a permanent cost. It also turned inward: PLO-aligned death squads executed close to a thousand Palestinians between 1989 and 1992 as suspected collaborators, often on flimsy or invented grounds, a toll that exceeded what many Israeli units did in the same years. The uprising fed directly into diplomacy it did not by itself resolve: it pushed the 1991 Madrid Conference and, in 1993, the Oslo Accords, the first direct agreement between Israel and the PLO.

The course of the Second Intifada

The second uprising was a different order of violence from the start. Within its first weeks, a Palestinian mob in Ramallah lynched two Israeli reservists who had taken a wrong turn, dragging their mutilated bodies through the street. What followed was a sustained suicide-bombing campaign, at a Netanya Passover seder in March 2002 (30 dead, 140 wounded), a Tel Aviv disco in June 2001 (21 dead, mostly teenagers), on buses and in pizzerias across Israeli cities. Weapons flowed to Fatah-linked militias including the Tanzim, led by Marwan Barghouti, and in January 2002 Israel intercepted the Karine A, a ship carrying 50 tons of Iranian-supplied weapons bound for the PA. Israel answered in March and April 2002 with Operation Defensive Shield, a full reoccupation of West Bank cities to dismantle the bombing networks, and began building the security barrier that cut suicide attacks from the northern West Bank by more than 90 percent. The violence tapered after Arafat, under American pressure following the September 2001 attacks in the United States, made some arrests, and it ended formally at the February 2005 Sharm el-Sheikh summit, where Sharon and new PA president Mahmoud Abbas jointly declared it over.

Forces and casualties, honestly

The First Intifada killed roughly 160 Israelis, about half of them soldiers, and some 1,100 Palestinians died in clashes with Israeli forces, alongside the nearly 1,000 Palestinians killed by fellow Palestinians as accused collaborators. The Second Intifada was far deadlier: more than 1,000 Israelis were murdered, most of them civilians, and Palestinian deaths are estimated near 3,000 to 5,000, the large majority in Gaza and West Bank clashes and Israeli military operations, a share of them combatants and bomb-makers, a share civilians caught in crossfire or checkpoint incidents. Neither side’s dead were evenly distributed between fighters and bystanders, and any honest account says so rather than picking the number that flatters one side.

Outcome and how it is misremembered

Israel completed the Gaza disengagement in 2005, the year the Second Intifada formally ended, withdrawing every soldier and settler from the Strip, only to see rocket fire and, in 2007, a Hamas takeover follow. The barrier and the reoccupation of West Bank cities remain in place today, credited by Israeli security officials with the collapse in suicide bombings after 2002. The word “intifada” itself has since been detached from either historical event and repurposed as a rallying cry, most visibly in the slogan “globalize the intifada”, chanted at Western protests as if it named a stone-throwing protest rather than the campaign that killed over a thousand Israeli civilians in restaurants and on buses. Coverage today routinely calls the Second Intifada a “wave of violence” or a “cycle,” passive language that erases Falouji’s own admission and the sequence: an offer, a rejection, and a planned campaign that followed it. The Second Intifada carries its own dedicated entry for the fuller record.

Second Intifada · Yasser Arafat · The 2000 Camp David summit · Intifada, glossary · Who attacked first, every war · The offers refused

Sources

From Who attacked first on the main site.