Second Intifada
The Second Intifada (2000 to 2005) was a sustained campaign of Palestinian violence against Israelis whose defining weapon was the suicide bomber, and whose defining targets were civilians: buses, cafes, discos, markets and a Passover seder. It killed about 1,100 Israelis, the large majority civilians, and it began weeks after the Palestinian leadership walked away from a state at Camp David.
How it started
Section titled “How it started”In July 2000 at Camp David, Israel’s prime minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state on the large majority of the West Bank and all of Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat refused and made no counter-offer; even President Clinton publicly placed the blame on him. Two months later, following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, coordinated in advance with Palestinian security officials and conducted without entering the mosques, the violence began.
The “Sharon caused it” story did not survive contact with the participants. The international Mitchell Report (2001) concluded the visit “did not cause” the intifada. The PA’s own communications minister, Imad Falouji, said it plainly in March 2001: the intifada “had been planned since Chairman Arafat’s return from Camp David.” Arafat’s widow later said the same. The pretext was a walk on a hill; the cause was a decision. See who started the intifadas and the offers refused.
What it was
Section titled “What it was”Over four years, Palestinian factions, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah’s own al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, carried out more than 130 suicide bombings and thousands of shootings. The emblematic attacks were not battles; they were massacres of people eating dinner:
- Dolphinarium disco, Tel Aviv (June 2001): 21 murdered, most of them teenage girls.
- Sbarro pizzeria, Jerusalem (August 2001): 15 murdered, including 7 children.
- Park Hotel, Netanya (27 March 2002): 30 murdered at a Passover seder, the deadliest single attack, which triggered Operation Defensive Shield.
- Bus after bus: Haifa’s Egged 37, Jerusalem’s line 19, Beersheba, Hadera. Riding to school became an act of courage.
In January 2002 Israel intercepted the Karine A, a ship carrying 50 tons of Iranian weapons to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, ending the claim that the PA chairman was a bystander to the violence he was funding and arming.
How it ended
Section titled “How it ended”Not by negotiation but by defense: Operation Defensive Shield dismantled the bombing networks in the West Bank cities, targeted operations removed the organizers, and the security barrier, begun in 2003 along the areas the bombers crossed, cut successful suicide attacks by over 90 percent. The barrier that Wikipedia’s related articles frame primarily as a land grab is the reason the buses stopped exploding. The violence wound down after Arafat’s death in late 2004 and the Sharm el-Sheikh summit of February 2005.
The toll, honestly
Section titled “The toll, honestly”About 1,100 Israelis were killed, roughly three-quarters of them civilians, and some 8,000 wounded, in a country then of six million: proportionally, a September 11 every few months. Roughly 3,000 to 3,300 Palestinians were killed in the same years, a figure an honest article also reports, while noting what the symmetric framing hides: one side’s dead included the bombers themselves and thousands of armed fighters killed attacking or being stopped; the other side’s dead were mostly people at dinner, on buses, at prayer.
Related pages
Section titled “Related pages”Who attacked first, every war · 2000 Camp David Summit · Yasser Arafat · Marwan Barghouti · The History They Skip