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al sis
After Five Years,
The Intifada Lives
DOUGLAS DAVIS FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
O
n December 9, 1987,
an Israeli vehicle
plowed into a line of
oncoming autos in
Gaza, killing four Palestin-
ians and wounding seven
others from the squalid
Jabaliya refugee camp near-
by. It was more than just an-
other traffic accident. In-
stead, it was the spark that
ignited the "intifada."
Frustrated by the Arab
world's apparent indif-
ference to their plight and by
the marginalization of their
cause, the Palestinians took
to the streets in a spon-
taneous popular uprising to
protest Israeli rule, an act of
defiance that has carried a
high price tag in both
human and economic terms.
Israel's military com-
manders — trained to deal
with such sophisticated ar-
mies as those fielded by
Syria, Jordan and Iraq —
were caught off balance by
the untrained Palestinians,
many of them children, who
seized the opportunity to
vent their rage against the
Jewish occupation with
stones and burning tires.
But if the Israeli au-
thorities were taken by sur-
prise, so too was PLO
Chairman Yassir Arafat at
his headquarters in Tunis,
where he and his loyalists
had been consigned to polit-
ical limbo after their expul-
sion from Lebanon in 1982.
It took Chairman Arafat
several weeks to fully com-
prehend the significance of
the uprising and better than
six months to understand
what the young Palestinian
demonstrators knew in-
tuitively: that their stones
and fire-bombs would not
end the Israeli occupation,
let alone destroy Israel.
However much damage
they inflicted, however
much discomfort they caused
to Israel's military planners,
however much they tore at
the fragile fabric of Israel's
consensus, they knew their
primitive weapons could
never constitute a serious
military threat.
Rather, the intifada was a
means to an end, a way of
focussing attention on their
cause and of creating the
international climate for a
political process that would
pry loose the Israeli grip on
the West Bank and Gaza.
The Unified Leadership of
the Uprising (UNLU), the'
shadowy underground,
movement which emerged to
guide and direct events on ,
the ground, must have
known that the intifada was
a tactic rather than a,
strategy, a media-driven
event that provided an in-
strument for separating
Israel from its allies, notably
the United States.
The most they could have
hoped for — still a substan-
tial prize — was to make the,
occupation as uncomfortable
as possible and to catalyze
diplomatic pressure that
would compel Israel to make
concessions that would allow
the Palestinians at least a
limited measure of national
self-determination.
As a tactic, it succeeded
brilliantly. The conflict was
portrayed by the media and
perceived by its consumers
as a re-enactment of the
Islamic
fundamentalists
have been the
intifada's biggest
winners.
biblical struggle between
underdog David and brutish
Goliath, but with a curious
twist — the roles were re-
versed and the Palestinians,
complete with slingshots,
emerged as the modern-day
David, the Israelis as the
awesome Goliath.
However, five years after
the start of the intifada,
frustration among Palestin-
ians in the territories and
tensions between those in
the territories and those in
Tunis have led to a collapse
of internal discipline, a con-
dition that threatens to
transform the territories
into another Lebanon.
Today, mass confronta-
tions between Palestinians
and Israelis are largely a
matter of history. More Pa-
lestinians now are being
killed by their fellow-
Palestinians — ostensibly
because of "collaboration,"
but overwhelmingly because
of political, religious and
even personal disputes
—than by Israelis.