On December 8, 1987, 16 year old Palestinian schoolboy protestor,Hatem Abu Sissah is killed by Israeli soldiers, he had simply gone to join with hundreds of others, demonstrating against their ongoing occupation. On December 9th an Israeli truck crashed into two vans carrying Palestinian workers, killing 4 inhabitants. It would act as a final straw and catalyst for the days of rage that were to follow.
It would ignite the first intifada in Israeli-occupied Palestine, a popular uprising that would see many Palestinians uniting in a campaign of resistance against the Israeli occupation. Spreading initially from the Jabaila refugee camp, throughout the occupied territories, the Gaza strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It would lead to a general strike, refusal to pay taxes, a boycott of Israeli institutions and riots which lasted until the early 1990s.
In Arabic intifada means to rise up or to shake off. It would embody the struggle of the Palestinians to win basic freedoms long denied by Israel, against policies of exclusion and domination, against a background of oppression.and the denial of basic freedoms.
In the days and years that followed, almost daily clashes with Israeli soldiers would occur and would catapult the Palestinian cause onto the international stage and into the hearts of millions of television viewers across the globe as they resisted a colonial military power that had been occupying their land by force since 1967. While the First Intifada is largely reduced to images of Palestinian boys throwing stones at Israeli tanks, women were at the helm of resistance.
It would result in a total of 1,489 Palestinian lives being lost along with 185 Israelis.
Some years later on September 13, 1993, the uprising would end with the Oslo Peace agreement between the PLO and Israel, that would bring the Palestinians dream of Independence in the West Bank, and Gaza one step closer, but was followed again in September 2000, with a second intifada.
The intifada transformed relations between occupiers and occupied. As the resistance went on month after month . year after year, the Israelis came to realise that they could neither dominate nor expel the Palestinians.
This was not the first time that Palestinians rose up in protest, In 1935, when Palestine was still under British colonial rule, it was British forces that killed, injured and arrested thousands of Palestinians fed up with colonialism and occupation. And it was British colonial lawmakers who instituted practices such as administrative detention, detaining people without charge or trial a practice which was then adopted Israeli policy, that is still being used against Palestinians today.
Palestinians still have to take principled methods of non-violent civil disobedience, that includes general strikes, boycotts of Israeli products, refusal to pay taxes, hunger strikes, along with graffiti, and spontaneous demonstrations to allow their plight to be recognised by the world.
Many believe that it wont be long until a third intifada comes to call. How many more intifada's must be fought until real justice for the Palestinian people prevails and the world finally witnesses an end of illegal Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories.?
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