The First Intifada (1987-1993)

The Spark and the Spread

On December 8, 1987, an Israeli military truck struck a car in the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, killing four Palestinian workers. Rumors spread that the collision was deliberate, and the funerals became mass protests. Within days, the uprising had spread across Gaza and the West Bank. This was the First Intifada — from the Arabic word meaning 'shaking off.'

The intifada was not organized by any single faction. It erupted from below, driven by twenty years of accumulated grievances under Israeli military occupation: land confiscation, settlement expansion, arbitrary detention, economic restrictions, and the daily humiliations of occupation. A generation that had grown up entirely under occupation — young people who had never known anything else — became its driving force.

The initial methods were overwhelmingly low-tech: stone-throwing, tire-burning, commercial strikes, tax boycotts, and civil disobedience. The iconic image of a Palestinian teenager throwing a stone at an Israeli tank became a global symbol. The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), a coalition of PLO-affiliated factions operating clandestinely in the territories, issued leaflets coordinating strikes and protests. Local popular committees organized alternative schools (after Israel closed Palestinian universities), underground clinics, and food distribution networks.

Israel's Response and International Impact

Israel's initial response was harsh. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin reportedly ordered soldiers to 'break their bones' — a policy of using beatings to suppress protests. Over the course of the intifada, Israeli forces killed an estimated 1,100-1,400 Palestinians, including many children. Tens of thousands were detained. Homes were demolished as collective punishment. Curfews confined entire towns to their houses for days or weeks.

The international impact was transformative. Television footage of armed soldiers beating stone-throwing teenagers shifted global sympathy toward the Palestinians. Israel, which had long been seen in the West as a small democracy surrounded by hostile armies, now appeared as an occupying power using disproportionate force against a civilian population. The intifada put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back at the center of international attention.

Inside Israel, the intifada forced a reckoning. The occupation had been relatively cheap and invisible to most Israeli citizens for twenty years. Now reservists were being called up to police refugee camps, and the economic and moral costs became impossible to ignore. A growing Israeli peace movement argued that the occupation was unsustainable and that negotiations with the Palestinians were necessary.

For the PLO in exile, the intifada was both an opportunity and a challenge. The uprising demonstrated that the Palestinian population in the territories was the real center of gravity — not the PLO leadership in Tunis. Arafat moved quickly to claim leadership of the intifada, and in November 1988, the Palestine National Council declared an independent State of Palestine and implicitly recognized Israel by accepting UN Resolutions 242 and 338. This was a historic shift from the PLO's earlier position of rejecting Israel's existence.

The Path to Oslo

By the early 1990s, several factors converged to make negotiations possible. The intifada had made the status quo untenable for Israel. The PLO had moderated its position and was weakened by its support for Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, which cost it Gulf state funding and goodwill. The Cold War's end removed Soviet support for Arab rejectionism. And the 1991 Madrid Conference, convened by the United States and the Soviet Union, brought Israelis and Palestinians (as part of a Jordanian delegation) to the same table for the first time.

Secret back-channel negotiations in Oslo, Norway, beginning in January 1993, produced the Oslo Accords — the first face-to-face agreement between the Israeli government and the PLO. The famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, seemed to mark the beginning of the end of the conflict. The intifada had demonstrated that Palestinians would not accept permanent occupation; Oslo was supposed to chart the path to a two-state solution.

The First Intifada's legacy is debated. Palestinians credit it with putting their cause on the map and forcing Israel to negotiate. Some critics argue that the Oslo Accords that followed actually entrenched the occupation by creating a Palestinian Authority with limited autonomy but no sovereignty, while settlement expansion continued. The intifada's grassroots, civil-resistance character would contrast sharply with the militarized Second Intifada that erupted seven years later.