The First Intifada, 1987 to 1993

What happened

On Dec. 6, 1987, an Israeli was stabbed to death while shopping in Gaza. ¹ The next day, four residents of the Jabalya refugee camp were killed in a traffic accident, and a rumor moved through Gaza that Israelis had killed them deliberately, as revenge. ¹ On the morning of Dec. 9, mass rioting broke out in Jabalya, and a 17-year-old was killed by an Israeli soldier after throwing a Molotov cocktail at an army patrol. ¹ Over the following week, rock-throwing, blocked roads, and burning tires were reported across the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. ¹

None of that was planned. It began as a spontaneous outburst and then developed into an organized rebellion. ¹ Palestinians ran commercial strikes, refused to pay taxes to Israel, and used stone-throwing and other acts of civil disobedience against Israeli soldiers. ¹

The Anti-Defamation League's backgrounder lists stones, axes, Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, and firearms supplied by Fatah as the weapons used against soldiers and civilians. ² The Jewish Virtual Library counts more than 3,600 Molotov cocktail attacks, 100 hand grenade attacks, and 600 assaults with guns or explosives in the first four years alone. ¹

Roughly 1,100 Palestinians died in clashes with Israeli forces. ¹ Sixteen Israeli civilians and 11 soldiers were killed, and more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and 1,700 soldiers were injured. ¹ Between 1989 and 1992, Palestinians killed nearly 1,000 other Palestinians as suspected collaborators, a wave of internal violence sometimes called the intrafada. ¹

Leadership was contested from the start. A body called the Unified Leadership of the Intifada issued leaflets directing when to strike and whom to attack, and the Jewish Virtual Library credits the PLO with running the uprising through it. ¹ The ADL's account is more qualified: the young men driving events in the West Bank and Gaza supported the PLO leadership sitting in exile in Tunis but did not consider themselves accountable to it, and many of them later became officials of the Palestinian Authority. ²

The uprising also produced Hamas. In December 1987, as it broke out, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin founded the movement in Gaza as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the movement's own covenant later described as its parent body. ⁴ Yassin was a quadriplegic, partly blind cleric who served as the movement's founder and spiritual leader and who was the covenant's principal author. ⁴ The ADL dates the founding to 1988 and describes Yassin as a fundamentalist preacher aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, so the year comes out differently depending on which account you read. ^{4 5}

The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement was issued on Aug. 18, 1988. ³ It states that "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it." ³ It declares all of Palestine an Islamic waqf, a religious endowment that no one may concede any part of, and it dismisses initiatives, peaceful solutions, and international conferences as contrary to the movement's principles, leaving jihad as the only route it recognizes. ³ The ADL notes the document is filled with antisemitic incitement, including a reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. ⁵ Hamas was a rejectionist organization by charter from its first year. ³

The uprising itself lost force before the diplomacy did. The ADL describes it as having petered out by 1990, with most of its leadership arrested. ² The Gulf War, which drove Iraq out of Kuwait and ended with a ceasefire in late February 1991, then rearranged the region. It left the PLO weakened because it had backed Iraq, and it left Arab states that had supported the American campaign expecting movement on the Palestinian question. ⁶ That is the opening the Madrid Conference used, convening from Oct. 30 to Nov. 4, 1991, co-chaired by President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, with Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestinians from the territories seated in a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. ⁶ Bilateral talks followed in Washington in December 1991 and multilateral talks in Moscow in 1992, and they faltered, which is what pushed the real negotiating into the secret channel that produced Oslo in September 1993. ⁶ Hamas rejected the agreement. ⁴

Why it still matters

The uprising moved Israeli public opinion and the peace negotiations of the 1990s, which the ADL's own backgrounder acknowledges. ² It also set the American diplomacy in motion. Washington began pressing for talks after December 1987, and Israel rejected the early proposals because they did not require ending the intifada first. ⁶ Madrid convened four years later, and when its talks stalled the negotiating moved to the secret channel that produced Oslo. ⁶

Hamas is the other inheritance. It was founded in Gaza in the first weeks of the uprising, put in writing in 1988 that it would not negotiate and that Israel would be eliminated, and became the main organization carrying out terrorist attacks in Israeli cities from 1994 onward. ^{4 3 5} Our view: the violence that wrecked Israeli confidence during the Oslo years came from a movement that already existed and had already written down what it wanted, six years before anyone signed anything. ^{4 3 5}

Nearly 1,000 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians as suspected collaborators between 1989 and 1992. ¹

The words you'll hear

Intifada. The name given to the Palestinian uprising that began with mass rioting in Jabalya on Dec. 9, 1987, and later reused for the uprising that began in 2000. ¹

Jabalya. The Gaza refugee camp where the December 1987 riots began after four residents were killed in a traffic accident the day before. ¹

Unified Leadership of the Intifada. The clandestine body that issued leaflets directing strikes and attacks during the uprising, generally described as the PLO's instrument on the ground. ¹

Hamas Covenant. The founding charter issued Aug. 18, 1988, declaring Palestine an inalienable Islamic waqf and rejecting negotiated settlements outright. ³

Waqf. In Islamic law, property permanently dedicated to religious purposes. The 1988 covenant applies the term to all of Palestine, which leaves no room for partition. ³

Intrafada. Shorthand for the killings of Palestinians by Palestinians as suspected collaborators, nearly 1,000 of them between 1989 and 1992. ¹

Madrid Conference. The Oct. 30 to Nov. 4, 1991 conference in Madrid, co-chaired by the United States and the Soviet Union, that seated Israeli and Arab delegations at direct talks for the first time. ⁶