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WHAT CAUSED INTIFADA II ?
by
Arthur Bierman
On Friday, September 29, 2000, serious disturbances erupted on the Temple Mount plaza in East Jerusalem. Responding to stone throwing youths, Israeli police fired, first rubber bullets and then live ammunition. Five Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded; seventy policemen were also injured. On the next day, violence erupted all over the West Bank and Gaza - the second Intifada had begun.
What caused this uprising? Palestinians and their sympathizers blamed, first and foremost, an oppressive Israeli occupation, then in its 36th year, which had generated much hatred for the occupying forces; secondly, Israel's policies during the Oslo years which, after promising the Palestinians an independent and prosperous state, had dashed these high hopes by allowing continued settlement expansion and instituting closures and humiliating roadblocks; thirdly, Barak's Camp David peace proposals which, at least according to this account, were soon exposed as a transparent effort to foist a puppet state upon the Palestinians; and finally, Sharon's September 28th Temple Mount visit which had not only "desecrated" Islam's third most holy site but had also endangered the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
As for Arafat's role in the uprising, the Palestinian narrative proposed two alternate versions. To Western audiences it claimed that Arafat had played no role whatsoever -- the second intifada, just like the first uprising, had been a purely spontaneous eruption of popular rage. However, to the Arab "street" it announced that the Palestinian leadership had actually prepared for the second Intifada ever since the end of Camp David.
This narrative is a transparently one sided account, blaming Israel exclusively for the violence, and ignoring many inconvenient facts -- Arafat's failure to rein in Hamas terror during the Oslo period, for example. Let me therefore propose an alternate explanation, which is in better agreement with the factual evidence. This account argues that the Israeli occupation, while indeed oppressive, had made the second intifada possible, but not inevitable. What had, in fact, compelled the uprising, were a number of policies implemented by the Palestinian Authority during the Oslo years, that is, between 1993 and 2000 . Let me list some of these policies:
-- The PA's refusal, in violation of its Oslo commitments, to destroy the terror network of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This refusal resultant in much violence, in the territories as well as inside Israel proper, and not only alienated much of Israeli public opinion but compelled also the institution of widespread closures and roadblocks which were so destructive of Jewish-Arab reconciliation.
-- The PA's encouragement of certain popular expectations -- most particularly, for complete Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the unlimited right of return of refugees -- which would have been unacceptable to any plausible Israeli government.
-- The PA's insistence upon these same unacceptable demands at Camp David, thus dooming the summit to failure.
-- The PA's efforts, during the summer of 2000, to prepare its population for a violent confrontation in the belief that such violence would achieve what the Oslo negotiations could never do -- gain Israel's agreement to the above demands.
-- Finally, the PA's decision, immediately after Sharon's Temple Mount visit, to inflame public opinion to the point that a minor riot was transformed into a major confrontation.
The rest of this article is devoted to a detailed discussion of these items.
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Let me begin by acknowledging that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had indeed generated a significant amount of Palestinian hatred for the occupying forces. In support, I would argue that any military occupation would soon be experienced as oppressive and humiliating by the subject population. This observation would be particularly relevant for Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, given the long history of conflict between the two people, and given that close to a million of its residents were refugees from Israel proper who blamed the Jewish state for their current plight. This was recognized by none other than Israel's Prime Minister Rabin who made the following statement to the Israeli Knesset on April 18, 1994:
"I want to tell the truth. For 27 years we have been dominating another people against its will. For 27 years Palestinians in the territories...get up in the morning harboring a fierce hatred for us, as Israelis and Jews. each morning they get up to a hard life, for which we are also, but not solely, responsible......"(1)
Given this "fierce (Palestinian) hatred". it should come as no surprise, then, that this dominated population erupted in 1987 in that violent uprising, now called the first intifada. It is also generally agreed that this intifada was a spontaneous mass action, without prior organization and leadership, which surprised not only the Israeli government but also the PLO leadership then exiled in Tunis.
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Consider next the Oslo Peace Process which began with high hopes in September 1993 and ended amidst widespread violence at the end of January 2001. As is apparent from Rabin's above cited statement, he, along with many other Israelis, hoped that the Oslo process would not only lead to an independent Palestinian state but also eliminate Palestinian hatred for Israel. To achieve the former, Israel agreed upon a gradual withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and the creation of self governing institutions; to accomplish the latter latter, both parties pledged themselves to "foster mutual understanding and tolerance." This task would be assisted by "abstain(ing) from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other and .... tak(ing) legal measures to prevent such incitement by any organizations, groups or individuals within their jurisdiction." (2)
By and large, with some delays and certain exceptions, Israel implemented its Oslo commitments. The PLO was recognized as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. A quasi state possessing many, though not all, attributes of sovereignty -- an armed police force and an armed militia, the Tanzim; its own press, radio, Television, a school system, a legislature and a judiciary -- was established on a good part of the West Bank and Gaza; and by spring 2000 almost 95% of its Arab population were ruled, either completely or partly, by Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA).
But there were also some developments during the Oslo years which had a negative effect upon the Palestinian people. For one, there was Israel's policy of permitting continued settlement expansion in the West Bank and Gaza, an expansion -- which, while not prohibited by Oslo, was nonetheless a violation of its spirit and created much Palestinian hostility. Secondly, a rash of Hamas terrorist activity caused Israel to limit the entrance of Palestinian workers into Israel proper, thus weakening the Palestinian economy; it also compelled the Israeli military to impose more rigorous road blocks and travel restrictions, all of which not only made life more difficult but were also experienced as humiliating.
How well did the PA implement its signed commitment to foster "mutual understanding and tolerance" during those Oslo years? The answer is quite clear: With few exceptions, all institutions controlled by Arafat, the PA, the PLO, Fatah, the Tanzim, the Palestinian educational system, the PA financed religious establishment, either closed their eyes to ongoing anti-Israel incitement or actively encouraged it. (3) Thus, Hamas and Islamic Jihad were permitted to launch terror attacks against Israel, even though they were clearly intended to sabotage the Oslo Peace Process; the schools continued to teach that Israel was an illegitimate entity; the media persisted in vilifying the Jewish state and the PA financed religious establishment continued to preach religious hatred against Jews. As a consequence, instead of increasing security for Israeli citizens, Oslo actually decreased it. This effect is most starkly revealed by comparing the number of Israelis killed by Arab hostility before and during the Oslo period. What we find is that while an average of 29 Israelis were killed yearly between 1986 and 1991, that rate increased to a yearly average of 63 Israelis during the Oslo years 1993 through the middle of 2000. (4)
There was still one other area where the PA laid the groundwork for future violence: It encouraged unrealistic expectations among its population - unrealistic, that is, in that they could not conceivably be achieved by peaceful means. I am referring, in particular, to the refugee problem. The Palestinian leadership must surely have known that almost all Israelis viewed the unlimited right of return of refugees as an existential threat to the state. Nonetheless, during the Oslo years, the same leadership encouraged popular expectations that the Peace Process would conclude with such an unlimited return. While initially of little significance, this demand became one of the major stumbling blocks to a successful conclusion of the Oslo negotiations and contributed greatly to the Palestinians resort to violence.
What can we conclude? While persistent settlement expansion, Israeli closures with their attendant economic losses and the humiliating roadblocks undoubtedly exacerbated Palestinian hostility, the PA played a significant role in encouraging such intercommunal antagonism.
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Let us turn now to the Camp David summit: I have already discussed this important event in two earlier articles and concluded that its failure was caused by Arafat's insistence upon two unacceptable provisions -- complete Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the unlimited right of return of Palestinian refugees. (5) As to Barak's Camp David offer - a proposal whose "generosity" has been fiercely debated in the literature - I argued in the same articles that the answer to this question could not be factually determined and for the simple reason that Arafat's tactics at the summit had invalidated the normal give and take of the negotiating process. However, given Barak's response to Clinton's December 2000 proposal, we have every reason to assume that the PA could have gained a viable state on most of the West Bank and Gaza had it been willing to compromise on East Jerusalem and refugees. But Arafat was unwilling to make any serious concessions, and accordingly tried to strengthen his position by turning to violence. This became apparent even before the end of Camp David, when Hasan al-Kashif, Director General of the Ministry of Information and Culture, published an article in the July 24 issue of the Ramallha Daily Al-Ayyam which informed his readers that the negotiations had entered "a decisive stage." (6) Addressing the Palestinian masses, he assigned them two separate "missions":
-- "To escalate the popular activity affirming ....the ...national rights to return, liberate the land, secure sovereignty, and declare the establishment of a state with Jerusalem as its capital. This campaign should focus on Jerusalem and the right of return of refugees, and should take place simultaneously with the issues discussed at Camp David"
--"To launch a national campaign to prepare the people... to defend the State in the event it is declared on 13 September and to snatch the rest of our rights to our land and sovereignty...Preparing ourselves to face the breakdown of the summit caused by Israel is legitimate. Our preparation will be defensive opposite the aggressive Israeli military preparations now under way."
To implement these military preparations, Al-Kashif called upon each Palestinian household to "store basic food supplies for several months. Each house has a place to store sacks of wheat, rice, sugar and a quantity of candles and lamps working on gas or kerosene." As to the planned military strategy, he rejected reliance upon "fixed positions," and called upon the Palestinians to return "to our natural instincts as a fighting people that are expert in the art of the intifadah.....Every house in the homeland is open and ready to become a command center."
In short, two days before the summit ended, at a time when active negotiations were still proceeding, the Palestinian leadership had already begun preparing for a September 13 confrontation -- a date the PA had selected for a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. Apparently forgotten was Arafat's commitment to those Oslo provisions prohibiting the use of violence in settling disputes between the two parties.
It is of interest to ask just how Arafat thought that violence would help his cause. The following two possibilities come immediately to mind:
Encouraged by Hizbollah's recent success in driving Israel from from southern Lebanon, Arafat may well have believed that a similarly sustained uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, accompanied by a terror campaign inside Israel proper, would weaken Israeli morale to the point that it would agree to the above cited, normally unacceptable, provisions.
And secondly, that Israel's military response to such an uprising would result in such heavy civilian Palestinian losses, as to elicit an international Kosovo -like intervention, perhaps by a combination of friendly European and Arab countries.
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So much for the Palestinian leadership. How receptive were ordinary Palestinians to the use of violence in the immediate post-Camp David era? As it turns out, this question can be answered with reasonable accuracy since one of the most respected Palestinian Sociologists, Khalil Shikaki of the West Bank's Bir Zeit University, had just -- at the end of July -- completed one of his periodic public opinion surveys in the West Bank and Gaza. (7) It showed overwhelming, more than 82%, support for Arafat's uncompromising stand at the summit; an even larger, almost 90%, support for insisting on the unlimited right of return of refugees, with over half of the respondents rejecting as inadequate a reported Israeli offer of a Palestinian state occupying not only 96% of the West Bank and Gaza but also some unspecified amount of Israeli territory.
Perhaps even more significant, the same survey disclosed an almost cavalier willingness to use violence in achieving national objectives. Thus 63% of the respondents agreed that they should emulate the "Lebanese method" of Hizbollah - i.e. wage guerilla warfare; almost 60% supported a violent confrontation with Israel over the planned unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood on September 13; and another, almost 60%, majority believed that such violence would achieve Palestinian rights "in a way that negotiations could not."
In short, at the end of July 2000, the Palestinian leadership as well as the Palestinian masses were prepared to abandon the Oslo Peace process for the use of sustained violence.
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As already mentioned, even before the end of Camp David, the PA leadership had started preparing its people for a violent confrontation with Israel over the issue of a unilateral declaration of statehood. The planned for date was September 13, 2000, exactly seven years since the start of the Oslo peace process. These preparations were continued into the post-summit period and included the following:
1. An intense media campaign during the summer of 2000, demonizing the Israeli government, Israelis, and Jews more generally, as evil and murderous creatures. It also denied Israel's legitimacy on Islamic as well as on nationalist grounds. (8)
2. Preparing the population for an impending confrontation by repeated statements stressing the need for violent actions to advance Palestinian national interests.
3. Training the population for armed confrontation: This included dispatching PA security officers to military training courses in Egypt, Yemen, Algeria and Pakistan; reinforcing PA police stations and militia bases by digging trenches around them and fortifying these positions with sandbags; and opening 40 training camps for school age teenagers where they were taught military tactics and ideologically indoctrinated for violence. (9)
I will discuss the first two items in greater detail:
Palestinian Media Campaign:
On September 11, 2000 -- more than two weeks before Sharon's Temple Mount visit -- the Israeli Palestinian Media Watch issued a report which noted with alarm that since the beginning of the summer "PA television broadcasting of violence and hate has reached unprecedented levels...and has created an atmosphere (reminiscent) of the eve of outbreak of war. Palestinian television is currently broadcasting a systematic campaign that negates the peace process and reconciliation. Included are abundant violence clips, the depiction of Israeli soldiers as rapists and murderers, call for eternal war against the Jews, military marches, libelous accusations, denial of Israel's right to exist and education of Palestinian children to see all Israel as stolen "Palestine". (10)
Here are a few examples, taken from Palestinian Media Watch, illustrating the demonization of Israel:
On July 7, 2000 , PA TV presented skits by children who were being indoctrinated in summer camps in anti-Israeli ideology and were given also semi-military training. In these skits Israelis in general and settlers in particular were presented as thieves and murderers.
On July 23, 2000, PA TV presented a Palestinian artist who called Jesus the first Palestinian and accused the Jews of having murdered Jesus for bringing a message of justice to the world.
On August 8, 2000 the PA TV presented a scene from a Palestinian film in which "Israeli soldiers rape a girl and murder her parents. In the scene Israeli paratroopers wearing red berets torment a Palestinian family. A soldier conducts a search and when he does not find anything the soldiers take the girl, drag her to the hood of the jeep and rape her. The parents try to resist and after the rape the father is shot and the mother is stabbed to death. "
PA TV broadcast every Friday a sermon containing anti-Israeli and often anti-semitic propaganda. For example: On August 11, 2000, an Islamic preacher, Dr. Halabiya informed his listeners about the "cunning ways, the heresy, the jealousy of the Jews.." and called upon our "Arab brothers" to assist the Palestinians in their "war against the Jews." And on September 8, 2000, Sheik Yusef Abu Sneina informed his audience that "Muslim Palestine is one and cannot be divided. There is no difference between Haifa and Nablus, Lod and Ramallah, Jerusalem and Nazareth or Gaza and Ashkelon."
During the summer of 2000, PA TV showed a large number of clips depicting Israeli soldiers committing brutal and violent acts; graphic pictures of Palestinians wounded or killed, of hospitalized children, of funerals, of bitter crying and screaming; also of Palestinians rioting and fighting with Israeli soldiers, the latter scenes showing rock throwing and tossing of fire bombs. Many of the scenes showed children engaged in violent acts, such as throwing rocks or petrol bombs, and included stirring military music as well as loud calls for Jihad.
PA TV accused the Israeli government of criminal activity. For example, on July 23, 2000, Intisar Al-Wazir, the minister of social affairs, charged on PA TV that the "Israeli authorities are working hard on bringing drugs into Palestinian society." And on August 11, 2000 Israelis were accused of planning to destroy the Al-Aksa Mosque and replace it with the third Temple.
Preparing the public ideologically for the need to supplement Oslo by violent confrontation:
-- As early as the beginning of March 2000, Marwan Barguti, head of the West Bank Fatah, stated publicly: "We must wage a battle in the field alongside of the negotiating battle..I mean confrontation." (11)
--In early April 2000, Arafat "hinted" to a gathering of Fatah youth in Ramallah that "the Palestinian people are likely to turn to the Intifada option." (12)
-- On July 14, 2000, the Israeli Arab magazine Kul Al-Arab cited an unnamed, high ranking Palestinian security official: "The Palestinian people are in a state of emergency against the failure of the Camp David summit. If the situation explodes they are ready for the next bloody battle against the occupation. The next Intifada will be... more violent than the first one especially since the Palestinian people (now) possess weapons allowing them to defend themselves ...." (13)
-- The July 21, 2000 issue of Kul Al-Arab, cited the same official as stating that "(p)opular recruitment in the PA territories has increased greatly and the popular Palestinian army has been established...Weapons have already been distributed to citizens by the PA. which supervises training and preparations for a potential confrontation with occupation forces." (14)
-- The July 24, 2000 issue of the Ramallah Al-Ayyam carried a lengthy statement by Hasan al-Kashif, Director General of the Ministry of Information and Culture, which called upon the population to prepare for the impending confrontation. He urged each Palestinian house to store "basic food supplies for several months" and listed "sacks of wheat, rice, sugar and a quantity of candles." He rejected "barracks, fixed positions. depots" and advocated returning to "our natural instincts as a fighting people." (15)
-- On August 16, 2000, Gaza Chief of Preventive Security, Muhammad Dakhlan, warned that failure of reaching agreement would lead to violent confrontation. "We will reach an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, even if it is by blood." (16)
-- On August 24, 2000, PA Justice Minister Freih Abu Madden stated that "..violence is near and the Palestinian people are willing to sacrifice even 5000 casualties." (17)
-- On September 11, 2000, Al-Sabah, an official publication of the PA, declared: "We will advance and declare a general Intifada for Jerusalem. The time for the Intifada has arrived, the time for Intifada has arrived, the time for Jihad has arrived." (18)
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Besides preparing the Palestinian masses for a confrontation on, or shortly after, September 13, Arafat also tried to gain international support for the coming conflict with Israel. Hence, shortly after returning to Ramallah from Camp David, he went on an extended world tour, first to Arab capitals, and then to Western Europe, Turkey and Japan. To his disappointment, he found little enthusiasm for his plan. Not a single Arab leader was willing to publicly support such a Palestinian declaration, and the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram even published an editorial, headlined: "Egypt advises Palestinians to postpone the state declaration date." (19) Bowing to this international pressure, on September 10 Arafat persuaded the PLO Central Council to postpone the statehood declaration by two months.
But this setback did not weaken the PA's insistence on a settlement patently unacceptable to any Israeli government. This was exemplified in a September 19, 2000 Palestinian TV interview with Abu Mazen, then PLO General Secretary and today Arafat's newly elected Prime Minister. (20) In this interview, Abu Mazen heatedly denied the "opposition's" claim that "we", the leadership, had made any "concessions" at Camp David: "(A)ccusations that we made concessions on Jerusalem, borders, and refugees were all proven wrong;." To reinforce this message, he referred to "some negotiators", presumably from the Israeli side, who had claimed that "understanding on some issues were reached in Camp David.." They were mistaken, he insisted: " I say there was no agreement on anything and there was no progress recorded." And lest there be any misunderstanding, Abu Mazen repeated the same non-negotiable package of demands that had torpedoed the Camp David summit.
"We are not ready to concede the future of our people, our sovereignty on Jerusalem, and the right of return for refugees. We are not ready to accept Israeli presence on our land, or the presence of settlements......Our position is that all refugees must be allowed to return ...."
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