The second Palestinian intifada: a chronicle of a people's struggle

231 Pages·2006·1.91 MB·English

by  Baroud, Ramzy

The Second
Palestinian Intifada
A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle
RAMZY BAROUD
Foreword by Kathleen and Bill Christison
Introduction by Jennifer Loewenstein
Photographs by Mahfouz Abu Turk
and Matthew Cassel
P
Pluto Press
LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI
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First published 2006 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Ramzy Baroud 2006
The right of Ramzy Baroud to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2548 3 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 2547 5 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Printed and bound in the United States of America by
Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group
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To Zarefah, Iman, and Sammy,
my life’s inspiration
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Contents
Foreword by Kathleen and Bill Christison viii
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xvii
Introduction by Jennifer Loewenstein 1
1 The Intifada Takes Off (2000–01) 16
2 Intifada International (2002) 36
3 Calls for Reform (2003) 53
4 Profound Changes, Insurmountable Challenges (2004) 90
5 End of the Intifada? (2005) 120
Epilogue 158
Appendix I Total Deaths and Other Losses During the
Second Palestinian Uprising 166
Appendix II Timeline of Events During the Second
Palestinian Uprising: 2000–05 168
Notes 196
Recommended Reading 207
Notes on Contributors 208
Index 210
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Foreword
Kathleen and Bill Christison
In a poignant piece included in this book, Ramzy Baroud tells the
story of his grandfather, a refugee from the Palestinian village of Beit
Daras who spent nearly 40 years until his death at a very old age in a
Gaza refugee camp constantly listening to a transistor radio, hoping
that someday it would bring the news that Palestinian refugees would
be allowed to return to their homes, lost in 1948 when Israel was
created and 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes.1
Ramzy’s grandfather, like the Palestinian people themselves, lived
in what might be called a state of suspended animation, wrapped in
memory, holding before him a vision of Palestine that would never be
recreated. His long but ultimately, for him, fruitless vigil symbolizes at
once the tragedy of the Palestinian people and their great strength.
A predominant, and perhaps the most salient, feature of the
history of Zionism and the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state
has been the Zionist effort to ignore—and therefore ultimately to
erase from the political landscape—the Palestinian people who were
native to the land that became Israel. Throughout the nearly 60 years
since Israel’s creation and the Palestinians’ dispossession, and for
the several decades before this when Zionism was gaining strength,
Zionists and their supporters in the United States and Europe have
made a concerted effort to dehumanize the Palestinians, render them
invisible, and delegitimize them as true claimants to a national life in
Palestine. From the Balfour Declaration pledging British support for
a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, at a time when Palestinians
made up 90 percent of the population; through the United Nations
decision 30 years later to partition Palestine and give the Zionists
over half the territory for a Jewish state, when Jews constituted no
more than one-third of the population and owned only 7 percent
of the land; through the Palestinians’ decades of statelessness and
displacement following 1948; to the Second Palestinian Uprising,
the most recent of the Palestinians’ struggles to assert their right to
independence and self-governance in their own homeland, Zionism
has persuaded much of the world that the Palestinians’ presence in
and claim to the land of Palestine are of no consequence.
viii
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Foreword ix
The effort to ignore Palestinians continues unabated, even into
the twenty-fi rst century. As the years have passed, it has become
ever easier for people the world over, as well as for politicians and
policymakers, to forget the Palestinians because they do not constitute
a state (or an effective political lobby), and, in a cruel vicious circle,
the longer Palestinian national aspirations are ignored, the less their
claim to any kind of national sovereignty is seen as legitimate. A body
of assumptions and misconceptions has grown up, centering on the
notions that Israel is the victim, that Palestinians have no rational basis
for their hostility to Israel, and that the only real issue is Palestinian
hatred of Jews and refusal to accept Israel’s existence. These very
fundamental misperceptions have never been adequately challenged
and, with the passage of time, have become more widespread and
fi rmly entrenched. As misperception has built on misperception, it
has become easier for Israel to justify pushing the Palestinians aside,
ever more openly oppressing the whole Palestinian population, and
for the world to look away. Each Palestinian uprising, each attempt
to assert a national right, seems to strengthen an ever-growing belief
that Palestinians have no inherent rights in Palestine and are driven
only by hatred of Jews to contest what is widely thought to be the
Jews’ inherent right to patrimony there. Few remember, because it
is now inconvenient to remember, that Ramzy Baroud’s grandfather
and 750,000 other innocent civilians were displaced nearly 60 years
ago and that their descendants still live under oppression and in
exile. The body of misperceptions surrounding the Palestinians has
not simply grown haphazardly, but has been carefully shaped and
nurtured by a skillful pro-Israeli propaganda machine that operates
around the world but primarily in the United States. As a result, the
U.S.—from the public to the media to politicians and policymakers—
has completely bought into the images of Israelis as innocent victims
and Palestinians as unworthy of more than secondary consideration.
This set of images, and the political mindset that accompanies
them, has grown cumulatively with time, gradually blotting out
the historical record, blurring memory, and creating what passes for
political reality, until the prevailing mindset has become so dominant
that few challenge it.
What was once a tacit U.S. acceptance of Israel’s occupation of
the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem and its undemocratic
dominance over the territories’ three million Palestinians has become
under President George W. Bush an eager endorsement of Israel’s
policies. The growing U.S. inability to view the confl ict from any but
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x Foreword
Israel’s perspective, and the Bush administration’s outright animus
toward the Palestinians, have opened the door to unrestrained Israeli
oppression of the Palestinians. If it was not clear before, it is now
indisputable that Israel’s actions are designed, with U.S. concurrence,
to erase the Palestinians as a people and a national entity. Israeli
settlements encircle Palestinian towns and cities. Israeli roads cut
through Palestinian agricultural land, separating one town from
another and preventing any Palestinian growth. The separation
wall winds through the West Bank, destroying or confi scating prime
Palestinian agricultural land and fresh water wells, razing thousands
of Palestinian olive trees, destroying Palestinian markets and halting
commerce, demolishing homes, separating children from schools
and adults from workplaces, totally severing East Jerusalem from
the West Bank, leaving Jerusalem Palestinians with no hinterland
and West Bankers with no capital and no religious or civic center.
Israeli tanks occupy Palestinian cities; Israeli bulldozers demolish
Palestinian homes; Israeli authorities confi scate Palestinian residency
permits; most maps published in Israel depict the West Bank and Gaza
as part of Israel. Gaza is caged and in ruins, worse than Dresden of
1945. The Israeli occupation army has demolished every Palestinian
government and security headquarters building throughout the
West Bank and Gaza, ransacked every Palestinian civilian ministry,
even destroyed Palestinian census records and land registry records.
What is the Israeli purpose here other than to erase all trace of
Palestinian existence?
The Palestinian–Israeli confl ict has gone beyond being a mere
political problem, beyond the stuff of cool political debate. It is a
human disaster that can no longer be treated with dispassion, no
longer addressed by an equal weighing of rights and wrongs on both
sides. The Israeli appropriation of the Palestinians’ land, livelihood,
and very existence is terrorist violence, as surely as any suicide
bombing is terrorism. The massive difference between the terrorism
of the two sides, however, is that one employs a few youth to express
an entire people’s rage through individual acts of murder, while the
other employs the vast military power of a strong nation to smother
another people. There is another critical difference: in international
media coverage of the two sides, only Israel’s story is told, so that
Palestinian violence has no context and no reason, whereas Israeli
violence is portrayed as “reasonable” and “unavoidable.” Studies of
newspaper and television coverage in both the U.S. and Britain have
shown that Israel is consistently portrayed as the besieged victim
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Foreword xi
despite its military power, that Palestinian casualties are consistently
minimized despite their far higher numbers, that Israeli grievances
and justifi cations for Israeli actions are consistently reported, without
similar reporting of Palestinian grievances and justifi cations.2 The
result is that even the media-savvy publics in the U.S. and Europe
know next to nothing about the Palestinians, about the Israeli
occupation, about the killing of Palestinians, about the root causes
of Palestinian “terrorism.”
How should the Palestinians respond to the ethnocide being
committed against them? In these circumstances, with no one
listening, no one hearing their grievances, and no feasible way to
stop the Israeli machine, many desperate Palestinians have felt they
had no other course than to lash out with murderous acts against
individual Israelis. Attacks on innocent civilians can never be justifi ed,
but few critics even seem to notice when the Palestinians use a non-
violent strategy. Neither Israel nor the U.S. nor the American and
international media have noted that Palestinian protest activities
against the separation wall for the last two years have been totally
non-violent. Nor have they noted that in general non-violence has
become a unilateral Palestinian enterprise—that when Palestinians use
non-violence, Israel continues gratuitous violence against Palestinians
through assassinations and assaults on Palestinian towns. In reality,
the obstacle to peace has always been Israel’s occupation, not Yasser
Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas or Hamas; the source of violence is not
Palestinian “terrorism,” but Israel’s occupation and the land theft,
oppression, and ethnic cleansing that go with it. It is Israel that is
not a partner for peace, Israel’s violence that impedes peace.
The Palestinians’ tragedy, as symbolized by Ramzy Baroud’s
grandfather and his obsession with listening for news of his salvation,
is that they and their leadership have always been too ready to let
others do for them—to let the Arab states fi ght for them or the United
States bring them peace, always hoping, as if in a dream, that the
radio will soon bring good news. They have never known how,
and therefore have never tried adequately, to prevail in the public-
relations contest with Israel—never known how to frame their story
in a way that would win the sympathy of a public enraptured by the
story of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. There may never in fact
have been anything they could do, given the Israel-centered frame of
reference that has shaped public discourse, and ultimately policy, for
over half a century. But the Palestinians have never made a serious
attempt to break the almost total media blackout in the United States
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xii Foreword
that has left their narrative unknown. The leadership has also never
been able to make the transition from revolutionary movement
to state-building institution. With no coherent territory to govern
over and no true governing authority anywhere, the leadership has
never known how to balance resistance to the Israeli occupation
with preparation for governing a state. Where once Yasser Arafat
and Fatah and the P.L.O. were rallying points and unifi ers for the
Palestinians, in the half-light of the Oslo so-called “peace process,”
where they were able neither to control the pace of negotiations nor
freely to advance the interests of their own people, the leaders and
the organizations all soon descended into mundane political hackery
and corruption. In this volume, Baroud discusses the level of betrayal
felt by ordinary Palestinians because of this failure of leadership, as
well as the crippling corruption that has become pervasive within
Palestinian institutions. But the long vigil of Baroud’s grandfather
also demonstrates the Palestinians’ great strength: their resilience
and remarkable endurance. Even in the face of being ignored,
exiled, repeatedly dispossessed, oppressed by successive conquerors,
occasionally massacred, the Palestinians carry on vigorously. Baroud’s
grandfather obviously had a clear sense that the injustice done to
him and to all around him was so very great that redress simply had
to come sometime soon. And so he waited in that state of suspended
animation. And, it must be asked, what better way is there after all
to carry on in the face of massive power and gross injustice?
This puts one in mind of the great Palestinian novel, The Secret
Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist, by Emile Habiby, about the diffi cult
life of the small remnant of the Palestinian people who remained in
Israel in 1948. In one episode, the Palestinian hero, the Pessoptimist,
watches as an Israeli military governor drives a Palestinian woman
and her child away at gunpoint from a fi eld where she is working.
“At this point,” says the hero,
I observed the fi rst example of that amazing phenomenon that was to occur
again and again…. For the further the woman and child went from where we
were, the governor standing and I in the jeep, the taller they grew. By the time
they merged with their own shadows in the sinking sun, they had become
bigger than the plain of Acre itself. The governor still stood there awaiting their
fi nal disappearance, while I remained huddled in the jeep. Finally he asked in
amazement, “Will they never disappear?”
The answer to that Israeli question is no, the Palestinians will endure.
Palestinians like Ramzy Baroud and his grandfather will make it so.
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Preface
The Second Palestinian Uprising will be etched in history as an era
in which a major shift in the rules of the game occurred. From the
shock of witnessing scores of young people voluntarily blowing
themselves up, to the shame of the construction of one of the largest
walls in history to create an eternal divide between two peoples, it
has been a time in which both sides, oppressor and oppressed, have
become intimately and painfully affected by the scourge of the Israeli
occupation and the subsequent Palestinian resistance.
I was a teenage boy in high school when the First Palestinian
Uprising erupted in December 1987. As the world’s media wrangled in
an attempt to construe or misrepresent the actual causes of violence
throughout the Occupied Territories, the impoverished and persistently
grief stricken residents of my Gaza refugee camp were consumed with
other more worldly matters: would they eat today, would they fi nd
clean water, would they seize their long-awaited freedom? Family
members, friends and neighbors lost their lives in that evocative
fi ght in which the Palestinian people once again reclaimed their
rightful role in the struggle. It was an awesome awakening which
forced all parties that had traditionally laid claim to the Palestinian
struggle to relinquish their stake. Ordinary Palestinians took to the
streets, defying the Israeli army and articulating a collective stance
that echoed a seemingly eternal commitment across the generations:
“Our souls and our blood are forfeited to free you Palestine.” I grew
up hearing the echoes of that chant and soon joined in.
My house was positioned at the forefront of what the refugees
referred to as Red Square. There, many of my peers fell to a cruel fate,
the trails of their blood leaving stains that would last forever. Directly
beside Red Square was the ever-expanding graveyard, wherein many
graves were adorned by the colors of the Palestinian fl ag, marking the
resting places of the many martyrs. It was in those dismal yet stirring
surroundings that I began to write. In my earliest attempts, I wrote
poetry. Many of my verses would soon evolve into chants that would
resound throughout the camp, in times of celebration and in times
of grief. My fi rst works were published all along the walls of Gaza’s
refugee camps. Sadly, that is where they would stay, along with the
other countless screams inscribed on those pockmarked walls. The
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