On the evening of 8 December 1987, an Israeli army truck collided with a line of cars near the Erez checkpoint, killing four Palestinian workers from Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The men had spent the day laboring inside Israel and were heading home. Within hours, Jabalia — one of the most densely populated places on earth, a camp that had held families dispossessed since 1948 — erupted in protests that would not stop for six years. The First Intifada had begun.
What followed was not, in the main, a military campaign. It was a sustained, largely unarmed civil uprising — a revolt of strikes, boycotts, tax refusals, and neighborhood committees — that forced the Palestinian cause back to the center of international attention and, in the end, reshaped the terms of every negotiation that followed.
A Pressure Cooker Twenty Years in the Making
To understand why Jabalia exploded that December, it helps to understand what two decades of occupation had produced. By 1987, Israel had controlled the West Bank and Gaza Strip for twenty years. Settlement construction had accelerated sharply under the Likud governments of the late 1970s and 1980s, steadily consuming Palestinian land. The economy of the territories was structurally subordinated to Israel: Palestinian workers crossed daily into Israel for wages but were barred from developing independent industries that might compete with Israeli goods. Movement was controlled, political organizing was repressed, and Palestinian universities had been subject to repeated closures.
UNRWA figures from the period documented chronic overcrowding and unemployment in camps like Jabalia, Shatila, and Balata. Scholars including Rashid Khalidi have argued that the occupation had created a generation of young Palestinians — born under military rule, educated enough to analyze their situation, and with little economic future — who no longer looked to distant PLO leadership in Tunis for salvation. The anger in Jabalia that December was local, immediate, and years overdue.
The Unified National Leadership and the Architecture of Resistance
Within weeks of the initial outbreak, an organizational structure emerged from within the territories themselves. The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) — a coalition of Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, and the Palestinian Communist Party — began issuing numbered communiqués, printed and distributed by hand, that coordinated strike days, commercial boycotts, and demonstrations across the West Bank and Gaza. The Islamic movement Hamas, founded in Gaza in the early days of the uprising, operated on a parallel track and would become an increasingly significant force as the intifada wore on.
The UNLU’s leaflets instructed shopkeepers to close their shutters at set hours, taxi drivers to stay off the roads on certain days, and civil servants to resign from the Israeli military administration. Entire villages established popular committees — lijan sha’biya — to organize food distribution, neighborhood medical care, and informal education when Israel closed schools and universities. These committees represented a genuine attempt to build the infrastructure of a parallel society beneath the occupation’s nose.
The weapon of choice was the stone. Television cameras captured young men and boys hurling rocks at heavily armed Israeli soldiers, and that image — asymmetric, visceral — traveled around the world and reframed how international audiences perceived the conflict. Tax resistance was another front: Palestinians in Beit Sahour, a small town near Bethlehem, mounted a celebrated refusal to pay Israeli taxes in 1989, forcing Israeli authorities into a prolonged and ultimately embarrassing standoff that attracted wide international coverage.
“Break Their Bones”: The Military Response
The Israeli military’s response was severe. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously articulated a policy of “force, might, and beatings” — widely rendered as a directive to break the bones of protesters — which was reported at the time by Israeli journalists and subsequently documented in accounts by historians including Benny Morris and Tom Segev. Soldiers were photographed and filmed fracturing the limbs of Palestinians they had detained.
Beyond beatings, the response included mass arrests, prolonged administrative detention without charge or trial, deportations, the demolition of homes, the uprooting of orchards, extended curfews that confined entire towns for weeks, and the closure of educational institutions. The systematic nature of these measures was documented in real time by human rights organizations including B’Tselem, founded in 1989 specifically in response to the intifada, and by international bodies including the ICRC.
The human cost was documented by B’Tselem in detail. According to the organization’s records, more than 1,070 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces or settlers during the First Intifada, among them at least 237 children. Tens of thousands more were injured, and more than 100,000 Palestinians passed through Israeli detention over the course of the uprising. On the Israeli side, B’Tselem recorded 100 civilians and 60 security force members killed by Palestinians during the same period.
Women, Doctors, and Farmers: The Breadth of Civil Participation
One dimension of the intifada that is sometimes lost in retrospect is how broadly Palestinian civil society mobilized. Women’s committees that had been building organizational capacity throughout the early 1980s — groups affiliated with each of the major political factions — shifted rapidly to relief and coordination work. Researchers including Islah Jad have documented how women took on prominent roles in neighborhood committees, managed food storage and distribution during curfews, and sustained community life when men were disproportionately targeted for arrest.
Palestinian medical workers, many of them trained under severe resource constraints, organized field clinics to treat protest injuries at a time when reaching hospitals was often impossible under curfew. Farmers in villages like Beit Sahour experimented with agricultural self-sufficiency, buying dairy cows to reduce dependence on Israeli suppliers — an act of economic resistance the Israeli military ultimately suppressed by confiscating the animals.
This texture of daily, distributed resistance was what the UNLU’s communiqués were designed to coordinate and what gave the intifada its character as something distinct from previous Palestinian armed struggles. It was, in the framing of legal scholar Noura Erakat, a form of popular resistance that drew on international humanitarian law’s recognition of occupied peoples’ right to resist.
Oslo and the Contested Legacy
The intifada did not end with a Palestinian victory in any conventional sense. It ended, or rather dissolved, into the Oslo process — the secret negotiations between the PLO and Israel that produced the Declaration of Principles signed on the White House lawn in September 1993. For many Palestinians who had built the uprising from within the territories, Oslo was a profound betrayal: the PLO leadership in Tunis had negotiated away key questions of Jerusalem, refugees, and sovereignty in exchange for formal recognition and a limited administrative authority over fragments of the West Bank and Gaza.
The legacy of the First Intifada is therefore genuinely contested. Optimists point to Oslo as proof that sustained popular resistance could force Israel to the negotiating table and win international legitimacy for Palestinian statehood. Critics, including Rashid Khalidi in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, argue that Oslo locked Palestinians into a framework that preserved Israeli control while transferring the costs of administering the occupation — the civil services, the policing — onto Palestinian Authority institutions with no real sovereignty.
What is not contested is what the intifada revealed. It demonstrated that Palestinian society in the occupied territories possessed deep reserves of organization, resilience, and political imagination. It produced a generation of local leaders, women’s organizers, and civil society institutions whose influence outlasted the uprising itself. And it established, indelibly, that the Palestinian people under occupation were not passive subjects of history — that in Jabalia camp and in Beit Sahour and in a hundred villages across the West Bank, ordinary people had chosen to act, at enormous personal cost, to make their condition visible to the world.
Sources
- B’Tselem — Statistics on Palestinians killed in the First Intifada (btselem.org)
- B’Tselem — The Interrogation of Palestinians during the Intifada (1991)
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020)
- Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict (Knopf, 1999)
- Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (Metropolitan Books, 2000)
- Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019)
- UNRWA — Historical data on Jabalia refugee camp population and conditions
- ICRC — Reports on conditions in the occupied territories, 1988–1993
- Islah Jad, “The ‘Democratization’ of Women: Women’s Organizations in Palestine,” Middle East Report
