On the morning of September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon — then leader of the Israeli opposition, surrounded by roughly a thousand Israeli police officers — walked onto the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary that Jews call the Temple Mount, in occupied East Jerusalem. He had been warned the visit would ignite violence. He went anyway. The next day, Israeli security forces killed seven Palestinian protesters around the compound. Within weeks, an uprising that would last nearly five years and kill more than five thousand people had taken hold. Palestinians called it the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
For over two decades, a particular story has been told in Western capitals about why the Second Intifada began: Yasser Arafat walked away from a “generous offer” at Camp David in July 2000 and chose violence instead. That story is, at best, a serious distortion of the documented record. Understanding what actually happened — in the negotiating rooms and on the ground — matters enormously, because the causes of the uprising shape how we read everything that followed: the F-16 strikes on civilian infrastructure, the siege of Jenin, the construction of a separation barrier that the International Court of Justice would later rule illegal.
Camp David 2000: What the Record Actually Shows
The “generous offer” narrative was popularized above all by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his American interlocutors after the July 2000 summit collapsed. It was systematically dismantled by participants and scholars who examined the actual maps and proposals. Robert Malley, who served as a Special Assistant to President Clinton and was present at Camp David, co-authored a detailed account in The New York Review of Books in 2001 concluding that “the accepted explanation” placing sole blame on Arafat “is not only one-sided but wrong.” Malley and Hussein Agha noted that Barak’s proposals were never presented in a single written document, that Israeli settlement blocs would have cut the proposed Palestinian state into non-contiguous cantons, and that Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem — the political and spiritual heart of any Palestinian state — was not genuinely on offer.
Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, documents in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) that the Palestinian delegation in fact tabled detailed counter-proposals, and that the summit’s failure was a product of profound gaps on core issues — refugees, Jerusalem, borders — that neither side had the political conditions to bridge. Arafat’s refusal to sign away rights he was not authorized to sign away was not a rejection of peace; it was a refusal to legitimize a framework Palestinian negotiators regarded as a formalized surrender.
The broader context matters too. By September 2000, the Oslo process had presided over a near-doubling of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza — from roughly 110,000 at Oslo’s signing in 1993 to over 200,000 by 2000, according to Peace Now settlement data. Palestinian movement was more restricted, not less. Unemployment had risen. The “peace process” had delivered process without peace, and Palestinian frustration had been building for years before Sharon set foot on the Haram al-Sharif.
The Proximate Trigger: Sharon’s Temple Mount Visit
Sharon’s September 28 visit did not cause the uprising the way a spark causes an explosion in a vacuum. It caused it the way a spark causes an explosion in a room full of gas. Palestinian Authority officials, Jordanian government representatives, and senior Israeli security figures all warned in advance that the visit was needlessly provocative. Then-Prime Minister Barak approved it nonetheless.
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem — whose casualty database is among the most methodically documented available — records that Israeli security forces killed seven Palestinians on September 29, 2000, the day after the visit, during protests at and around the Haram al-Sharif. In the first month of the uprising, B’Tselem recorded, the vast majority of those killed were Palestinian civilians and protesters shot by Israeli live fire. The pattern of disproportionate early lethality is significant: it shaped the trajectory of Palestinian militant response in the months that followed.
The Course of the Uprising: F-16s, Checkpoints, and Jenin
The Second Intifada differed from the First (1987–1993) in its weaponry and its death toll on both sides. Palestinian militant factions — Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a Fatah offshoot — carried out suicide bombings inside Israeli cities that killed Israeli civilians in cafés, buses, and markets. Those attacks were war crimes. They also, for the Israeli government and much of the international community, provided a frame for the entire uprising that erased the structural conditions that had produced it.
Israel’s military response escalated steadily and dramatically. The Israeli Air Force struck Palestinian Authority infrastructure — including Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah — with F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters. OCHA oPt documented systematic destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure across the West Bank and Gaza. Closures and checkpoints fragmented the Palestinian economy; the World Bank estimated Palestinian GDP fell by roughly a third in the uprising’s first two years.
The most intense single episode of ground combat came in April 2002, during Operation Defensive Shield. Israeli forces invaded the Jenin refugee camp, a densely populated area of roughly 14,000 residents in the northern West Bank, following a Hamas suicide bombing at a Passover seder in Netanya that killed 30 Israelis. The battle of Jenin lasted from April 1–18. When it ended, Human Rights Watch — in its detailed 2002 report Jenin: IDF Military Operations — documented that 52 Palestinians were killed, including civilians, and that Israeli forces had used Palestinian civilians as human shields, denied medical access, and conducted unlawful demolitions of homes. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers were also killed. Israeli officials initially claimed a “massacre” of hundreds had been carried out by Palestinian militants, then reversed themselves; HRW’s investigation found no massacre by Palestinian forces but documented serious Israeli violations of international humanitarian law.
By the time the uprising wound down in 2005 — without a formal ceasefire or political settlement — B’Tselem’s figures showed 4,228 Palestinians and 1,024 Israelis killed. Among the Palestinians, over 900 were children.
The Separation Barrier and the ICJ Advisory Opinion
Alongside the military campaign, Israel began constructing what it called a “security fence” — a structure that runs, for significant stretches, as a towering concrete wall cutting deep into the West Bank rather than along the 1949 armistice line (the Green Line). By the time it was substantially complete, approximately 85 percent of the barrier’s route ran inside the West Bank, according to OCHA oPt data, effectively annexing substantial Palestinian land and cutting communities off from their agricultural land, schools, and hospitals.
In July 2004, the International Court of Justice issued an Advisory Opinion on Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The court found, by 14 votes to one, that the construction of the barrier in the West Bank — including in and around East Jerusalem — was contrary to international law, that Israel was obligated to cease construction, dismantle the sections already built inside Palestinian territory, and make reparations to those harmed. Israel rejected the opinion. Construction continued.
Legacy: The Architecture of Control That Outlasted the Uprising
The Second Intifada ended without resolving a single one of the issues that had made it inevitable: settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty. What it produced instead was a hardened architecture of control. The barrier became permanent. The siege of Gaza — where Hamas took power in 2007 — tightened into what Gisha, the Israeli legal center for freedom of movement, and OCHA have documented as a comprehensive closure affecting every dimension of civilian life. In the West Bank, the checkpoint system and Area C military administration documented by B’Tselem and OCHA continued to restrict Palestinian movement and development.
The uprising also calcified political positions on both sides in ways that shaped everything that followed. The international community’s absorption of the “Arafat rejected peace” narrative gave successive Israeli governments cover to avoid meaningful negotiations. For Palestinians, the failure of both armed resistance and the Oslo diplomatic track left a political landscape fractured between Fatah and Hamas, with no viable path to statehood visible on the horizon.
Sharon’s walk across the Haram al-Sharif did not cause Palestinian statelessness. But it lit a fire in a structure whose foundations had been rotting for years — and when the fire went out, the structure was smaller, and its inhabitants more confined, than before.
Sources
- B’Tselem, Fatalities in the First Intifada and Second Intifada, casualty database, btselem.org/statistics
- Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” The New York Review of Books, August 9, 2001
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan Books, 2020)
- Human Rights Watch, Jenin: IDF Military Operations (May 2002)
- International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, July 9, 2004
- OCHA oPt, The Humanitarian Impact of the Barrier, various years, ochaopt.org
- Peace Now, Settlement Watch data, peacenow.org.il
- Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, Gaza closure documentation, gisha.org
- World Bank, Twenty-Seven Months — Intifada, Closures and Palestinian Economic Crisis (2003)
