The Second Palestinian Intifada

Ramzy Baroud

Description

This is a comprehensive account of the momentous events which shaped the political landscape not only of Palestine and Israel but of the entire Middle East region.



Addressing the most controversial issues, including the alarming escalation in suicide bombings, and the construction of the Separation Wall, he reports on the huge rate of unemployment and hunger in the Occupied Territories - statistics so critical that NGOs compare their magnitude to African nations such as the Congo. From the brutality of the Israeli army to the ever-compromising nature of the Palestinian Authority, few are spared Ramzy Baroud’s thoughtful critique.



The book is clear and concise, with one chapter dedicated to the major events of each year, and includes a comprehensive timeline.
Dedication

Acknowledgements

Preface

Foreward – Kathy and Bill Christison

Introduction – Jennifer Lowenstein

1. The Intifada Takes Off (2000-2001)

2. Intifada International (2002)

3. Calls for Reform (2003)

4. Profound Changes, Insurmountable Challenges – 2004

5. End of the Intifada (2005)

Epilogue

Appendix I – Total deaths and other losses during the Second Palestinian Uprising

Appendix II – Map of the West Bank and Gaza including the Separation Wall and Settlements location

Appendix III – Intifada Timeline: 2000-2005

Recommended Readings

Index

Sujets

• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Political Science
• Advocacy group
• Terrorism
• Palestine

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849643214
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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 • ANN ARBOR, MI

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 identified 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 ISBN

0 7453 2548 3 hardback 0 7453 2547 5 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

10

9

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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

To Zarefah, Iman, and Sammy, my life’s inspiration

Cont

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Foreword byKathleen and Bill Christison Preface Acknowledgements

Introduction byJennifer Loewenstein

1 The Intifada Takes Off (2000–01)

2 Intifada International (2002)

3 Calls for Reform (2003)

4 Profound Changes, Insurmountable Challenges (2004)

5 End of the Intifada? (2005)

Epilogue

Appendix I Total Deaths and Other Losses During the Second Palestinian Uprising

Appendix II Timeline of Events During the Second Palestinian Uprising: 2000–05

Notes Recommended Reading Notes on Contributors Index

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196 207 208 210

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 1 created and 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes. 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.

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Foreword ix

The effort to ignore Palestinians continues unabated, even into the twentyfirst 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 firmly 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 conflict from any but

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 confiscating 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 confiscate 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 conflict 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

Foreword xi

despite its military power, that Palestinian casualties are consistently minimized despite their far higher numbers, that Israeli grievances and justifications for Israeli actions are consistently reported, without 2 similar reporting of Palestinian grievances and justifications. 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 justified, 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 fight 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

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 unifiers 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 difficult 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 field where she is working. “At this point,” says the hero,

I observed the first 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 final 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.

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 find clean water, would they seize their longawaited freedom? Family members, friends and neighbors lost their lives in that evocative fight 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 flag, 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 first 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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