In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Three The Intifada as Palestinian Civilian Resistance The exact date of the following incident is not known. It may have occurred just prior to the intifada or during its early phases. It is recounted here because it captures so vividly the spirit of this uprising in the Occupied Territories. Dheisheh camp, near the West Bank city of Bethlehem, has long been a site of confrontations between Palestinian refugees and Israeli soldiers and settlers. Because of its location overlooking one of the main roads traversed by settlers, Dheisheh has frequently been the source of stones thrown at passing cars. Some years ago, a group of Jewish settlers led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a vocal leader of the ultraright Gush Emunim movement, staged a deliberate, prolonged, and aggressive "sit-in" outside the camp. Levinger and his followers were determined to remain in place until the Israeli authorities solved the "problem" of stone-throwing Palestinian youth. They finally erected a huge fence all along the outskirts of the camp, bordering the main road. As one West Bank Palestinian told me, from then on the Palestinian camp dwellers were like "monkeys in a circus," trapped behind their wire fences. At the time of the incident in question, Israeli army personnel had cleared a piece of land just across the road from one of the main entrances to the camp. They had installed utility poles, had erected tents, and were preparing to set up an army unit on the site. The camp dwellers of Dheisheh were evidently disturbed by these moves. They did not want an army presence at such close proximity, so they decided to protest. For three nights in a row, Palestinian women stood just inside the fence and spent the long hours of the night Copyrighted Material 58 Eyes Without Country shouting and ululating across the road at the soldiers. After three nights ofsuch continuous commotion, the Israeli soldiers packed up and left the site. The army later set up its camp a few miles down the road, away from Dheisheh. At some point during recent years, however, the army returned.1 The moral of this story is not that the army was afraid of the Palestinians or seriously disturbed by the noises of the women. According to the West Bank Palestinian who recounted the tale, what concerned the Israelis most was that through such action, Palestinians would learn something about their own power. They feared that Palestinians would organize and employ direct action against their opponent, action that does not rely on the force of arms to be effective. Much has been written about the events immediately preceding the intifada -both in the Occupied Territories themselves and the region at large.2 1t is not really necessary to go far beyond the boundaries of the Occupied Territories themselves to locate the origins of the intifada. Palestinians viewed Israel as intransigent and unwilling to reach a political settlement. Frustration with the political process had been accumulating for years. Palestinians never accepted their situation passively, and they soon said "enough is enough" and took matters into their own hands to change the situation. Before a full-fledged civilian struggle could be launched, a firm commitment from the PLO was required for the mass movement in the Occupied Territories-whereby the civilian population would struggle against the occupation with largely nonviolent means-to be legitimate in its own right. Perhaps the PLO was caught by surprise by the specific timing, but there can be little doubt that the PLO not only approved of such a struggle, but had been actively involved in laying the groundwork for it. Helena Cobban quotes the Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini to the effect that Abu Jihad, the military commander of the PLO, had been planning for "offensive nonviolence " in the Occupied Territories at least as early as 1985. By Cobban's own account, the PLO consciously adopted this strategic focus after its ouster from Lebanon in 1982. It was then that the PLO realized the limitations of armed struggle and decided to shift the locus of power to the civilian population under Israeli rule.3 This shifting emphasis signaled a division of labor in the national movement. The PLO would retain responsibility for the formulation of general policy (grand strategy), while the population in the Occupied Territories would be responsible for formulating and coordinating the tactical steps of the intifada. They would be the ones to employ direct and generally nonviolent resistance against the occupation regime (the nonuse of...

Share