December 9, 2007 at 20:53:52

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The First Palestinian Intifada

By Chris Gelken (about the author)     Page 2 of 3 page(s)

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Murdock argued that the Palestinian cause would have been better served through civil disobedience or passive resistance, rather than violence.

“To me it’s always a mystery, a tragedy that the Palestinian cause was not fought through the tools of non-violence, which you saw Mahatma Gandhi use in India and Martin Luther King Jr. used here in the United States. Standing up to oppression through non-violence, through peaceful protest.”

By using violence and targeting civilians, Murdock said, the Palestinians lost the moral high ground and they have largely lost a lot of the sympathy they would otherwise have had.

“Gandhi,” Sizer responded, “was only able to conduct his non-violent resistance because of the British approach to diplomacy. If he had been living in Gaza he would have either have been arrested, kidnapped or disappeared. He'd have been shot.”

Baroud said the intifada actually did begin as a peaceful protest. “I disagree with Deroy,” he said, “the intifada was not a continuation, it was a new non-violent resistance and that is exactly what it was. The fact that Israel responded so harshly and so brutally in so many different ways, I can’t imagine what any other response would be except to counter violence with violence.”

Watching American television, Baroud said, you will not get the realities of what is actually taking place in Palestine.

“The Palestinian people have been dehumanized; have been mistreated so brutally throughout the years. They have been treated less than animals, they are literally caged, people are dying at Israeli checkpoints, they are being sniped at daily by Israeli snipers – it just shows me how little people know about the reality of living in the Palestinian territories.”

When the intifada began the Palestinian leadership was mostly living in exile, but a consequence of the uprising, Baroud said, was a short lived unification of different Palestinian factions.

“The first intifada managed to end the state of factionalism among Palestinian groups. There was, for the first time, internal Palestinian cohesion. We saw parties forming some sort of a unity group through which they coordinated their resistance. Unfortunately it did not last for long. But my hope is that they will be able to do that once more,” he said.

The energy that came out of the first intifada, Baroud continued, could have been channeled in a way to empower the Palestinian leadership to negotiate as a strong party, not one with a posture of defeatism. “That was an opportunity that was squandered.”

Murdock isn’t convinced there was Palestinian unity, and pointed out that in addition to the 1,100 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, more than 1,000 were killed in factional disputes.

“A big part of the intifada was the moderate Palestinians who were targeted, assassinated, by the PLO,” Murdock said, “Yassir Arafat went through this group of 120 who had been killed and said ‘We have studied the files of those who were killed and found that only two of them were innocent.’ The others, according to Arafat, were guilty of collaboration with the Israelis and were executed.”

Arguably the uprising contributed to the Madrid Conference of 1991, a three-day meeting that attempted to forge the beginning of a peace process between Israel and its Arab enemies. It also marked the return of the PLO from its exile in Tunisia. The conference was the first of several rounds of negotiations throughout the 1990s, and formed the basis of the 1993 Oslo Accords – the first direct agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

The Accords set out the structure for the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Israeli didn’t leave Gaza until 2005, and Murdock isn’t impressed with result.

“Israel turned Gaza over to the Palestinians and the Palestinians had every opportunity to turn it into a trade zone to attract investment. And instead you've seen violence, destruction, Palestinian on Palestinian. The Palestinians came in and they destroyed it. They had a great opportunity to show we now control Gaza and make something of this, and now we just have mayhem and chaos,” he said.

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