The Palestinian uprisings against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The First Intifada (1987–93) was largely characterised by civil disobedience and stone-throwing; the Second (or Al-Aqsa) Intifada (2000–05) involved suicide bombings and armed confrontation.
The First Intifada began spontaneously in December 1987 following a traffic accident in Gaza in which an Israeli truck killed four Palestinian workers — an event that triggered weeks of accumulated frustration at twenty years of military occupation into sustained uprising. The uprising was notable for its civilian character: strikes, boycotts, refusal to pay taxes, stone-throwing against soldiers, and a grassroots committee structure that organised daily resistance across the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO leadership in Tunis had not planned it and scrambled to assert its authority over a movement that had emerged from the ground up. Israel’s response — including Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s reported instruction to break the protesters’ bones — was widely televised and damaged Israel’s international image. The First Intifada contributed directly to the Oslo peace process: it demonstrated to Israeli leaders that military occupation had political costs that could not be indefinitely sustained. The Second Intifada, which began in September 2000 following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif compound, was far more violent: Palestinian suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians, Israeli military operations in Palestinian cities, the construction of the separation barrier, and over 3,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli deaths.
The two Intifadas represent two different strategic logics and produced two different outcomes. The First Intifada’s power lay in its civilian character: it was difficult to portray mass civil disobedience as terrorism, and the images of soldiers confronting stone-throwing children generated international sympathy and Israeli domestic discomfort that contributed to the Oslo negotiation. The Second Intifada’s suicide bombings killed civilians in markets and restaurants and generated Israeli public support for a military response that dismantled the Palestinian Authority’s security infrastructure and built the separation barrier. From a purely strategic perspective, the Second Intifada was counterproductive: it produced the opposite political conditions from those that had made Oslo possible, enabling Israeli governments to shift public debate from the occupation to security in ways that strengthened the political positions most hostile to Palestinian statehood. The hard question — whether any Palestinian strategy could have achieved statehood given Israeli political dynamics and American policy — cannot be answered by comparing the two Intifadas alone.
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