About the Intifada
by Naseer Aruri and Reja-e Busailah

The first week of December 1987 passed more or less as an ordinary week in the history of Palestinian-Israeli relations. The stab-killing by Palestinians of an Israeli merchant in Gaza, followed by the crushing to death of four Palestinians under an Israeli military vehicle, along with the injury of seven others, went scarcely beyond the routine in a situation composed of a tenacious oppressor and stubborn oppressed, a situation whose highly intense history goes back well beyond 1967 when Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began, well beyond 1948 when the Israelis conquered more than three fourths of Palestine, dispossessing and forcing into exile and refugee camps at least two thirds of the Palestinian population.

Incidents similar to those of the first week of December 1987 had taken place quite regularly for a long time, and little had been made of them by anyone. It was only later that this week impressed itself on the consciousness of both oppressor and oppressed, as well as on the consciousness of the international community, as profoundly different from other weeks and days. This week came to be associated with the historic facts that seventy years earlier (November 1917) Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration conferring Palestine on an alien people, that in the same year (December 8, 1917) the British Army, under General Allenby, conquered Jerusalem, and that forty years earlier (November 1947) the then West-dominated United Nations voted the partition of Palestine between Palestinians and predominantly immigrant Jews.

Finally, while this week was ushering in the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli state, it was giving birth to an event equal in significance to any of the events we have mentioned, the Palestinian Intifadah. The Intifadah constitutes the latest phase of the Palestinian reawakening, which was stimulated by the 1967 Arab defeat. It is an integral part of the Palestinian nationalist struggle, which spans most of the current century and which re-emerged in 1967 to give the Palestinians a new identity, a new leadership, and new forms of struggle. It was preceded by numerous acts of protest, civil and violent, such as the riots in Jaffa in 1920, the riots in Jerusalem, Hebron and other cities in the country in 1929, as well as by the first Arab Congresses of Haifa and Jerusalem in 1921 and 1922; by the first Palestinian Women Congress of 1929; the Hebron Congress of 1000 peasants in 1929 and the thoroughgoing revolution of 1936-39, as well as the resistance to the establishment of the Jewish state on Palestinian land in 1948.

Just as unarmed Palestinian men, women, and children now face elite units of the Golani Brigade, their grandparents faced the famous British Cameroon and Seaforth Highlanders regiments in 1936. Just as they face brutal attempts to contain and abort their uprising now, their grandparents had to contend with faulty Arab promises that His Majesty's government will do justice. All they had to do in 1936 was to call off their six-month strike; now, they are told to end the violence", and wait for deliverance by Washington and Cairo. The current uprising is the most recent of four major phases into which post-1967 history can be divided. In the broadest terms, it can be said that post-1967 politics in the occupied West Bank and Gaza have gone through four major phases, which are defined primarily by the character of the resistance at each stage: Phase 1 (1967-76) was characterized by the armed struggle of 1967-70 waged by the Palestine Liberation Organization from bases in Jordan and Lebanon, and the non-violent struggle waged by the Palestine National Front (PNF) in 1973-74 inside the occupied territories.

While Israel captured most of the PNF leaders in the spring of 1974, it never conquered the spirit of the resistance. The seeds of a policy of non-cooperation with the occupation regime had been planted. This policy included organized strikes, boycotts, rallies, legal defense funds for dissidents and for land owners threatened with expropriation for non-payment of taxes.

The resistance was stimulated and energized by the October 1973 war, the Arab summit's recognition of the PLO as sole legitimate representatives of the Palestinians in 1974 in Rabat, Morocco, and the mounting international legitimacy of the P.L.O. which was emphasized by its admission to the United Nations as observer. It gained broad momentum when Palestinian nationalists captured a decisive majority in the 1976 municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza and when the Nazareth Democratic Front replaced Israel's men in the Knesset.

The second phase of the internal resistance (1976-82) was characterized by the formation of mass organizations of students, workers, women and professionals, united in an endeavor to defeat the Camp David arrangements. The struggle was coordinated by the National Guidance Committee, which consisted of newly elected municipal counselors and mayors as well as professionals and nationalist notables. This phase of internal Palestinian resistance was largely a response to Camp David and the Likud phase of the occupation, which began in 1977 and which was marked by a pervasive domination of the economy, land and water resources and increased colonization of urban and rural areas.

Land became rather scarce for the native Palestinians, who had owned 93 percent of the land of Palestine on the eve of the establishment of Israel. After 1948, they were squeezed into 23 percent, which constitutes the West Bank and Gaza. By the start of the 1 980's, the stepped up land colonization by Jewish settlers took away 55 percent of the land in the West Bank and 35 percent in Gaza, thus leaving the Palestinians effectively with only 12 percent of their national patrimony.

Furthermore, Israeli thirst for Palestinian water has been no less ferocious than Israeli hunger for Palestinian land. Since the invasion and occupation of 1967 the policies of grabbing land and water resources have gone hand in hand-hence the phenomenon that a Jewish settler consumes 20 times as much water as an indigenous Palestinian. Moreover, other parts of the economic infrastructure of the occupied territories were forced to become dependent on and/or physically integrated into the Israeli infrastructure. Examples are the transportation and communication systems, currency, and the electric grid.

Needless to say, the economic benefits which accrued to Israel because of the occupation caused severe damage to the indigenous Palestinians and depressed the quality of their life. Life conditions would have become even much worse after nearly two decades of intensive exploitation and suppression, had it not been for the oil boom in the Arabian Peninsula, which provided employment and income for Palestinians and their families in the occupied territories.

But the Arab oil economy began to decline rapidly in the early 1980s, and that gave the Palestinians a new sense of realism about the future: the steeper the decline and the corresponding slump in employment, the stronger the commitment to the land in occupied Palestine. The resulting slowdown in emigration of Palestinians seeking employment produced a demographic pattern which favored social unrest, and the combination of these economic social and demographic factors has further reduced the prospects for a stable occupation-a goal which Israel has so fervently, yet in vain, pursued.

Meanwhile the population of the West Bank and Gaza has become exceedingly young in the 1980s. The majority of the population is under the age of 20 and one-third are students. In Gaza, which has one of the highestrates of density in the world, 77 percent of the population are under the age of 29. It was not strange, therefore, that the third phase of the resistance ( 1983-87) was one of heightened nationalist activity, spearheaded by the generation of the occupation, which was free of their parents' complex of defeat. It was characterized by the formation of popular committees which mobilized thousands of people to perform social services in the areas infrastructure that would eventually become the infrastructure of an of health, education, and general welfare. these committees were intended to operate as parallel hierarchies or alternative independent state.

The mass organizations confronted Israeli strategies designed to regularize the occupation. They leveled a stiff resistance against the "civil administrations" which was Sharon's idea of providing the military occupation with a benign face. They fought the quizzlings, known as the Village Leagues, and totally discredited them. They waged a campaign against the Amman Accord, which envisioned a settlement with Israel based on a Jordanian Palestinian entente and a division of functions.

Although the Palestinian leadership of the National Guidance Committee was suppressed by the Israelis under the impact of Iron Fist I, which was formulated in 1979 and executed in 1981/82, preparations for an extended and renewed phase went underway, under the impact of Iron Fist II authored by Yitzhak Rabin, the Defense Minister. The escalation of repression and the stepped up confiscation of land and water resources, together with the rise of settler violence, expansion of colonial settlements and economic squeeze, provided the objective and subjective conditions for the Intifadah whose spark was lit on December 8, 1987. Hence, the fourth and current phase of the Intifadah, is a process of revolution in all aspects. It is a revolution against traditional values, which militate against positive social change, as much as it is a revolution against foreign military occupation. Its singular success has been its ability to provide a broad organizational framework for an endless variety of views, aspirations, and energies, which coalesce around the goal of independence.

The grassroots organizations known as Popular Committees serve as the Intifadah's most important organizational achievement. These committees organize marches and demonstrations, cater to social and economic needs of the people, organize security patrols to guard against army and settler raids, distribute plants and seeds for victory gardens, and coordinate underground educational activities, among other activities. They function very much in the manner of parallel hierarchies which provide an opportunity for participation in national life and serve as the administrative apparatus of the future state. And as such, these committees represent the social base for the Palestinian national movement whose representative is the PLO.

Israel's present adversaries are neither desperadoes showering airline pavilions with automatic weapons and explosives, nor border "infiltrators" in search of civilian hostages. They are organized components of a grassroot movement, which aspires to maintain social order, to run the economy, to manage the educational system, to allocate state resources, to create a viable infrastructure, to develop community-based solutions to social and economic needs. They are a part of a collective endeavor, whose aim is to meet Palestinian needs by Palestinians, to out-administer, not out-fight the Israeli enemy. They are aiming towards the ultimate creation of that social reality that would make Palestinian independence necessary and not merely desirable, and that would raise the cost of the occupation to the occupier in economic, political, and moral terms.

The uprising has been institutionalized. It is now a way of life and it has shown that there can be no return to the status-quo. For what is in question is not a specific Israeli policy, a combination of policies or even the Iron Fist itself. What is at issue is the occupation itself.

Intifadah literature belongs to the genre known as "resistance literature," whose most distinctive characteristic is its unequivocal commitment to the struggle--armed, political, social, and cultural waged by an oppressed people against an oppressor, usually the colonized against the Western colonizer. It is a literature dictated more by immediacy and the exigencies of liberation than by the tranquil deliberation to provide leisurely entertainment, a manifestation of a particular crisis generated mostly by men and women who are fully integrated into that crisis. Resistance literature is a third world phenomenon which in large measure disregards Western literary tradition, itself the outcome, when the rest of the world is taken into account, of unique and narrow attitudes.

Resistance literature is little known in the West, and less appreciated. Many of the poems collected in this volume, however, have not been composed in Palestine itself, nor for that matter by Palestinians. They are the work of Palestinian poets in exile, of poets of Palestinian extraction, of Arab poets, of Israelis, of Jews and Gentiles.

Thus, though the poems deal with the Palestinian Intifadah they deal with it from a variety of aspects and approaches. The variety is as wide as the national and cultural temperaments the poets in this anthology represent--possibly the whole spectrum (one is tempted to think) of issues, emphasis, tone, intensity, and so forth. The volume is not so boundless as to contain contradictions, but it places such poems as Darwish's "Oh You Passing Through Fleeting Words" and al'Qasim's "A letter to Invaders Who Do Not Read" side by side with Almagor's "We Shoot Children Too, Don't We?", "Nostalgia," and "Voluntary Transfer," the intense and the militant side by side with the ironic and the understated; a sentiment so nationalistic that it almost sweeps everything in its path, pitted against though not entirely in rupture with a sentiment divided against itself denouncing the present yet idealizing the past that gave birth to the present. The volume brings together the widely divergent styles and tones of such poets as Naomi Shihab Nye and Stead al-Sabah, or Jack Hirschman and June Jordan. Finally, the poems vary in quality, some being the product of highly celebrated poets, some of poets unknown but to a small readership.

Documenting an important aspect of the international response to the Palestinian Intifadah rather than emphasizing the artistic merit is the primary purpose of this anthology. We admit that a number of the poems included in this volume may have little artistic claim, yet they are significant if only because they are the reaction to one of the major events of the century. One of the obstacles we have encountered in putting together this anthology is locating the poems. We are sure, for instances, that the Palestinian Intifadah gave birth to poems in languages other than Arabic, English, and Hebrew; and we are almost equally sure that such poets as Tawfiq Zayyad and Ahmad Fouad Nigem have been artistically moved by the Intifadah, and yet we have not come by the sources where such poetry may be found. Nor have we been able to ascertain what, other than "Martyrs of the Intifada," communicated to us privately, Ms. Fadwa Tuqan may have written on the matter. Her "Hamzah" and "Nightmare of Day and Night" were published before December 1987. Some we have included for being prophetic of what is to come, others for expressing some of the major themes of the poetry composed during the Intifadah.

The Intifadah poetry composed by Palestinians is preoccupied with expressing the predicament of the Palestinian people, their dreams, hopes, suffering, and determination as a people oppressed by the Israeli colonizers. It mostly delineates the relationship between the two camps. In some cases it sums up this relationship through pitting against one another the two cultures. The poetry bursts with the particulars of torture, death, dispersion, detention, grief, defiance, and hope, against brutality, repression, and arrogance. On the other hand, in a poem like Mahmoud Darwish's "Oh You Passing Through Fleeting Words," the conflict is stated through presenting as opposites the total culture of the Israeli oppressor and the oppressed Palestinian, the one predatory, destructive, archaic, and impermanent--the other rooted in the land preoccupied with cultivating it: hence its permanence.

The most distinguishing feature of the Intifadah, and consequently of its poetry, is the intensity and duration of the crisis on which it is predicated as well as the means which gives expression. The struggle waged by the Palestinians is not only to achieve liberation which is the ultimate objective of course, but also to safeguard their very physical existence threatened by implacable settler-colonialism. Thus, the Palestinians resist with all the rudiments of their existence, of life, dominated by stones cast by children--the child and the stone primal and ultimate, a paradox which has galvanized the world. This phenomenon pervades Intifadah poetry, naturally with varying degrees of effect. At its best it finds expression in such poems as al-Qasim's "A Letter To Invaders Who Do Not Read," Darwish's "Oh You Passing Through Fleeting Words," and Abd al-Naser Salih's "Lady of the Harbor" and "In Memory of All Smoody and Astad al-Shawwa." The Palestinian crisis is longer than any of its kind in the twentieth century and, consequently, often more intense.

It is very important to note that the Intifadah and its poetry draw closely and deeply on a tradition which is almost a century old. The present crisis is the continuation and development of movements and events which go back to the beginning of the century, i.e. when the Zionist colonization of Palestine, with the objective of expelling and dispossessing the whole of its people began, accompanied from the start by determined Palestinian resistance. And from the start Palestinian writers, especially poets, gave expression to the conflict, as is attested in the poetry of Wadi' al-Bustani, Muhammad Is'af al-Nashashibi, and Sulayman al-Taji alFarouki, all of whom wrote even before the Balfour Declaration and British occupation of the country. Anxiety, confidence, determination, and urgent calls for vigilance expressed in this poetry reflect the political situation which was rapidly intensifying.

By the time we get into the 1930's, the conflict between oppressed and oppressor (Palestinian on the one hand, and British and Zionists on the other) is in high gear, culminating in the three year-long armed Palestinian Rebellion, very reminiscent of, yet significantly different from the present situation. Correspondingly, so much of the poetry of such poets as Ibrahim Tuqan, Abu-Salma, and Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud is informed by the mood of the main theme of the poetry of the Intifadah: denunciation of oppression, lamenting the deaths of fighters, decrying the failure of Arab leaders to support the resistance yet always with unwavering confidence of victory in the end, due to the resilience of their people and the justice of their cause.

The process of usurping Palestine and of expelling and dispossessing its people intensifies today, as does the resistance to the process. The Intifadah, however, differs from the 1936-39 Rebellion in that while the latter ended in the defeat of the Palestinians, thus paving the way for Zionist ascendancy, the former is a determined challenge to this ascendancy which demands that Israeli expansionism and colonization be stopped, if not reversed. "The Palestinians' state will come to pass/ [writes Dan Almagor] It will. / Not a poet wrote this./ History will." This is what made Henry Kissinger make his notorious exhortation that the Intifadah be "quelled as quickly as possible and the media be shut out a la South Africa." The Israelis and the pro-Israeli media were quick to heed the exhortation. Today the world is allowed to hear little and see less of the Intifadah and the inhuman Israeli response to it, of, in Rabin's words, "force, might, and blows."

Many Western and Israeli writers, "liberal" and otherwise, applied the advise with unqualified zeal when Mahmoud Darwish published his "Oh You Passing Through Fleeting Words" in March 1988. He has been called "a terrorist poet," "anti-Jewish racist," and a spokesman of assassins. "

No reading of this poem could by any stretch of the imagination make logical such a reaction to either its contents or tone. In contrast, the following poem drew no serious reaction from liberals among the Israelis or in the West. It hung on a notice board of a senior officer of the civil administration in Gaza for at least a year, according to Israel Shahak, before it was removed, when it came to the attention of Ha'aretz.

Yes, it is true that I hate Arabs
I want to take them off the map
Yes, this is all my work.
My life passes pleasurably
One shoots a bullet and a head is flying.
It is a pleasure to feel when the bullet touches it
Knocks into the head and it splits.
Then I feel liberated and even feel a pleasure
To see how the head is flying off.
Then I feel liberated and even feel a pleasure
To see how the head is flying off.

This zeal finds its supreme and sophisticated expression in a report in the New York Times (April 5, 1988) which was given the title "Palestinian's Poems Unnerves Israelis," while insidiously attributing to the poem the power to excite in the Palestinians such an "appetite for land" as "unnerves" the Israelis! A classic example of throwing reality upon its head. The Times goes on with its misrepresentations. It tells us that Darwish was born in a village in the Galilee region in what is today northern Israel, while failing to mention even the name of the country this region was a part of, as well as the fact that the village where Darwish was born was wiped off the map by the Israelis along with some 400 other Palestinian villages. Similarly, the Times fails to remember about Darwish anything other than the fact that he was "a member of the Israeli Communist Party and in 1970 left the country for a conference in Moscow never returning" [emphasis added]. It won't even tell its readers that he won the Lenin Prize for Poetry, as though agreeing with Yitzhak Shamir's assessment of Darwish's poem as a "stupid poem of this questionable poet who is ordering us not only to leave the country for good but to take our dead away with us." The Times concludes the article with a sinister endorsement of the absurd and sensational statement made by the Israeli writer Amos Kenan: "What is so terrible [about this poem] is that all those thousands of Israelis who were asleep until now and only because of the uprising started wondering if the time had come to start talking with you, now may decide there is nothing to discuss with you except through the barrel of a gun;" and all this because of a "stupid poem of a questionable poet!"

It is hardly possibly to do otherwise from a Zionist point of view: for not only does the poem give, better than any we know, an epitome of the history and character of the long Israeli-Paslestinian confrontation, but it functions as a stern reminder that the confrontation is far from over and that, since the logic of nature and of history is on the side of the Palestinians, it is inevitable that the colonizers shall have to reverse their course. For the Palestinians to refuse to forget what Israeli society has committed is unnerving and must be dealt with ruthlessly. Israeli attempts at repressing the Intifadah, a la Kissinger, have gone hand in hand with Israeli efforts to suppress Palestinian freedom of speech. ''A la South Africa," and largely off camera, the killing of unarmed civilians, especially children, the destruction or usurpation of property, interminable curfews and interminable closures of schools, and so forth, continue unabated. Over 60,000 Palestinians have been jailed since the beginning of the Intifadah, at least 20,000 of whom in the notorious detention camp Ansar III in the Negev; and some 60 Palestinian writers from the West Bank and Gaza have also been jailed., Stone-throwers, journalists and poets together carry the struggle into the streets, and often meet in Israeli jails from where they carry on with their struggle.

In fairness to Henry Kissinger, it ought to be remarked that Israeli persecution of Palestinian intellectuals begins well before his exhortation, and goes well beyond censorship and intimidation. Their imprisonment is regular, while harsher treatment is not infrequent. Among the Palestinian intellectuals and poets murdered by the Israelis are: Kamal Nasir, Ghassan Kanafani, Majed AbuSharar, and Abd al-Wahhab al-Kayyali. Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud fell fighting them at the Battle of al-Shajarah in 1948. The involvement of the Palestinian writer with the resistance is thus on both the immediate and intellectual levels. He is always in the thick of things. He participates in the daily confrontations, he writes about them, and he thus produces resistance poetry more composed in the heat of confrontation than "recollected in tranquility." The product is often very different from what is known in the West, since it belongs to a life and a tradition that are hard to grasp here and are viewed by the average Western readers with anxiety, if not outright hostility. The Palestinian poetry of the Intifadah is born out of and shaped by a tradition of fierce resistance to Western repression, occupation, and the threat of total annihilation of greater duration and magnitude than any resistance this century has witnessed.