Editing Palestine (section)

=====First Intifada (1987 - 1990)=====
By 1987, Palestinians realized they were not going to receive any external support against Israeli occupation. They engaged in non-violent civil revolt for two years before it was defeated by harsh Israeli repression. 15,000 Palestinians were jailed per year during the First Intifada. Amnesty International reported in 1998/9 that there were as many political prisoners in the occupied territories as in Iraq, but as a portion of the population the difference was astronomical. Amnesty, Bt'selem, Human Rights Watch documented "the systematic and methodical ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian detainees."

Hamas (or the Islamic Resistance Movement) was founded on December 10th, 1987, early in the First Intifada. It was founded by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic and partially blind Muslim cleric. It was at first a charity group-- also an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was committed to peaceful resistance to the occupation by Israel. Eventually, Hamas was pushed by the IDF's continuous murder of civilians to take up armed resistance.

Hamas is a Palestinian Sunni political party and military force which today controls the Gaza Strip. In its founding charter, the "Covenant" (1988), Hamas cited the Holy Quran in saying "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."

However, as the Wilson Center points out:

"In 2017, a revised Hamas manifesto included three departures from the 1988 charter... First, Hamas accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state separate from Israel —although only provisionally. Its statement on principles and policies said, 'Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.' Second, it attempted to distinguish between Jews or Judaism and modern Zionism. Hamas said that its fight was against the “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project, Israel, but not against Judaism or Jews. The updated platform also lacked some of the anti-Semitic language of the 1988 charter. Third, the document did not reference the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas was originally an offshoot."

Here we will mention briefly our view on the violent attacks which have taken place since 1989. Although Palestinian Islamic Jihad had carried out one suicide attack in 1989, and ''individuals'' from Hamas coordinated with PIJ on attacks in 1993, the overwhelming consensus is that Hamas (especially) and the PIJ didn't sanction use of terror or suicide attacks until 1994, following the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron. On February 25th 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a Zionist from the ultranationalist Kach party (1971-1994) made his way past IDF security at the holy site with a rifle and other armaments, opening fire on and killing 29 and 150 Muslims while they prayed. This led to the dissolution of the Kach party in Israel, but at the same time kickstarted the spell of terroristic violence which Hamas and PIJ considered a proportionate reaction to not only the actions of Goldstein and other armed Israeli settlers, but the state of Israel and its supporters as a whole for fostering these attacks in the occupied holy land. Thus, these attacks by Palestinian resistance groups were a response to Israeli occupation and settler violence. Not to be lost is the fact that many of these attacks targeted Israeli military, not civilians, and almost completely disappeared after the Second Intifada. 

Another brief excursion: Should we not support armed resistance? Should we oppose _all_ violence as a matter of "principle"? Infrared argues that we should support just wars on the principles of self-determination and popular sovereignty, especially as Americans. To take up arms against an invading force is rather to fight to the death for one's family, land, country, and lastly themselves. To take up arms against an invader is to be armed for defense, and against an occupier it is to be armed for liberation. Thus we support wars of popular sovereignty, of national liberation, of self-determination; in a word, those against. All criticism of such armed struggle should be secondary to this support since the basic precedent is a battle to the death between invader (or occupier) and invaded (occupied). The one-sided, rigid, and universal condemnation of violence lacks recognition of the world-historical development of class struggle and antagonism, which necessarily leads to violence on a major scale-- they are the progenitors of both violence which has no basis in the common sense notion of popular sovereignty, and, in turn, that which does. Meanwhile, in the 21st century, it has become more effective to manage both peaceful (diplomatic, civil, legal, etc) protest movements as well as online "discourse" (see [[Information warfare]]). 

By 1990, Palestinian opposition was defeated, and so was the Intifada. The Soviet Union was dissolved the following year, crippling the Palestinian resistance. Later, it seemed, the defeat of Iraq destroyed the main economic and political support for Palestine once and for all.

At that point, Israel gave the PLO an ultimatum: genuflect to Israeli rule or the PLO will be extinct. They thought Arafat was the toadying leader they were looking for, a "rebel" who was in a position of defeat, and tried to recruit Palestinian leadership as leaders of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gazan territories under the guise of Palestinian self-determination. This recruitment was known as the Oslo Peace Accords.