The First Intifada or First Palestinian Intifada (also known as simply as "the intifada" or "intifadah") was a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, which lasted from December 1987 until the Madrid Conference in 1991, though some date its conclusion to 1993, with the signing of the Oslo Accords. The uprising began on December 9, in the Jabalia refugee camp after a series of escalating actions and deaths of Palestinian and Israeli citizens, and tensions reached a boiling point when an IDF truck struck a civilian car, killing four Palestinians. Rumors that the crash was deliberate quickly spread throughout Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In response to general strikes, boycotts of Israeli civil administration institutions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, civil disobedience in the face of army orders, and an economic boycott consisting of refusal to work in Israeli settlements on Israeli products, refusal to pay taxes, refusal to drive Palestinian cars with Israeli licenses, graffiti, barricading, and widespread throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails at the IDF and its infrastructure within the Palestinian territories. Israel, deploying some 80,000 soldiers and initially used live fire, killing a large numbers of Palestinians. In the first 13 months, 332 Palestinians and 12 Israelis were killed. Given the high proportion of children, youths and civilians killed, it then adopted a policy of 'might, power, and beatings,' namely "breaking Palestinians' bones" and using live ammunition against civilians. The global diffusion of images of soldiers beating adolescents with clubs then led to the adoption of firing semi-lethal plastic bullets. In the intifada's first year, Israeli security forces killed 311 Palestinians, of which 53 were under the age of 17. Over the first two years, according to Save the Children, an estimated 7% of all Palestinians under 18 years of age suffered injuries from shootings, beatings, or tear gas. Over six years the Israeli Defense Forces killed an estimated 1,162-1,204 Palestinians while Palestinians killed 100 Israeli civilians and 60 IDF personnel and injured more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and 1,700 soldiers. Intra-Palestinian violence was also a prominent feature of the Intifada, with widespread executions of alleged Israeli collaborators, including an estimated 822 Palestinians killed as alleged collaborators (1988-April 1994), although fewer than half had any proven contact with the Israeli authorities. The ensuing Second Intifada took place from September 2000 to 2005. Palestinians and their supporters regard the Intifada as a protest against Israeli repression including extrajudicial killings, mass detentions, house demolitions, forced migrations, relocations and deportations.[17] After Israel's capture of the West Bank, Jerusalem, Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt in the Six-Day War in 1967, frustration grew among Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories. Israel opened its labor market to Palestinians in the newly occupied territories. Palestinians were recruited mainly to do unskilled or semi-skilled labor jobs Israelis did not want. By the time of the Intifada, over 40 percent of the Palestinian work force worked in Israel daily. Additionally, Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land, high birth rates in the Palestinian territories and the limited allocation of land for new building and agriculture created conditions marked by growing population density and rising unemployment, even for those with university degrees. At the time of the Intifada, only one in eight college-educated Palestinians could find degree-related work.[18] Couple this with an expansion of a Palestinian university system catering to people from refugee camps, villages, and small towns generating new Palestinian elite from a lower social strata that was more activist and confrontational with Israel.[19] The Israeli Labor Party's Yitzhak Rabin, the then Defense Minister, added deportations in August 1985 to Israel's "Iron Fist" policy of cracking down on Palestinian nationalism.[20] This, which led to 50 deportations in the following 4 years,[21] was accompanied by economic integration and increasing Israeli settlements such that the Jewish settler population in the West Bank alone nearly doubled from 35,000 in 1984 to 64,000 in 1988, reaching 130,000 by the mid nineties.[22] Referring to the developments, Israeli minister of Economics and Finance, Gad Ya'acobi, stated that "a creeping process of de facto annexation" contributed to a growing militancy in Palestinian society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Intifada Image By http://www.flickr.com/people/45644610@N03 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/idfonline/6826308970/) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• published: 16 Sep 2014
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