The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of major trends and characteristics of the Palestinian uprising during its first two years. Developments have been divided into three arenas - Palestinian, Israeli and international - and into three phases which have followed more or less chronologically but with some overlap. The material has thus been structured into sections which loosely correspond to phases in the uprising. The table below shows the framework that has been adopted in this report.
In phase one, mass Palestinian protest erupted and spread, meeting a violent response from the Israeli army, which in turn provoked intense international condemnation of Israel.
In phase two, the Palestinians worked to consolidate the community-based "popular" structures which served both to sustain protest and to create organisational forms independent of the Israeli authorities. The Israeli authorities responded with an all-out war against these popular structures in which the level and range of sanctions employed were progressively escalated. Meanwhile at the international level, many countries reformulated their diplomatic stance towards the Palestine question, including Jordan, which "broke ties" with the West Bank, and the US, which opened diplomatic relations with the PLO. The Palestinian Declaration of Independence played a central role in this process.
In phase three the violence and sanctions of the previous phases continued unabated, however new developments were mainly in the diplomatic arena. Following the Declaration of Independence the PLO launched a diplomatic initiative for peace through a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel responded a few months later with a "peace initiative" of its own, which explicitly excluded both a Palestinian state and a role for the PLO, and combined the launch of this plan with a publicity campaign against the uprising and the killing of collaborators. At the international level the outcome remains uncertain with much diplomatic manoeuvring around US and Egyptian proposals, and the prospect of a tripartite US-Egypt-Israel meeting in the near future.
Material for this essay has been collected from a variety of sources, including JMCC daily and weekly summaries of the local press and publications by the Palestine Human Rights Information Center, Al-Haq, and The Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. It is not intended to provide comprehensive documentation of human rights issues, as this is being done by other groups. The intention is rather to provide a summary of major elements and trends of the uprising as a contribution to a better understanding of its nature.

The Structure of the Report

Arena	Phase 1	Phase 2	Phase 3
Palestinian	Mass protest	Consolidation of Popular Structures	Diplomatic Intiative
Israeli	Violent Repression	Israel's Quest for Control	Israeli "Peace" Intiative
International	Shock and Condemnation	Reformulation of Diplomatic Stances	New points and Plans

During this initial stage of the conflict Israel responded with direct physical violence as well as carrying out mass arrests, deportations and school closures, all measures which were to remain a permanent feature of Israel's war against the uprising throughout the next two years. On the internal front as well as in the international arena, Israel meanwhile sought to deny that there was anything unusual about events in the occupied territories and blamed the situation on outside inciters, including the media.

On 9 December 1987 protests erupted in Jabalia Refugee Camp, Gaza Strip, after the deaths of four Gazans in a collision involving an Israeli vehicle. During the protests a Palestinian youth was shot dead by Israeli troops. That evening thousands of Jabalia residents joined the funeral procession. As protest spread across the occupied territories, Shifa Hospital in Gaza City began admitting the first casualties of the uprising, most with live ammunition wounds.

The following day another Palestinian youth was shot dead during anti-occupation protests, this time in the city of Nablus. On 11 December, three more Palestinians were killed in the neighbouring Balata Refugee Camp and a fourth died later in hospital of wounds sustained that day. As news of the killings reached the main city of Nablus, people took to the streets in protest, burning tyres, building makeshift barricades and stoning IDF patrols. By the end of the day Al-Ittihad Hospital, Nablus, had admitted over 50 people injured by IDF gunfire.

By the morning of 13 December protest had spread to the streets of East Jerusalem. Two days later demonstrations following Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa mosque were broken up by Israeli police using teargas and batons. With young people taking over the main shopping streets, stoning Israeli troops and attacking Israeli banks, press reports described the commercial centre of East Jerusalem as looking like "a battlefield".'

As curfews remained in force in the Jabalia and Balata Refugee Camps, a commercial strike called in response to the army killings took hold across the occupied territories. On 16 December the commercial shutdown became an all-out general strike as all traffic and trade in the occupied territories came to a standstill.

By 21 December protest in the West Bank reached the northernmost town of Jenin where one youth was shot dead and a further two succumbed to injuries, sustained the previous day. December 21 also marked the day that two protestors were killed in the West Bank village of Tubas. Most confrontations had previously been confined to the larger Palestinian population centres - towns and refugee camps: now even remote villages were entering the fray.

While with time the form of demonstrations changed as Israel introduced a series of measures designed to quell all street protest, daily demonstrations and resulting clashes when the army intervened, remained a consistent feature of the whole two year period. The graph below shows the monthly numbers of demonstrations and clashes as recorded by JMCC from the local press. These numbers provide only an index of the frequency of clashes: the real number may be substantially higher as local press is subject to censorship, and many demonstrations go unreported. The method of counting used is that only one demonstration or clash can be counted per day per location.

From the beginning, protest was combined with political demands. The first communiqué of the uprising, signed by "The National Forces in the Gaza Strip", was distributed on 18 December, just nine days after the protests had erupted. The leaflet referred to the escalating street protests as a "popular uprising" and called on Palestinian communities in the occupied territories to organise themselves behind the demand for an end to the Israeli occupation and Palestinian self-determination in an independent state. Similar early communiqués distributed across the West Bank and Gaza Strip all reiterated these demands as did petitions and sit-ins from women's groups, merchants' committees and groups of well-known local Palestinians.

On 21 December, with 23 Palestinians already dead, Israeli Prime Minister Shamir was still insisting that there was "no cause for concern ... There's nothing new in this ... we have overcome this kind of thing in the past and we will do so now and in the future". The same day Israeli Defence Minister Rabin, who had just returned to Israel from an 11-day visit to the US, stressed that he had felt no need to cut short his trip despite the ongoing protests in the occupied territories. During the American tour Rabin had declared that the trouble would "all be over by Christmas" adding that the Israeli security forces would "use whatever is needed to prevent it".

"You can't imagine what's happening there. And there are places the journalists don't see. I'm sitting there in front of a riot. Thousands of people are on the rampage, there's smoke everywhere you look, and on the radio I hear some little Mickey Mouse announcing the Strip is quiet. Are they having a joke at our expense? Or are they trying to calm things down or something like that? On the radio they say the disturbances are local. Local? I saw how well organised they were…." Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip, Davar, 22 December 1987.

Israeli President Herzog on a visit to Britain during the same period stated that there were only "small" incidents in the Gaza Strip which he attributed to the increased influence of Muslim fundamentalism, adding that such "incidents" were quite separate from events in the West Bank which, according to him, were related to the commemoration of the Balfour Declaration.

"Although the area is not entirely quiet, the situation is already under control $ 6 announced Chief of Staff Dan Shomron on the- day that f our Palestinians were shot dead in massive demonstrations across the Gaza Strip, including two killed in the grounds of Shifa Hospital. Journalists in the Strip that day, 15 December, reported main highways littered with burning tyres, stones and makeshift barricades with the commercial heart, Gaza City, a deserted ghost town.

"Terrorist organisations outside the country are pressing their agents in the administered territories day by day to exacerbate the security situation there", asserted Shamir to the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee in December, adding that the terrorists were sending messages all the time through numerous channels". Other top Israeli numerous channels officials, including IDF Chief of Staff Dan Shomron, blamed the "violent public disorder" on more locally based agitators. "Under no circumstances will we allow a small minority of inciters to rule over the vast majority, which is in general pragmatic and wants to live quietly", proclaimed the commander of the Israeli army.

As official Israeli concern over how Israel's image was being projected to the rest of the world grew, the term "outside agitators" soon came to include the media. In a press conference Coordinator of Activities in the Territories Shmuel Goren spoke of "a campaign of agitation [in which] Israeli elements were also participating". When asked to clarify what he meant by the statement Goren replied, "the news element for example", going on to explain that "relatively high" casualty rates were not caused by troops indiscriminately opening fire on unarmed demonstrators as some media reporindicated, but because "small units of soldiers were getting into situations in which their lives were in danger and they had to open f ire".

A few days later Israeli TV broadcast footage shot by an Israeli crew of an Israeli security agent firing live ammunition into a crowd of demonstrators, showing clearly that official standing army orders - first shout a warning, then f ire shots into the air and only shoot as a last resort - were not being adhered to in the field.

The Israeli military at first responded to the uprising by inflicting direct physical punishment on the Palestinian population. Live ammunition, teargas and rubber bullets were all used to disperse street demonstrators. Many Palestinians fell victim to the Israeli armed forces when not directly involved in street confrontations and other forms of public protest: some casualties were passersby, others were injured or even killed inside their homes. Later the international press began to report the assassination of a number of Palestinian activists by undercover Israeli hit squads.

Death from live ammunition and "rubber" or "plastic bullets" (see glossary) remained the major cause of Palestinian deaths over the. two-year period. The graph below shows the monthly number of deaths caused by the IDF, Israeli settlers and Palestinian collaborators, using JMCC records from the local press.

"The first priority of the security forces is to prevent violent demonstrations with force, power and blows ... We will make it clear who is running the territories". Defence Minister Rabin during a tour of Jalazon Refugee Camp, Jerusalem Post, 20 January 1988.

Over the two days following this pronouncement more than - 1 00 Palestinians were hospitalised with injuries inflicted by clubs and rifle butts, which ranged from skull fractures and broken bones to severe contusions all over the body. On a single day, 25 January, 200 cases of fractures and other injuries caused by beatings were admitted to Shifa Hospital, the main hospital in Gaza city.,,

"...dominant side-forearm and hand shaft fractures ... which suggested deliberate policy of systematic beating designed to disable but not to kill, to in the maximum damage while reducing the of death ... indeed the word "beating" does properly convey the literal pounding mauling with clubs and other instruments required to produce the injuries we saw".

However, as Amnesty International noted in a special report released in August 1988, beatings did not begin with Rabin's infamous pronouncement. Already on 17 December 1987, Amnesty had sent a telex to Defence Minister Rabin expressing concern at reports of "Israeli soldiers severely and often indiscriminately beating demonstrators with clubs and rifle butts", noting that such activities, even in response to demonstrators' stone-throwing, went "well beyond what might be considered reasonable force".

"A detainee sent to Fara'a prison will be freed in 18 days unless the authorities have enough evidence to charge him. He may then resume stoning soldiers. But if troops break his hand, he won't be able to throw stone for a month an half." Jerusalem Post, 20 January 1988.

"Soldiers told Hadashot that their commanders had taught them how to use clubs, and they further said they had received professional training from border guards. One of them said "We can handle clubs just as well as we handle arms. The Arabs don't understand anything. [We] have to pummel them with clubs and that will do the trick." An Israeli journalist, Hadashot, 21 January 1988.

"I only know what orders I gave my soldiers: I ordered them to beat up demonstrators break their bones, and draw blood." A Gaza Strip army commander, Ma'ariv, 28 January, 1988.

Israeli armed forces used teargas not only to disperse demonstrators but, according to Amnesty International, also "in such a way as to constitute a punitive measure, to harass and intimidate Palestinian residents in the occupied territories" . Reports of cases of teargas fired into homes, schools, mosques and even hospitals became so widespread during the first few months of the uprising that, in May 1988 one of the US-based manufacturers, Transtechnology, suspended shipments to Israel "until such a time as Israel demonstrates that it is prepared to use the product in a proper and non-lethal manner". 15 Teargas canisters are marked "For Outdoor Use only"; instructions for use also warn that canisters should not be fired directly at people. Even when the gas was used "outdoors" it was often in refugee camps where narrow alleys and enclosed spaces created high atmospheric concentrations of toxic gas. Saturation of even larger areas occurred when Israeli helicopters dropped large quantities of the gas onto built-up areas. Cases of serious injury and even death were also reported when teargas canisters exploded on impact with the body.

Physicians for Human Rights observed as early as February 1988 that exposure to high concentrations of teargas fired in enclosed spaces is potentially lethal "particularly to infants and children, the elderly and those with respiratory and cardiac disease", adding that teargas can increase miscarriage incidence. Gazan doctors told the visiting delegation that they had identified up to 40 cases of second and third trimester fetal death and stillbirth following exposure to the toxic gas.

Israel immediately embarked on a policy of mass arrests: according to Defence Minister Rabin, 1,978 Palestinians were arrested between 9 December 1987 and 6 January 1988. Palestinian sources estimated the number detained to be significantly higher. By 28 December, amidst mounting threats from Israeli officials including Defence Minister

A new detention centre, Dhahariya Prison near Hebron, was opened and a further two prisons already in use - al-Fara'a in the West Bank and Ansar 2 in the Gaza Strip - were expanded with tents to absorb the sudden influx of new detainees. By March 1988 the notorious Ansar 3 prison camp, with an estimated capacity of 4000, had begun to function. According to AlHaq, by I May 1988, more than 17,000 Palestinians, including over 2,000 administrative detainees, had already been imprisoned. 18 By the end of the second year of the uprising according to military sources a total of 50,000 Palestinians had been arrested.

On 3 January 1988, nine Palestinians charged with "incitement" were served with expulsion orders. Despite international condemnation of the measure including a UN Security Council resolution calling on Israel not to carry through the deportations, on 13 January Israel expelled the f irst four deportees of the uprising to Lebanon. In carrying out subsequent deportations during the two-year period, Israel claimed repeatedly to be removing the ringleaders from the arena of the uprising. A total of 58 Palestinians were deported over the two years of the uprising.

During the first year of the uprising all West Bank schools and vocational centres were shut down for nearly eight months, denying 310,000 Palestinians access to any formal education. At one stage even all kindergartens were ordered shut. During those periods when blanket bans the whole of the educational sector were not in force, Palestinian education was severely disrupted by individual closure orders, and area-wide shut-downs throughout the uprising. Curfews also brought classes to a halt; in the Gaza Strip a weekly average of 188 schools were prevented from normal functioning due to the imposition of curfews between September and December 1988.

On 23 December 1987, four higher educational institutions, all located in the Ramallah/Jerusalem area, were issued with one-month closure orders. Hebron University together with the Islamic University and the Palestinian Religious Institute in the Gaza

Strip were also ordered closed. By I February 1988 all six Palestinian universities and the 13 colleges run by the Palestinian Council for Higher Education were shut down, depriving 21,857 students of all access to further education. 21 All higher education institutions remained closed throughout the two-year period.

In November 1989, the head of the Israeli Civil Administration in the West Bank stated that universities would only be allowed to reopen if demonstrations stopped. Closures remain in force on grounds that large numbers of people gathered together would incite unrest; however, small alternative classes have also been broken up and banned by the Israeli authorities.

Israel's response to the uprising attracted substantial international criticism.--Qn- 22 December 1987 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 605 which "strongly deplored" Israeli policies in the occupied territories violating Palestinian human rights, "in particular, opening fire of the Israeli army, resulting in the killing and wounding of defenceless Palestinian civilians". Voting was 14-0 with only the US abstaining. 23 At the beginning of January the US voted against Israel in supporting a Security Council resolution which called on Israel to rescind the first deportation orders issued during the uprising.

American reservations concerning Israeli policies were voiced in the early stages of the uprising. The US representative to the UN expressed American government grievances "at the extensive loss of life and the large number of people who have been wounded in demonstrations", also noting that Israel's measures to restore security were "unacceptably harsh". He furthermore refuted Israeli claims as to the cause of the unrest stating that the demonstrations "were spontaneous expressions of frustrations, and were not externally sponsored". Later the same week, US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Phyllis Oakley called on Israel to refrain from using excessive force against Palestinian demonstrators. 25 By 19 December the White House official spokesperson had announced that President Reagan was "upset and worried" .

A Time Magazine poll at the end of January 1988 revealed that 45% of non-Jewish Americans believed the US should cut aid to Israel because of its actions; a further 56% supported the idea of a Palestinian homeland in the occupied territories.

In Western Europe the response was also markedly critical with a number of governments calling for an end to Israeli measures in the occupied territories. The West German Foreign Ministry criticized Israeli measures and called on Israel to recognise its responsibilities as an occupying power in accordance with international law. The same communiqué stated that the EEC was ready to provide economic and social assistance in the occupied territories to achieve this goal .

President Herzog came under strong attack from a number of British MPs during a visit to London in December. In an interview with the London-based Jewish Chronicle, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stated that, in the light of current events in the occupied territories, the convening of an international peace conference on the Middle East was necessary. 29 In part as a protest against Israeli violence, the European Parliament postponed the ratification of trade protocols with Israel in mid-December 1987.

On a number of occasions during the early stages of the uprising, television coverage Of Israeli actions in the occupied territories elicited immediate international outrage most notable of these occurred in February 1988 when CBS footage of four Israeli soldiers pounding the arms of two bound youths with rocks was screened around the world. Israeli embassies abroad were flooded with protest calls from a shocked international public almost as soon as the broadcast was over.

During the first few weeks of the uprising journalists had already filed stories of youths tied to army jeeps as a shield for soldiers attempting to enter Palestinian localities, and of troops urinating in Gazan water supplies. By January there were increasing reports of Palestinian fatalities incurred after exposure to concentrated teargas in confined spaces. Television cameras captured intensive teargas "bombardment" by IDF helicopters of Palestinian towns and refugee camps. In February, a report of Palestinians being buried alive by soldiers attracted further attention.

By March restrictions against the media were in force with Israeli military personnel from generals to privates authorised to turn back television crews and other journalists from localities declared closed military areas. Large areas of the occupied territories were declared off-limits to all press, and on several occasions media was denied all access to the occupied territories (see JMCC, "Reporting Harrassment: Israeli Restrictions of Press Freedom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip", for more details).

After the first few weeks of the uprising, a new phase began which lasted until around the end of 1988. During this phase Palestinians began a process of disengagement from the structures of occupation. More permanent forms of community Organisation began to take root. At the same time, Palestinians set out to rescind Israel's de facto economic annexation of the occupied territories, a result of the one-sided incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza markets into the Israeli economy and the employment of Palestinians from the occupied territories as cheap labourers in Israel. Through a boycott of Israeli produce and a withdrawal of labour, Palestinians loosened economic links with Israel. Instead, an increased use of local resources was meant to build up independent economic structures: cultivation of fallow land; employment in local business, a rise in local enterprises' production; and, on a more individual level, home economy, all strengthened the drive towards self-in response Israel hit back hard with a series of measures designed to reassert authority and Reinforce Palestinian dependency. In economic sanctions were particular implemented with increasing severity, both as a means of collective punishment of individual communities, and as a reaction to Palestinian attempts at asserting some degree of economic independence. In spite of initial Israeli resistance, however, Palestinians succeeded in securing a direct export agreement with the EEC. As the struggle for authority continued on the ground, several developments in the international arena occurred which were seen as being a result of the uprising.

Since mid-December 1987 Palestinians in many areas had shut shop for days and in some cases weeks on end. At first such closures were carried out as an on-the-spot protest at Israeli army actions, in particular the killing of Palestinian protestors. Soon, however, complete commercial shut-downs began throughout the occupied territories. Shutting shop, a non-violent form of economic protest, had previously elicited punishments of fines and arrest from the Israeli authorities; during the uprising, however, the extent of Israeli measimplemented against the striking shopkeepers became as unprecedented as the scale of the commercial protest.

On 2 January 1988 Israeli troops wielding crowbars forced open the steel shutters of a number of striking shops in the city of Nablus and then threaten ed to weld shut shops which still refused to open. In protest at the Israeli action a two-week commercial shutdown was declared by all local shop and business owners in Nablus. As the IDF moved through other West Bank towns forcing shops open, similar commercial strikes went into force until soon the whole of the Palestinian commercial sector was -at a voluntary standstill.

In the face of the complete commercial strike the army stepped up its efforts to force the shops open, A number of shops were welded shut in Jericho as a warning to other shopkeepers. In Ramallah troops smashed the locks of shuttered shops, clubbed merchants and then confiscated their keys in order to prevent the shops being locked shut against army orders.33 On one occasion an army patrol locked a defiant merchant inside his shop and then fired a teargas canister into the premises; the merchant was rescued by passersby who rushed the man to hospital in convulsions.34 As soldiers breaking shop locks became a common sight in the streets and markets of the West Bank and Gaza, so too did the teams of Palestinian locksmiths who moved down the. streets after the army repairing the damaged locks. 35 After some weeks of army lock breaking, shop-shutters were simply left unrepaired after the IDF had finished its business. Other merchants stopped locking up their property altogether, relying on community trust and solidarity to prevent any pilfering. No cases of looting were reported.

"In contrast to the IDF spokesperson's report that it was business as usual in the West Bank, nearly total commercial strikes were reported to have been in effect in all West Bank cities. In East Jerusalem the general commercial strike entered its eleventh day… In Nablus the security forces employed a new method for deterring merchants [from striking]: metal chains attached to heavy military vehicles were tied to the locks of a few shops and were used to rip locks and shutters [off their hinges]." Ha'aretz, 20 January 1988.

With the commercial shutdown showing no signs of breaking despite the IDF's efforts, it was the shopkeepers themselves who took the initiative in opening up once more. On 12 January 1988, leaflets distributed in Nablus and Ramallah explained that Palestinian merchants had decided to go into business again, but for only three hours each day. The decision enabled the population to buy basic provisions while at the same time ensuring the-commercial strike, as a form of anti-occupation protest, could continue indefinitely. The strike rapidly turz6d into a battle for authority over when shops were to remain open and when they were to stay shut.

With Palestinians deciding when to open and close their own shops, the IDF was forced to change its tactics. From now on, instead of breaking open shops at any time of day, troops began forcing shops to close down-in, the morning opening hours set by the UNLU and local merchants committees, while trying to make shops stay open in the afternoon strike hours. As more shops continued to be welded shut in various West Bank localities, Gazan merchants were warned that two shops would be sealed shut for each day that the commercial strike continued. On Sunday 17 January, 26 shops in Ramallah, including some Christian-owned shops which traditionally stay closed on Sundays, were damaged by army attempts to break the shutters open; one merchant required 15 stitches after being beaten for refusing to obey army orders to open his shop. In some places even pharmacies were ordered closed despite the fact that such enterprises were exempted from the strike so that essential medical supplies remained accessible.

This battle for control continued until early May when an unprecedented military order came. All shops in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were ordered shut for a three-day period, from 5-8 May. The order was issued in retaliation for a general strike observed throughout the occupied territories on 4 May. Immediately after the three-day ban had been announced by troops patrolling Nablus with loudspeakers, shoppers were prevented from leaving the market area with their purchases. In Qalqilia teargas was used to force merchants to comply with the order and shut their shops. Army patrols in Ramallah forcibly stopped all commercial activity in the marketplace.

On 14 May the local press reported that, for the first time since the war against the striking shops began, all shops remained open in the morning without interference. The IDF had given up their attempt to control the shopkeepers.

Early uprising communiqués all stressed the importance of mutual support and solidarity, with increasing emphasis being placed on the formation and expansion of local emergency committees. General calls to assist those sectors of the population most in need soon became specific calls for concrete aid to be organised and coordinated through "popular" or "uprising" committees.

Rural Palestinian communities organised the collection and transport of food donations to the besieged Gazan refugee camps and later to West Bank towns and cities under curfew. Farmers in the Jordan Valley, the most fertile region of the West Bank and a centre for agricultural production, sent truckloads of local vegetables to the Gaza Strip.

Wealthier merchants and f actory owners contributed merchandise from their stores and warehouses. People went from door to door collecting money from those who could afford to give and then bought food supplies to be stockpiled and later distributed in times of curfew and siege.

In Nablus popular committees collected food donations and stockpiled supplies in expectation that the IDF would soon begin to apply the curfew weapon in the West Bank, too. When, in late February 1988, Nablus and its environs were put under a 13-day-long curfew, the foodstuffs were distributed from house-to-house across the flat rooftops or by foot during Intermittent one-hour liftings.

Early uprising communiqués also called upon Palestinian doctors, nurses and health workers to join medical committees working for the, relief of the sick as well as those injured on the streets. Through such committees medical personnel coordinated their efforts to provide free treatment to the population while Palestinian pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies gave away medicines without charge.

As the number of Palestinian casualties mounted, an emergency situation was declared with volunteer first aid teams set up in many districts to treat those injured in clashes with the army. The move was prompted by both the sheer scale of the casualties and the fact that IDF raids on hospitals to arrest those wounded in protests were on the increase.

With all West Bank schools being repeatedly closed by the authorities, education, too, became the province of the popular committees. Palestinians viewed the closures as a collective punishment intended to Pressurise the whole population to back down from their protest. So, rather than allow students-, to lose a whole academic year, popular committees began to run classes in private. homes. Throughout the uprising UNLU communiqués repeatedly called upon students and teachers not to give up their basic right to education and to organise structures that would provide students with access to learning despite the bait on formal education imposed by Israel. Later, popular education was expanded to include a campaign to eradicate adult illiteracy and moves to set up a Palestinian educational curriculum. Study outside the constraints of Israeli rules and regulations governing formal education provided to develop schooling in ways not previously possible (for more details see JMCC, 1988, "Palestinian Education: A Threat to Israel's Security?").

As early as communiqué 6, the UNLU was calling for Palestinians to move towards comprehensive civil disobedience, including-. withdrawal of labour from Israel on general strike days and, where possible, on a more permanent basis; refusing to pay occupation taxes and fines; boycotting Israeli products and instead encouraging the development of a local home-grown economy; and boycotting the structures of occupation.

"The Israeli construction industry, which relies on Palestinians for some 40% of its workforce, has been particularly hard hit by the withdrawal of Palestinian labour, either on strike days or on a more permanent basis. The Israeli press reported absenteeism levels of up to 70% during the summer of 1988. At one construction site the company director estimated that his firm was about 3 months behind schedule on projects and commented that absenteeism had risen from 45-50% in Feb. 88 to around the 70% mark in the July/August period. The chairman of the Jerusalem Association of Builders and Contractors confirmed that most local contractors were 3-4 months behind schedule". The Jerusalem Post, 7 October 1998.

Economic disruption soon proved to be a highly effective political weapon. During the first five weeks of the uprising Palestinian absenteeism in Israeli workplaces 'was approximately 50% resulting in a slowdown in the construction industry, a breakdown in municipal services, especially rubbish collection, and a shortage of cheap agriculture labour, such as pickers, at a crucial seasonal point.

Israel reportedly made emergency plans to deal with this crisis; plans included recruiting school children, students and demolished soldiers; recruiting cheap labour from the Far East; bringing more Lebanese workers from the "security zone and encouraging Jewish labour to return to the land.

As Palestinian absenteeism became a more and more permanent feature of Israeli enterprises, the Israeli Building Workers Union introduced a programme of psychological counselling as part of its efforts to attract demobilised soldiers to work on building sites. The counselling was intended both to help soldiers overcome barriers concerning the low status of such work and to overcome negative feelings at working alongside the reduced Palestinian workforce so soon after serving in the army.

"In the long run the [self-sufficiency] movement will succeed - 1.7 million is a vast internal market. The problem is Israeli opposition in the form of bureaucratic obstacles and obstructions…" Meron Benvenisti, director of the West Bank Data Base Project.

In the 20 years prior to the current Palestinian uprising, the occupied territories had become an important market for Israeli exports with $850 million worth of Israeli products sold in the West Bank and Gaza Strip each year. Israel had also derived substantial revenues from taxes on goods imported into the occupied territories through Israel.

A refusal to purchase Israeli products wherever a locally produced alternative was available was, like withdrawal of Palestinian labour from the Israeli market, viewed from the start as a means by which simultaneously reduce Israeli revenue and support the development of the local Palestinian economy. First carried out spontaneously by consumers in the occupied territories, the boycott of Israeli produce was then taken up as a general policy by the UNLU.

UNLU communiqués issued in late January 1988 called for promotion of the Palestinian economy especially through purchase of locally produced goods to go hand in hand with the boycott of Israeli goods. Shopkeepers, consumers and wholesale buyers were to play a crucial role in implementing the boycott in its initial stages.

By early March the boycott campaign was turning into a drive towards self-sufficiency. Not only were factories called upon to increase output in order to keep up with the new increased local demand but the whole population was encouraged to concentrate on home economy.

The self-sufficiency movement was also a response to specific needs in the Palestinian community. With food shortages created by prolonged curfews, many breadwinners in prison, workers staying away from jobs in Israel on general strike days and commercial strikes, many families were experiencing a sharp drop in income. Home economy provided a means of subsistence through which such hardships could be overcome.

Occupation taxes imposed on the Palestinian business and commercial sector since 1967 had been widely resented. In particular the imposition of VAT had been met with marked resistance. By 1987, VAT revenue had risen to approximately $50 million per annum. Other taxes imposed included import/export taxes and income tax. This taxation did not, however, entitle Palestinians to the same social benefits which Israeli citizens receive in return for tax payment.

Before the uprising, in response to anxieties voiced within Israel that the occupation was a fiscal burden on Israeli citizens, Meron Benvenisti, director of the independent West Bank Data Base Project, declared: "occupying the territories was not a burden on the Israeli tax payer, rather the contrary".

Refusal to pay taxes levied by the Israeli military authorities was initially an act designed to protest specific Israeli actions. Tax refusal during the uprising, like the battle for control over the shops, developed into a conflict between Palestinians who refused to fund the occupation from their own pockets and the Israeli authorities who insisted that all taxes should be paid. By early spring 1988 what had begun as an act of protest was acquiring the markings of widespread tax revolt. Refusal to pay taxes became part of the disengagement process.

For example Communiqué 12, released in April 1988, saluted the collective stand taken by Ramallah merchants who resolved at a special meeting not to pay taxes until the occupation ended; the communiqué upheld their decision as an example to be emulated by all Palestinian shopkeepers and business owners. Shopkeeper committees in various towns soon followed suit, with many merchants handing back VAT and income tax books. At the end of May, merchants in Qalqilia tore up tax ledgers and threw them into the streets, vowing not to pay taxes to the Israeli authorities.

By the end of March 1988, Israeli officials announced that tax collection was down 32% from the previous year. Then at the beginning of June 1988 senior Civil Administration officials admitted that tax revenue over the previous six months had dropped considerably. They also announced that as a result of reduced income caused by falling tax revenues, 1,000 Palestinian employees were to be laid off.

Mass resignations by Palestinian employees in the Civil Administration began in early March in response to UNLU calls for Civil Administration employees and members of the police force to resign from their posts. The first response came on 6 March 1988 when West Bank civil servants working in the Taxation Department of the Civil Administration began resigning en masse.

On 13 March 1988, 25 Palestinians working in the Gaza branch of the Civil Administration Tax Department left their jobs. Then in response to a special UNLU leaflet distributed in the Gaza Strip on 21 March, more employees resigned) including Absentee Property officials.

When all Palestinian employees in the Ramallah section of the Vehicle Licensing Department submitted their collective resignation, each resignee was immediately summoned to local military headquarters where Israeli officials, after bribery and threats had failed, forced them to board a military bus which transported them to their former work-place. When they refused to begin work in the of f ices, they were beaten by the soldiers who had taken them there. During the next few weeks the resignees were taken to the building each morning and ordered to start work. They were only allowed to leave for home long after working hours were usually over. Three of those who resigned were arrested on charges of inciting the other employees to resign. The head of the licensing department was threatened with deportation if he and his co-workers did not return to work.

The local press reported that hundreds of police handed in their resignations one day after communiqué 10 - with its call for resignations - was released. 52 The entire Palestinian police force resigned in Hebron and Jericho following a meeting convened by 14 Palestinian police officers where the decision to leave was taken. Within a matter of weeks local civil courts were paralysed due to the lack of police available to enforce court orders. 53 By 13 March around 300 Palestinian police had resigned including about half of the Gazan force (total 300).54 By the summer of 1989 Israeli sources reported that only 20 of the 430 Palestinian police formerly stationed in the Gaza Strip had not resigned.

The Israeli authorities claimed that the resignation of police would result in a crime wave sweeping the West Bank and Gaza. A special UNLU communiqué distributed 20 March in the name of the "Coordinating Committee for the National and Popular Committees of the Uprising in Occupied Palestine" noted that in fact it was Israeli troops who were endangering people's lives and property and called on popular committees to organise "guardian committees" to protect the community, "justice committees" to arbitrate local disputes and even "traffic committees" to ensure safe driving.

In February 1989 the Israeli chief of police in the Gaza Strip reported that crime in the Gaza Strip had decreased by 25% since December 1987, the month that the uprising began. 56 The Israeli Minister of Police announced the closure of several police stations in the Gaza Strip due to a manpower shortage.

The Israeli authorities had long cultivated a network of informers as part of the system of control exerted over the Palestinian population. Coerced through a combination of threats and bribes, individuals, or sometimes whole families, became part of the intelligence network operated by the Israeli security services. In return for supplying information on local political activists, informers would receive certain favours from the Israeli authorities.

"Wasta means in the local dialect, brokerage, a broker and also a pimp… Most of them began as collaborators with security forces and afterwards when their relations with the Israeli administration became institutionalized, they displayed themselves as having connections and influence inside the local Israeli administration… Therefore, incases where an Arab inhabitant has submitted a certain request to the Israeli administration for example for a permit to build a house, and his request was denied… he still had the possibility to turn to the people with connections, to that wastonary who walks so freely in the corridors of the administration building". David Grossman, "The Wastonaries", in Koteret Rashit, 29 April 1987.

Such people also became part of a system of patronage whereby Palestinians in need of an official document from the Civil Administration - a license for trade or construction, for example - were often forced to go through the informers who also acted as middlemen wielding influence with the Israeli-run department concerned in return for a fee. Palestinians were thus often obliged to pay twice for the privilege of obtaining a travel permit: once to the middleman and then a second time to the Civil Administration itself. During the uprising public hostility towards informers/collaborators became increasingly overt. At first informers were asked to sever their links with the Israeli authorities and given ample opportunity to repent; numerous. cases of collaborators turning in their weapons were reported.

Enforcement of a wide range of new sanctions occurred at a time when the Palestinian struggle for survival in the face of the initial Israeli crackdown was being transformed into a more permanent form of revolt against Israeli rule. The drive for disengagement was gradually building momentum as the former dependency on the Israeli labour market and Israeli-manufactured products, on the Civil Administration and on Israeli-authorised education was being supplanted by Palestinian initiative and self-sufficiency ethos.

The uprising began to constitute a serious threat not just to Israeli control of the streets but to the previous monopoly on authority in every aspect of Palestinian life under occupation. By mid-March respected Israeli commentators like Zelev Schiff started to refer to the uprising as "economic warfare" and "a war of attrition".

Israeli counter-measures included: curfews, tax collection campaigns, financial restrictions, restrictions on movement and sanctions against Palestinian agriculture. These economic sanctions, which were less conspicuous as compared to violent army reactions, were, in the long term, very damaging to Palestinian economy. By contrast, as they attracted less media attention, economic sanctions did not inflict major damages on Israel's image abroad as shootings and beatings had done before.

Curfews were used as an instrument of control and punishment and continued throughout the two-year period. Frequently curfews were imposed as a way to contain mass demonstrations; curfew confined residents to their homes, took the demonstrators off the streets and prevented the spread of public protest to other areas. At the same time curfew also constituted a form of mass punishment since it imprisoned whole communities and kept them in enforced isolation from the outside world sometimes for weeks on end. Palestinians in Jalazon Refugee Camp near Ramallah spent 100 of the first 150 days of the uprising under round-the-clock curfew; the city of Nablus was under curfew for 36% of the same period (65 of 365 days).

Curfews also provided the army with an easier environment in which to carry out search and arrest operations as well as enabling Civil Administration officials to collect taxes and impose fines with impunity. Physical assaults on house-bound residents and vandalism of private property by troops were common during curfew. Press restrictions, with journalists only allowed into curfewed areas if at all - under strict army, escort, meant that such measures could be implemented without cameras present to record the proceedings.

In addition, curfews effectively paralysed the local economy, depriving the population of the means of earning their livelihood. Often a curfew on one location had widespread implications for a large area; a curfew on Nablus, for example, brought the entire northern West Bank economy to a halt since all the villages in that area rely on Nablus' central market.

On a number of occasions press sources estimated that more than one million Palestinians were confined to their homes in mass curfews imposed on the whole of the Gaza Strip, most major West Bank towns, cities and refugee camps as well as on many rural villages. Such blanket curfews were imposed on the occasion of the Israeli elections and the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in November 1988; the first and second anniversaries of the uprising, and Independence Day again in 1989.

As the tax boycott began to strengthen, Israel launched a concerted campaign to collect all taxes, including raids on shops, arrest of shopkeepers, confiscation of property, a new "clearance" policy and imposition of curfews. Much as this campaign was designed to reassert Israeli control, it also effectively drained the Palestinian economy.

Israeli tax officials backed by soldiers embarked on a widespread campaign of daily raids on shops and businesses. During such raids the Israeli officials would confiscate ID cards and business papers and order owners to report to the local taxation department. There merchants were f aced with the choice of either paying the sums demanded, having merchandise confiscated or serving a prison sentence.

For example, on 6 July 1988, as part of a mass tax collection campaign conducted throughout the West Bank, 250 Palestinians from the Ramallah/al-Bireh area were arrested while a total of 150 cars were seized and impounded. In addition, numerous shops in the area were raided with Israeli officials confiscating televisions, fridges and other household appliance.

"Usually when tax officials raid the shops of merchants or workshops, the confiscated accounts are examined differently from a normal audit. The merchant is ordered to pay an incredible amount of money, including fines, and the amount will be linked to the cost of living index. The sum might be four times the original tax and, with inflation, it might exceed 15-20 times the original sum."

Accountant Odeh Jibril from Ramallah . Imposing curfews in order to facilitate tax collection also became common with soldiers and tax officials raiding homes to impound property or rounding up residents in local schools or central squares and then demanding proofs of tax payment.

Roadblocks were frequently set up at the entrance to Palestinian towns and villages. Each passing vehicle was stopped while tax officials checked through lists of those who had not paid their taxes in that particular area. The car and the drivers license were then confiscated from the tax offender until the required sum was paid.

On 5 July over 300 cars were seized in Ramallah and impounded at local military headquarters, returnable on payment of taxes. 62 Another sanction was asset freezing: in June 1988, the Jerusalem municipality asked Israeli banks to freeze the assets of 16 out of the 35 Palestinian-run hotels in East Jerusalem on grounds that municipal taxes had not been paid. Even when some of the hoteliers protested that were in the process of negotiating tax cuts due to falling revenues caused by the slump in the tourist industry, they were ordered to pay.

Another sanction was the new "clearance" permit: clearance documents proving that all taxes had been paid had to be obtained before Palestinians in need of banking facilities had the Civil Administration issued any travel or export permit, drivers license or vehicle registration, a renewed ID card or a birth certificate.

In Gaza additional pressure was applied to obtain taxes by the forced replacement of ID cards. New cards were issued only to those residents who had obtained clearance documents from the Israeli Tax Department, proving that they had paid all Israeli and local taxes, utility bills, traffic tickets and were not wanted by "police or security forces investigators" . Any Gazan who failed to obtain clearance was prohibited from leaving the Strip. As many Gazans work in Israel, this sanction threatened Gazans with complete loss of livelihood.

In a similar way in July 1988, and in January 1989 in the West Bank, all cars were ordered to have new license plates, again only obtainable after full tax clearance. This made any cars with the old plates readily identifiable. In addition a "special" car tax had to be paid, ranging from NIS 100-500 (US$70500) depending on the car model, before the new obligatory license plates could be acquired. "I was forced to pay 2,800 shekels in taxes owing on a factory that closed down two years ago. I need the car. I had no choice", protested one Gazan car driver.

On 14 February 1988 Shmuel Goren, Coordinator for Affairs in the Territories, announced that new measures were being taken to block the transfer of "PLO funds" into the West Bank and Gaza. Halfway through March the limit on the maximum amount of cash which Palestinians were allowed to bring with them across the Jordan bridges was reduced from JD 2000 to JD 400.

Since no Arab bank had been allowed to operate in the occupied territories until 1987 and then only in a very limited fashion, taken to depositing savings in Jordanian banks across the river. The banking system in the occupied territories relies on a network of money changers who keep their accounts in Amman.

In August 1988 the receipt of money from abroad through branches of the Cairo-Amman Bank was reduced to JD 400. In October the limit on the amount of money that could be transferred was reduced to JD 200 (approx US$ 470) per person per month.

In the Gaza Strip a nighttime curfew lasting from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. was enforced on 14 March 1988. At the same time Palestinians from Gaza were forbidden from travelling to the West Bank without a special permit issued by the military authorities while West Bankers were not allowed to enter the Strip.

On 15 March 1988 all international telephone links to Palestinian localities in the occupied territories were cut; only international telecommunications with Israeli settlements continued to function. Israel claimed that the measure was intended to prevent contacts with the PLO abroad. In practice media and human rights information, commerce and trade, contact with family members living abroad were all seriously affected. International telecommunications remained completely blocked for more than a year until 9 April 1989.

At 5p.m. on 7 July 1988 Israeli tax collectors together with IDF troops raided the homes of 50 Beit Sahour merchants and confiscated their ID cards stating that the cards would be returned only on payment of outstanding taxes. Earlier that day military checkpoints had been erected at all entrances to the town where all passing vehicles were inspected and a number of them confiscated and impounded in the playground of a local secondary school. In addition, troops stopped a number of residents in the streets and confiscated their ID cards.

Just over a year later, in mid-September 1989, Israeli troops and tax officials launched an intensive tax collection campaign in Beit Sahour. Tax raids on homes and businesses began on 21 September and continued unabated until the last day of October. During the operation homes were emptied of furniture, household appliances including fridges; stoves, televisions and stereos; in some cases even children's toys were seized. Troop sacked shops and other enterprises confiscating all goods from the premises. Cases of looting were reported. At least NIS 3 million worth of goods and possessions were seized, NIS 50,000 in cash confiscations and approximately JD 11,600 frozen in bank accounts. Some of the seized goods were then auctioned off to the Israeli public despite international protest at the move.

During the operation the town was held in complete isolation with all telephones disconnected and not press permitted entry. Delegations of foreign consuls, Church dignatories and Israeli peace groups were all turned back when they attempted to visit the town. Troops prevented foodstuffs and other supplies from entering Beit Sahour.

Tax resisters were arrested and held in detention pending trial on charges for refusing to pay taxes, refusing to pay fines imposed for non-payment and refusing to hand over ledgers to the taxation authorities. Of the first 40 to be tried by 23 November, all opted for imprisonment with sentences of more than a year in some cases rather than pay the sums required.

A range of sanctions have been implemented against Palestinian agriculture during the uprising including sieges at harvest time to prevent crop harvesting or sale, punitive bans on export and uprooting and burning of trees (for more details see JMCC, 1989, "Bitter Harvest: Israeli Sanctions Against Palestinian Agriculture During the Uprising, Dec 1987 March 1989").

The following account is from an Israeli soldier who was involved in imposing one of the many harvest sieges, on the town of Qabatia. Qabatia had already been subjected to several weeks of continuous curfew when he began his stint. Electricity supplies had been cut off, food provisions were not allowed in and people allowed to leave their homes for only two hours every three days:

"As we reach the end of a night patrol, we spy a family bringing in a bucket of tomatoes. Suddenly our jeep springs into action as if the future of our country depends on it. We corner them and all are told to report to the commanding officer. They tell us they have no food, are simply starving to death and had no choice ... A 16-year-old barefoot kid starts running away from us. In a chase, jeep versus bare feet, the officer cocks his rifle and points at the kid from 10 meters away. I shout at him to stop - that's how the "statistics" occur ... Soldiers steal vegetables from Arab fields and can't understand when I say that you can't do that. You can't arrest 10-year olds for picking tomatoes - their own tomatoes - and then laughingly take them Yourself ... ".

On 13 September the Israeli authorities banned 15,000 farmers from Halhoul and two nearby villages from marketing their main product, grapes. The region harvests 10,000 tons of grapes each year - approximately one-f ifth of the West Bank's annual grape crop. The ban meant severe financial hardship for the many families who depend on the crop for an income. 69 Community leaders in Halhoul were summoned to local military headquarters and told that the ban would be lifted if they remained quiet in the town.

Tree uprooting was another sanction which has occurred throughout the period. Between December 1987 and March 1989 an estimated 19,000 trees valued at US$ 3.8 million were uprooted by the army after alleged stone throwing incidents (see JMCC, 1989, "Bitter Harvest"). JMCC has records of 427 tree uprooting incidents since the uprising began. The graph on page 26 shows the number of incidents by month.

On 18 August, Defence Minister Rabin issued a statement declaring all popular committees to be "illegal organisations." Overnight, any person participating in the activities of a popular committee became liable to a ten year prison sentence. Attending a committee meeting, being in possession of leaflets, contributing money and services to its cause was now a serious offence.

territories for the' year 1988. Israel's Industry and Trade Minister Ariel Sharon admitted that there had been a "drastic reduction" in the consumption of Israeli products in the occupied territories since the beginning of the uprising - although he explained the fall in terms of the declining standard of living. 73 Palestinians, however, put the fall down to the success of their boycott.

Quoting local factory owners observations, the Arabic press reported a dramatic increase in sales of Palestinian products, that while the pre-uprising local market often preferred Israeli-made commodities, now Palestinian factories could barely keep up with the new consumer demand for Palestinian products. Some local manufacturers reported sales increases of 30-50%.

In July 1989, Deputy Finance Minister Yossi Beilin told an Israeli bonds meeting that the Palestinian boycott of Israeli products cost Israeli businesses a total of US$ 300 millioin lost trade since the start of the uprising. Beilin added that the uprising had cost Israel 3% of its annual GNP.

At the end of May 1989, a Bank of Israel representative stated that Israeli exports to the occupied territories had fallen by approximately 40% while Palestinian imports to Israel had dropped by 48%. In total Israel's surplus with the West Bank and Gaza had decreased by 76% to US$ 42 million.

The same representative stated that the uprising had cost Israel US$ 650 million last year in lost exports which included US $280 million in tourist revenues that the uprising deterred and "further incalculable losses by creating a climate of uncertainty that deterred investors - both foreign and Israeli - from putting money into the economy".

In February, the Ramallah Chamber of Commerce reported that Palestinians had suffered an average 50% decline in living standards since the beginning of the uprising. The report put the drastic fall down to two factors: the economic war being waged by the Israeli authorities in an attempt to subjugate the Palestinian population, and the decline in the Jordanian dinar.

Amidst Israeli fears that the crisis could fuel the uprising still further, Israeli observers also cited the economic slowdown in Israel as a factor in the financial hardships. Analysts noted that the decline in the Israeli economy had resulted in price increases in the prices of basic foodstuffs, which Palestinians cannot boycott and must import from Israel, and rising unemployment in both Israel and the occupied territories with Israeli employers sacking Palestinian workers first when making staff cutbacks and reducing the amount of work subcontracted out to Palestinian firms.

The Jordanian dinar, which is the major currency in the West Bank and Gaza, first began to decline during the summer of 1988. By February 1989, it had fallen from US $3.30 to US$ 1.60 (NIS 5.5 to NIS 2.7) and so lost approximately half of its former value. Most West Bank employees receive their salaries in dinars. Palestinians contended that the Israeli government was at least partly responsible for the crisis since it had recently sold a large amount of Jordanian dinars that it held- in deposit and had thus flooded the market, lowering the exchange rate still further.

"We have a workable plan," announced Secretary of State George Shultz on arrival in Israel, 25 February 1988. The plan proposed a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to represent the Palestinians in negotiations. The scheme entailed the division of administrative responsibility for the occupied territories between Israel and Jordan, with no Palestinian state and little substantive change from the status quo. The Palestinians rejected the plan; when Shultz went to East Jerusalem to meet with twelve Palestinians invited by the Americans, none of them turned up. He held the press conference, intended to mark the end of a successful meeting, alone.

In early June, the member states of the Arab League convened an emergency summit conference to discuss the Palestinian uprising. The extraordinary session ended with resolutions which gave, for the first time, the full backing of the Arab world to the goal of an independent Palestinian state. UNLU communiqués had appealed to the Arab nations to declare a clear public position which affirmed the role of the PLO as the leadership of the Palestinian people, rejected US proposals, in particular the Shultz initiative, and called for an international peace conference leading to an independent Palestinian state.

At the end of July 1988, King Hussein of Jordan announced in a special broadcast that he was "severing legal and administrative ties" with the West Bank. The UNLU had been openly critical of Jordan's role in the occupied territories from the beginning of the uprising. Early communiqués urged people to boycott An-Nahar, the pro-Jordanian daily newspaper, and called for Jordanian appointed parliamentarians to step down.

Released in early July, a document written by Bassam Abu Sharif, a political advisor to Arafat, provoked political debate over the need for a new political programme. The document called for a two-state solution, and a diplomatic offensive to openly pursue the goal.

As the PLO began to talk of convening an emergency Palestine National Council (PNC) session as early as September 1988, the debate focussed on what exactly the agenda of the forthcoming extraordinary conference was to be. A unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence; a government in exile; and a provisional government composed of Palestinians from the occupied territories as well as PLO officials abroad, were all possibilities for the new political programme that the PNC was widely expected to endorse.

During this period of intense debate, UNLU communiqués reiterated calls for Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the sending of an international peacekeeping force to oversee the transition to Palestinian independence in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip

In a speech delivered to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 13 September, PLO Chairman Arafat not only declared that the PLO accepted all UN resolutions relevant to the Palestinian/Israeli situation including a Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338) providing that all parties recognise the Palestinian right to self-determination. Chairman Arafat also expressed PLO readiness to negotiate with Israel within the framework of an international conference, and accepted all UN resolutions as the basis for negotiations.

UNLU Communiqué No. 26, released immediately after Arafat delivered his speech, hailed the statement and repeated Palestinian calls for the UN to affirm Palestinian rights and force Israel to withdraw from all territories occupied in , East Jerusalem included.

Prior to the PNC meeting, Israel was concerned that it would be at a diplomatic disadvantage if the PLO adopted a new platform; Chief of Staff Shomron stated on 7 December that "if the PLO is to cross the threshold and accept 242 and 338, then Israel will be faced with a problem".

On 15 November, the Palestine National Council declared the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, with the explicit recognition of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. This declaration marked the start of a new diplomatic campaign, in which the PLO explicitly called for a two-state solution.

"There is nothing new or surprising in the PNC decisions which are just another step in the terrorist organization's war against Israel's independence and existence." Israeli Prime Minister/Likud party leader Yitzhak Shamir, Jerusalem Post, 16 November 1988.

"We feel very strongly that behind the smokescreen ... of moderation, what really happened is the PNC took a more extreme position ... [The Palestinians] are not accepting 242, they are in fact rejecting it. " Israeli Foreign Minister/Labour party leader Shimon Peres, Jerusalem Post, 17 November 1988.

One of the consequences of the new Palestinian diplomatic stance was the opening of the US-PLO diplomatic relations.

The United States had adhered to an agreement with Israel signed in 1975 not to negotiate with the PLO unless it recognised Israel. Following the PNC, Israeli officials continued to insist that nothing had changed. The US administration at first supported the Israeli position by refusing Arafat an entry visa to address the UN General Assembly in New York.

On 13 December 1988, Chairman Arafat, denied access to New York, instead addressed the United Nations-,, General Assembly in Geneva. Israeli Prime Minister Shamir termed the speech "a monumental act of deception." So The Americans thought otherwise. The following day, the United States announced its intention to open dialogue with the PLO.

The third phase of the uprising extended through the year 1989. In phase three, the Palestinians sought to promote their new peace plan, and hence make political gains in the international arena, while the Israelis, under pressure to make some kind of positive response, came up with a competing plan of their own. In the international arena there were a series of maneuvers and statements related to the respective proposals. At the time of writing, the consequences for a future adoption of the new political programme at settlement remain unclear.

Over the same period the demonstrations and protests in the occupied territories continued without a reduction in frequency (see page 5) as did Israeli measures against the uprising. In addition, several new measures were imposed, including new opening fire regulations for the IDF, the introduction of new identity cards for released prisoners, and new regulations for house demolitions, deportations and administrative detention. Economic sanctions also took a new turn when restrictions were imposed on the entry of Palestinian workers from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Israeli Defence Minister Rabin publicly warned that Israeli measures against the uprising would increase if Palestinians failed to accept the Israeli elections plan.

"In the past few weeks the diplomatic aspect of the Palestinian problem has changed shape more radically than at any time since Israeli occupied what used to be British Mandatory Palestine in June 1967… roles have been reversed". Sir Antony Parsons, former British Ambassador to Iraq, in Middle East International, 6 January 1989.

The diplomatic campaign aimed to secure world recognition for both the PLO as leadership of the Palestinians and their programme for peace - an independent state side by side with Israel. Within ten days of the the PNC, 60 states had recognised the Palestinian state, including two of the five members of the UN Security Council, all the Arab states (excepting Syria), most African nations and the socialist bloc. Some - notably France, Greece and Italy - expressed support for the principle of creating an independent state. Others, while withholding full recognition on grounds that the new state had no territorial sovereignty, of f icially acknowledged its existences.

In Tunis Arafat met British Foreign Office Minister William Waldgrave in a meeting that marked the opening of high-level PLO-British contacts. Only a few days earlier Arafat had held talks with Gerald Kaufman, the British Shadow Foreign Secretary. Soon Geoffrey Howe then Foreign Secretary, added more weight to changing British policy in the Middle East when he declared that "the Palestinians have gone as far as they can reasonably be expected to go ... it is up to Israel to make the next move". In the wake of the November Declaration of Independence he had already stated that it was time "Israel matched Palestinian concessions". Prime Minister Thatcher commented during a visit to Washington that "when-it looks as though [the Palestinians] are going in the right direction, if you don't encourage them, you won't get any further moves.

By March 1989, 160 countries had recognised the independent State of Palestine; Israel founded in 1948, was still only formerly recognised by 80 states. By the beginning in May the first president of the Palestinian state Arafat, was on visiting terms with most heads of government in Western Europe, the East and the developing world. In the meantime, despite repeated Israeli objections, the PLO-US dialogue in Tunis continued.

May was also the month in which Arafat arrived in Paris to pronounce the former Palestinian National Charter caduc (a French legalistic term meaning null and void or lapsed), implying that the new constitution of the State of Palestine superceded the old charter. This answered the demands of proIsrael critics who argued that as long as the covenant had not been publicly cancelled, the two-state formula was only a tactical ploy. Arafat's chosen platform, a f ace-to-face meeting with the head of state of one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, not only provided an indicator of the rise in status that the PLO now enjoyed but, with France about to assume the rotating chair of the European Community, also displayed a sense of diplomatic timing.

The EEC countries voiced strong appreciation of the Palestinian acceptance of ' UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the recognition of Israel as a major step forward in solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, highlighting the Palestinian right to self-determination as a necessary condition for lasting peace in the Middle East. The Venice Declaration had adopted the two-state programme as the most promising way forward some years earlier. "The PLO has done what the EEC has been asking it to do since we adopted the statement in Venice in June 1980," it noted an Italian diplomat soon after the PNC declaration.

With Foreign Minister Shevardnadze's tour of the Middle East in late February, the SovietUnion affirmed support for Palestinian self-determination and underlined its calls for an international peace conference involving the PLO. Meanwhile in the United States, opinion polls indicated a change in attitude to Israel. A survey conducted jointly by the Washington Post and CBS revealed that 52% of those interviewed now held a negative attitude towards Israel while 56% stated that they no longer considered Israel to be a reliable ally.

The new political programme facilitated closer links between the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements. "Peace Now", for example, now supported direct negotiations with the PLO. Joint demonstrations and meetings between Israeli and , Palestinian groups proliferated on the common platform of Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and negotiations with the PLO.

From the start of the uprising Israeli peace groups had staged protest and provided aid to Palestinians in the occupied territories. As the number of Israelis willing to protest against the occupation rose, more demonstrations took place. By early 1989, with the uprising in its second year, the peace movement was not only staging camp-ins outside Ansar 3 in the Negev but was also participating in peace visits to the occupied territories arranged by Palestinian community leaders.

Organisers of the Peace Days explained that they were intended to allay Israeli doubts concerning the peaceful intentions of the uprising by underlining that the uprising was targeted not against Israelis but rather directed towards peace with them.

At the beginning of March a day of "peace meetings" was scheduled to take place across the West Bank. Two thousand Israelis entered the West Bank to find soldiers under orders from Defence Minister Rabin to block roads to arranged meeting places. However when the prepared meetings were thus prevented from going ahead, Palestinians in other areas staged impromptu welcomes to the Israeli visitors instead. One such meeting took place in Tubas after the IDF turned back a group of peace activists trying to reach the nearby al-Fara'a Refugee Camp.

"What makes Shamir angry is that the Israel have started to understand, after this revelation of Palestinian public opinion, that the uprising is in essence a peace movement whose stones are as olive branches; the stones are thrown at the Israeli military presence but are turned into flowers to be offered to the Jewish representatives of peace who aspire to have two states for two peoples - with no enmity, no hatred, but with good relations and common aspirations for security, cooperation and peace". Editorial in Attalia, 9 March 1989

During another Peace Day held in late May, Israeli peace activists were greeted by villagers in Nahaleen only six weeks after a Border Police unit shot dead five Palestinians in a nighttime raid on the village. 88 Israeli delegations of peace activists visited various other Palestinian communities during the year, including Beit Sahour in the aftermath of the intensive tax collection operation.

In 1988, four members of an Israeli peace delegation were each sentenced to six months in jail for meeting with PLO officials in Rumania in 1986. Then, in early 1989, four Israeli Knesset members including a Labour MK participated in a peace dialogue with a PLO delegation in Paris. Parliamentary immunity from prosecution meant that they were not prosecuted for breaking the law. Later the same year the veteran Israeli peace activist Abie Nathan was jailed for meeting PLO Chairman Arafat in Cairo.

As the PLO's image continued to improve, pressure mounted on Israel - in particular from the United States - to make some response. Israeli Prime Minister Shamir eventually came up with a plan for elections which aimed to buy Israel time both in the international arena and on the ground where one year of intensive military campaign had yet to accomplish its objective of defeating the uprising. Shamir later acknowledged that the Israeli plan had been motivated by the public relations crisis Israel was f acing abroad, especially in the US.

Six months previously, in December 1988, Likud Prime Minister Shamir had produced a plan for municipal elections to be held in the occupied territories, on condition that the Palestinians halted the uprising before the elections, and providing that the region remained under Israeli control during the election period. Thereafter the details of the plan remained unclear. What it was that Israel intended to negotiate with the locally-elected "administrative council" was not disclosed by Shamir.

Then, at the end of January 1989, Labour Defence Minister Rabin put forward a rival plan of his own, without leaving any doubt about what was on offer: following "restoration of order" over a period of three to six months, elections were to be held to select representatives who would then become part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation which was to negotiate "autonomy". After an interim period of "self-rule", Palestinians were to be allowed to choose between confederation with Israel or confederation with Jordan.

Soon after Rabin had announced his plan, Shamir himself clarified what his own proposals meant. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, he asserted that there were two non-negotiable issues: no negotiations for an independent Palestinian state, and no negotiations with the PLO. He wound up the interview by declaring, "Israel will not participate in an international conference and no one will force it to do it

UNLU communiqués issued during this period interpreted the Israeli proposals as another Israeli attempt to impose an alternative leadership to the PLO and promote a vague concept of autonomy in place of the Palestinian call for full independence.

The year 1989 opened for Israel with strong American criticism of Israeli human rights violations in the occupied territories. The 1988 US State Department's Report on Human Rights Worldwide took Israel to task on several counts including causing many unwarranted Palestinian deaths and injuries and implementing harsh measures against the popular committees.

Not all of the Israeli establishment was in agreement with Shamir: the annual review of the Israeli intelligence services presented to the Israeli cabinet by Chief of Military Intelligence Ammon Shahak concluded in March 1989 that:

The report was released to the press by members of the Alignment. One day after the report's findings were made public, Shamir denounced the report as "a total lie". Labour leader Peres made no comment. Jerusalem Post, 21 March 1989.

In the same month the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, known as the top Israeli national security think-tank, published a report supporting the possibility of a Palestinian state" after a period of confidence-building of 10-15 years". Jerusalem Post, 9 March 1989.

At the beginning of April, Prime Minister Shamir announced, during a visit to Washington, a "new" peace plan in which elections were to be held in "Judea and Samaria" to elect Palestinian representatives with whom Israel could negotiate during "an interim period of autonomy pending a final settlement." Egypt and Jordan were to be involved in the final negotiations. Shamir described the elections which he envisaged as "free" and "democratic".

President Bush welcomed the Israeli proposals as "encouraging". Yet just prior to the visit, Secretary of State Baker had told the House of Representatives Committee that Israel might have to talk to the PLO. It appeared that Israel had succeeded in gaining time. Middle East International commented:

"Above all Mr Shamir wants time. That is the immediate stake that he is playing for, and the hint about elections may be a good way of buying time. The word has a familiar and reasonable sound in Western ears". Middle East International, 14 May 1989

On 14 April, the text of a cable circulated from the Israeli Foreign Ministry to Israeli embassies around the world explained that Palestinians who would stand in the proposed municipal elections would have to agree in advance to participate in a process leading to "interim self-government". In an interview with Ha'aretz, Israeli Defence Minister Rabin announced that he would arrest and imprison any Palestinian candidate who declared their membership of the PLO.

On Shamir's return from Washington, the Israeli government endorsed a joint Shamir- Rabin proposal which clarified beyond all possible doubt what the Israeli elections entailed. The 14 May cabinet session laid down a detailed 20-point programme which stipulated, among other conditions, that the uprising must halt before any elections were to be held and that the elections were to bring forward "representatives for a transitional period of self-rule" who would then negotiate a "permanent settlement". Point 3 revealed that the essence of the Israeli plan was to stop far short of Palestinian independence and to firmly bypass the PLO.

Three days later Shamir delivered a speech to the Knesset in which he declared: "We shall not give the Arabs one inch of our land, even if we have to negotiate for 10 years ... We won't give them a thing" . An editorial in the Palestinian newspaper Attalia commented that "from the start, the purpose of the elections idea was clear - it was designed to force the Palestinians to reject it.

"Settlement in Judea, Samaria and Gaza will continue ... Every -Jew who wishes to do so will be able to settle in any part of Greater Israel ... There will be no foreign sovereignty in any part of Israel. The Arabs of East Jerusalem will not participate in the elections. We will do away with all terror and violence before any negotiations get under way. There will be no negotiations with the PLO ... [and] no Palestinian state in the Land of Israel." The Jerusalem Post, 6 July 1989.

While the Israeli government claimed that they were looking for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with whom they could engage in dialogue, local Palestinian leaders publicly stated that "the address for negotiations was the PLO".

"The Defence Minister speaks of a hidden race called "non-PLO Palestinians in the territories" whom Israeli leaders will select from among "the leaders of the uprising" and who will emerge out of thick anonymity, defy the unanimous. consensus of the Arab world and form a separate delegation independent of the PLO in Tunis.

Candidates for this employ7nent are presumably being interviewed in Arab villages, in refugee camps, in detention centres and in other arenas not always congenial to the free expression of political attitudes, in the meantime the Labour Party joins the Likud in rejecting contact with the PLO ... We refuse to negotiate with those who are willing and are ready to negotiate with those who don't exist ... Can anyone seriously believe that a Palestinian Organisation which can get 160 states to affirm its representative status can be totally and permanently excluded from the negotiating process?" Abba Eban in Jerusalem Post, 14 July 1989.

In a meeting with US Assistant of State John Kelly in East Jerusalem, a number of leading Palestinian figures from the West Bank and Gaza called on the US administration to "demonstrate a genuine commitment to a just peace" based on the Palestinian right to self-determination and the "exchanging land for peace" principle through the convening of an international peace conference.

In addition, a group of eighty prominent Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip signed a "political document" in which they called for Israeli negotiations with the PLO and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, and for elections after Israeli withdrawal. The statement drew attention to unanimous local opposition to the Shamir plan as an attempt to divide Palestinians into those living in the West Bank and Gaza on the one hand and those outside the Israeli-occupied territories.

On 15 May Rabin threatened to increase Israeli measures "to put down the violence" by reducing Israeli dependence on Palestinian labour, restricting communications between West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel, and suspending the right to appeal against military orders. 98

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post Rabin stated that he saw no contradiction between Israel putting forward the elections proposal while at the same ti me using whatever means possible to put down the uprising: "it helps bring [the Palestinians] to the realities of life", he explained.

In 1976, elections were held in the West bank under Israeli supervision. Pro-PLO mayors were returned to office in almost every town. They were all subsequently dismissed, detained, deported or, in some cases, they became the victims of assassination attempts carried out by settlers.

In mid-May 1989 the whole of the Gaza Strip was again placed under curfew but this time the Israeli police ordered all Gazan workers still in Israel to return to the curfewed Gaza Strip, threatening to arrest anyone who remained behind in Israel. Then, 48 hours after the curfew went into effect, the Israeli defence establishment announced that henceforth all Gazans wishing to cross through any of the military checkpoints into Israel for work, business or any other purpose would only be permitted entry with a special permit.100 According to the Israeli press, the measures were intended as a "foretaste of the crackdown promised by Defence Minister Rabin if Palestinians reject Israel's proposals for elections." The Jerusalem Post, 17 May 1989

"We regard theright of the Palestinians from the territories to work in Israel as a benefit [to them]. But we have taken several measures to make it clear to the Palestinians and everybody else that we distinguish between those Palestinians who would like to continue their lives in a normal way ... and those who participate in violence" The Jerusalem Post, 18 May 1989.

… Shamir's project stands in total contradiction to the practice of his government's policies in the occupied state of Palestine: the military forces at the disposal of Shamir are physically searching for Palestinian national leaders and political activists to imprison, exile and, at times, kill them. Israel is violating the human rights of Palestinians, brutally suppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories and blatantly ignoring their declared political points of view which clearly address the concept of Shamir's "elections…."

The Palestinian people's rejection of the idea of any elections held prior to the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the West Bank and Gaza emanates from what has been mentioned above; it is not an indication, as some Israelis claim, of the people's rejection of democratic principles… Our rejection of the election proposal does not indicate a rejection of elections as a democratic process but is a rejection of a project which ignores the essence of the conflict. The elections proposed by Shamir do not constitute democratic practice within clearly defined principles; this isolated occurrence of elections does not illustrate how it will lead to the end of occupation and to Palestinian national independence. We believe that real peace in the region cannot be achieved by projects that are calculated to appeal to the media, to end the uprising, and to win time…

We believe the Israeli government now bears the responsibility of taking the next step towards peace; there is, so far, a total lack of any serious response by the Israeli government to the Palestinian peace initiative taken at the PNC by the leadership of the Palestinian people - the PLO. If Israel wants to prove its seriousness, the Israeli government should respond positively to the Palestinian initiative and immediately cease its oppressive and inhuman practices in the land of our occupied state - this response is far more realistic than to propose projects which illustrate only a lack of commitment to the establishment of a lasting peace". Al-Fajr English, 1 May 1989.

However the contradictions in the Israeli policy soon became clear. On 21 May, as the curfew was finally lifted in most areas, Israel Radio announced several times that the curfew was over and Gaza workers could now go to work in Israel. The workers decided otherwise and instead stayed at home to observe a general strike called in protest at the Israeli measures. 103 Rabin himself was forced to admit that "Israel needs the workers and they need the work."The Jerusalem Post, 18 May 1989

As both Israeli and Palestinian observers noted, Israel could not afford to replace cheap Palestinian labourers, who earn half the average Israeli wage, and work without social security benefits and trade union rights, with a more expensive Jewish workforce. Jewish workers moreover were not willing to do the kinds of jobs - rubbish collection, street cleaning, seasonal crop picking - usually done by Palestinians. Whole sectors of the Israeli economy would have to remain dependent on the migrant Palestinian workforce, "whether we like it or not", commented the Middle East editor of the Jerusalem Post. Cited by Bashir Barghouthi in Attalia, 1 June 1989. Some commentators went further:

"Israeli policy does not wish to acknowledge this simple equation: cheap Palestinian ]about is the other face of the occupation. Israel cannot afford to dispense with the one without dispensing with the other, Le. with the occupation itself. Yossi Beilin, the Israeli advisor to the Finance Minister, . was absolutely right when he said that the decision to prevent the Palestinian workers from entering Israel was the beginning of the establishment of the Palestinian state." Bashir Barghouthi in Attalia, I June 1989.

Then on 3 June, an area-wide curfew, the eleventh of its kind since the beginning of the uprising, was again clamped on the Gaza Strip. This time, the Israeli authorities enforced the issue of new identity cards to all Gazan males over the age of sixteen for the second time in a year.

The new magnetized identity cards were designed to enable comprehensive records to be kept and checked on the spot by specially installed computers at the military checkpoints into Israel. The cards were to be valid between six months and one year, renewable at the discretion of the Israeli authorities. Those with "security records" were to be barred from entering Israel.

With 8 August set as the date by which all Gazans were supposed to have received their new cards, the conflict between card resisters and the Israeli authorities continued. The original deadline was extended to 18 August, on which date workers from the Gaza Strip without the required card would be barred from entering Israel. 107 The UNLU called on West Bank workers to boycott work in Israel for one week, 18-25 August, in solidarity with their fellow workers in Gaza. Anyone taking the job of a striking worker would be deemed guilty of "national faithlessness," stated the communiqué.,

In mid-January 1989, IDF standing orders concerning the use of plastic bullets were expanded to include official permission to open fire not only on stone-throwers, but also on persons burning tyres, building street barricades and those fleeing troops. This latest army directive created controversy within the Israeli establishment.

IDF commander Mitzna's reference to the "method of total combat" in reference to the new directives.111 However, a Jerusalem Post editorial comment noted that the orders were only "seemingly new" since IDF of ficers and NCO's under their supervision had already for some time been officially permitted, whether or not they found themselves in life threatening situations, to shoot at "inciters" who were encouraging "rioters" from afar. Following a tour of duty in the Nablus casbah during which 17 Palestinians had been shot and injured with plastic bullets, an IDF soldier noted that "none of these seventeen youths was shot in self-defence; they were all shot as a punishment for throwing stones."

In addition to the increased use of plastic bullets, the IDF also recently began using a new type of bullet termed by soldiers "the improved rubber bullet." The bullet had a greater range than other rubber bullets already in use; it "seems to be proving as harmful and f atal as some of the others introduced during the past year," commented the Jerusalem Post. The same article went on to cite the case of Farid Maghari who died in late November after being shot with this kind of bullet. It also quoted a "military expert" on the increase in casualties since the introduction of the new bullet:

"First, soldiers think that thqy-have a weapon that does not kill, so they, shoot more freely. Secondly, the shooting policy has changed ... Now the policy is to shoot at any g-roup.of children who hold a stone in their hand. Jerusalem Post, 2 January 1989

In July 1989 IDF open-fire regulations were further amended to include official permission to open fire on "masked" youths regardless of whether they were throwing stones or could in any other way be perceived as posing a threat to the lives of the troops. 115 One week later IDF troops shot dead two Palestinian youths as they painted political graffiti on walls in Hebronand Khan Younis Refugee Camp respectively. 116 just over a year earlier UNLU communiqués had begun urging people to follow the example of youths in Nablus and Gaza in covering their heads and faces in order to hamper the identification of demonstrators by the Israeli security forces.

In October 1988 Reuters News Agency filed a report detailing the existence of Israeli "death squads" set up to target uprising activists. The report stated that at least two special undercover units codenamed "Samson" and "Cherry" had been deployed since the beginning of the uprising and cited three cases in which well-known local Palestinian activists had been shot in cold blood during a two-day period in early October.

The British-based Financial Times also published reports of the undercover squads and their use of Palestinian vehicles to gain entry to remote villages. Israel offically denied the existence of such units. However an ex-member of the special unit was then quoted in the press as stating that the unit's task was to detect and catch organisers of the uprising. Later Rabin confirmed that the "security apparatus" was permitted under military law to commandeer Palestinian cars "for security missions".

In July 1989 The Daily Telegraph described the killing of a young activist in Ramallah as a premeditated assassination attempt involving the Israeli security service. According to the British newspaper a van drove up to Yasser Abu Ghosh as he was walking along the street and "two civilians got out and shot him in the back as he tried to flee". Border Guards then shot the youth in the head. He died in Israeli army custody several hours later. 119 At the end of August Israeli security personnel disguised as tourists with cameras opened fire in Bethlehem killing one Palestinian youth.

First issued to recently released detainees in the Gaza Strip and then later to former prisoners from the West Bank, new "green" identity cards were introduced which were only valid for a period of three to six months and renewable at the discretion of the Israeli authorities.

The card carriers were not allowed to cross the Green Line (see glossary) into Israel or East Jerusalem, for any purpose including employment. Prohibiting travel to Israeli thus entailed not simply a movement restriction, but an economic sanction as well. Some recently released detainees were issued with "temporary documents" which were valid for three weeks only and renewable at the discretion of the authorities each time the expiration date was reached. The Palestinians thus affected observed that being issued the new card was similar to being placed under town arrest.

At Rabin's request to the Israeli Ministry of justice to find ways of increasing the effectiveness of measures against the uprising, the right of the deportee to appeal the expulsion order in the High Court was suspended. Since the Israeli High Court has never overturned a deportation order issued to a Palestinian, the suspension made little difference to whether or not the expulsion would go ahead. However, what the change in the law did mean was that deportation of, as Rabin put it, "central figures taking part in incitement, Organisation and participation" of the uprising" could now take place within 72 hours to one week of arrest. Only two of the eight Palestinians expelled on 29 June had completed their appeals in the High Court: both the appeals had been rejected.

In August 1989 the period covered by each individual administrative detention order was increased from six months to one year. Prior to this new measure, many six-month orders were simply renewed as soon as they expired. Beginning on 16 May a series of mass arrest campaigns accompanied the official launching of the Israeli elections proposal."' On 4 July alone, 200 alleged uprising activists were arrested. Many of those rounded up in the mass sweeps were placed under administrative detention in Ansar 3.

Mass demolitions were carried out in retaliation for isolated attacks on Israeli vehicles on a number of occasions during the uprising. At least, 70 families were made homeless when the Israeli army burnt down or demolished 82 shacks in the Jordan Valley village of jiftlik following the killing of an Israeli soldier on a nearby settlement. The assailant who was shot dead by another soldier at the settlement, had been living in jiftlik but came from the village of Tamoun; his family house in Tamoun was also demolished.

House demolitions were carried out in cases of suspected attacks against Israeli vehicles or Palestinian collaborators, and since January 1989 houses of suspected stonethrowers were also being demolished. A number of houses were destroyed on grounds that one of the tenants was "suspected of incitement" or because the suspect "forcibly resisted arrest". In addition, families had their houses destroyed because one family member was accused of membership in a popular committee.

The demolition of houses built without Israeli construction permits was also stepped up during the uprising. Observed The Jerusalem Post: "The Civilian Administration has stepped up house demolitions in the territories during the uprising as part of a bureaucratic crackdown aimed at stifling attempts to organise civil disobedience". In one case extensive demolitions of unlicensed houses in the village of Kissan left 250 people homeless. As a West Bank Data Base publication noted, the Israeli authorities "use planning as an instrument of reward and punishment for political and security purposes". Meron Benvenisti & Shlomo Khayat, The West Bank and Gaza Atlas 1988, West Bank Data Base Project, Jerusalem 1988, p. 56

Israeli military courts passed unprecedented heavy sentences on Palestinians accused of being popular committee members and/or organisers of strikes. On 19 June, for example, five Palestinian youths from the Gaza Strip, all aged 16 to 17 years, were imprisoned for eight years, with five years suspended, on charges of harassing shopkeepers who broke the commercial strike. 134 The following week, two 15-year olds were given two and a half years in prison for distributing uprising communiqués.

The killing of informers and collaborators received much media attention during the year, encouraged by the Israelis. The Israeli press itself repeatedly published gruesome tales about the "Palestinian bloodbath" and of how the uprising had "turned in on itself", putting the killings down to Palestinian internecine warfare (Jerusalem Post, 8 December 1989). Some explained the phenomenon as a manifestation of Palestinian frustration at lack of progress in the peace process. However there was another side to the story:

"The population involved in the intifada is physically endangered by many collaborators most of whom carry guns issued by the Israeli authorities and use them on fellow Palestinians and others. They provide the authorities with information which jeopardizes the lives, liberty and property of the general population. Hence, in addition to the need to provide sanctions that would punish and deter such individuals, there is also the need to protect the community from danger". Palestinian civil rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab, Jerusalem Post, 10 September 1989.

"Perhaps the most convincing sign of the power of the intifada [irooting out collaborators] is the army's disability to protect the lives of its collaborators… Early in the intifada, Israeli control of the population had declined to the point that the community members were able to send collaborators to the mosque or church to pray and repent. Most of them repented, or said they did. A number of them resumed their collaboration with the Israelis, tarnishing the image of collaborator repentance and reconciliation. This accounts for the killings that are taking place at the present stage of the intifada. The same delay occurred with the killing of collaborators by the Resistance in France in World War II." Frank Collins, "Why Palestinians Kill Palestinians in Israeli-Occupied Territories", The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 1989.

"Before the outbreak of the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto, which began to be planned only after the great majority of the Jews of Warsaw had already been exterminated, the Jewish Underground, with every justification, killed every Jewish collaborator it could find. Had it not done so, the revolt could not have begun at all", Dr. Israel Shahak, human rights activist who survived the Holocaust first in Warsaw and then in the Bergen-Belsen death camp, Kol Ha'ir editorial, 19 May 1989.

"Over the past three weeks cars belonging to many Palestinian nationalists have been set ablaze. Israeli officials have tried to hint to the press that the fires are the result of internal conflict among Palestinians over the question of elections… In one incident in Jericho, Palestinians succeeded in capturing with Israel. The community was able to see through the attempt to stir the conflict, but many Western journalists were duped". Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab, "Deportations and tricks", Middle East International, 7 July 1989.

"At the beginning of the uprising, the decision was taken to work towards "national cleansing". The collaborator confessed publicly and declared readiness to stop [working with the Israeli authorities]; the people declared their readiness to forgive. Those who refused to do so were expelled from their residences. This situation remained unchanged until after the Israeli authorities began to organise the collaborators and return them to their residencies having first armed them. Until recently the military authorities arrested "wanted" Palestinian activists. Now they kill them instead. This serious matter would not be possible without the help of the collaborators. The killings are carried out selectively. For example one of the nationalists confronted a collaborator and asked him publicly to stop acting against his own people. The following day the collaborator pointed him out to the army and the activist was shot in the main square of Ramallah… Deeds such as these changed people's attitudes. It is fair to say that Palestinians killed 120 persons in the last six months; it also needs to be noted that they only killed a total of 140 [collaborators] in the last 20 years. Director of the Arab Studies Society, Faisal Husseini, Al-Ittihad, 16 December 1989.

In August 1989, with the Shamir elections plan now five months old and the peace process showing no signs of progress, Egypt came forward with a proposal which raised the "land for peace" formula and the issue of the final status of the occupied territories as well as proposing a Palestinian-Israeli meeting in Cairo.

Some Palestinians observed that the Americans only began to display interest in the Egyptian points, which aimed to convene a Palestinian-Israeli meeting in Cairo to discuss elections details, three months after Egyptian President Mubarak had first put them forward. For some this indicated that the US, having granted Shamir time to come up with local Palestinian partners from the West Bank and Gaza only, was now convinced that any attempt to bypass the PLO on the road to a limited form of self-rule for We-St Bank and as early as the beginning Gazan Palestinians was bound to fail.

PLO; that Palestinians from outside the Occupied territories be included in the Palestinian delegation; that the agenda be open to discussion of more than just municipal elections; that the meeting should have an international dimension. Al-Fajr, 11 December 1989

Israel at first ignored the Egyptian proposals despite the fact that the ten points made no mention of the right of Palestinians to self-determination, the establishment of an independent state or the participation of the PLO in the peace process.

Shamir had told the Likud Central Committee as early as the beginning of June that he did not agree with the "land of peace" formula, rejected the participation of East Jerusalem Palestinians in the proposed elections and insisted on continued Israeli settlement in the occupied territories. Palestinians viewed the Egyptian proposals as significant in as much as they attempted to address those three issues.

On 6 October, the Israeli inner cabinet rejected Egypt's ten-point proposal regarding elections in the West Bank and Gaza. Labour Minister of Energy Moshe Shahal admitted that the decision meant "a rejection of the Israeli plan that Shamir himself devised". A-Sha'ab, 7 October 1989

US Secretary of State Baker then put forward five points of his Own which also aimed to promote a Palestinian-Israeli meeting in Cairo. Palestinians viewed the five American points at least in part positive but in need of further development to include a role for the PLO and become part of a comprehensive package leading to an independent state. The PLO gave the same qualified acceptance to the Baker points that it had earlier given to the original Egyptian proposals.

At the time of writing, a tripartite meeting is expected soon between Israel, Egypt and the United States, where the Palestinian issue will be discussed. The outcome of this processremains highly uncertain, with some observers feeling that Israel and the United States are simply playing for time, and are not serious about a settlement. Others remain more optimistic, citing the new atmosphere in superpower relations and the growing links between the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements as being hopeful developments.

"Shamir's strategy, based on the belief that time is on our side and that we can continue to resist the Palestinian pressure until attrition defeats them, is wrong ... The international framework is also changing. The thinking of the new era is focussing on people and their rights. The meaning of Israel's strategic alliance is changing. The atmosphere in the new Europe is also changing. The nineties will be much more innovative than the eighties." Ayre Naor, former cabinet secretary to the first Begin government. The Jerusalem Post, 8 December 1989.

IDF	535 Palestinians killed by army/settlers 69 under 14 years of age
IICHR	616 Palestinians killed by army/settlers, not including beatings/teargas deaths 131 under 16 year of age
Attalia	760 Palestinians killed, including beating and teargas deaths
JMCC	753 Palestinians killed, including beating and tear gas deaths
UNRWA	473 in West Bank and 228 in Gaza Strip. (Total 701 only including "100%" proven cases of army/settler involvement.)
IDF	136 collaborators killed
IICHR	153 collaborators killed

IDF	8 soldiers and 11 civilians killed
IICHR	10 soldiers and 9 civilians killed

IDF	8,938 casualties
IICHR	37,439 casualties (based on UNRWA records only)

IDF	50,000 arrests, 9,000 by administrative detention 9,240 currently in prison
IICHR	13,000 currently in prison

IDF	58 deportations
IICHR	58 deportations

IDF	248 demolished for security reasons 118 sealed for security reasons
IICHR	257 demolished for security reasons 124 sealed for security reasons
Al-Haq	246 demolished for security reasons 190 sealed for security reasons 1,650 demolished for lack of building permit

JMCC	Total number of curfew days: 6,572
Red Cross/ UNRWA	Total number of curfew days in Gaza Strip 1,784