The Road to the Second Intifada
Dirt crackled underneath the passing traffic as we waited for our ride into the city centre of Ramallah, the sun kissing our hair through the branches of a fig tree. I held my sister’s hand and stood back on the pavement while my best friend Shatha stood in the road, holding her hand up in the air. At ten years old, Shatha was one year my senior, and therefore the leader of our expedition. It was only our third outing into the city without our parents.
After a few minutes, a yellow minivan stopped to let us in. If you’ve been to Palestine you will be familiar with its symphony of yellow minivans, which still exists today. These vans drive along set routes on main roads in between and within cities, and cost a fraction of the price of a private taxi. We crawled into the back of the van and handed our fare - one shekel each - to the person sitting in front of us, who passed it forward until it reached the driver. I felt elated. Independence had always excited me.
The road to the city centre was short by all objective measures: when I drive it today, it takes me a maximum of fifteen minutes with bad traffic. But it was a long distance to be travelling alone. As we drove, residential buildings turned commercial, with brightly coloured signs pulling our attention left to right. We drove past the Muqata’a, too: the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority from which Yasser Arafat ruled the West Bank and Gaza.
At the time, it was a large but unimpressive building, surrounded by a high wall and flanked by a large concrete slab that was designated for public gatherings and helicopter landings. After it was destroyed during the intifada, it was rebuilt in a much more extravagant style, perhaps aptly so considering the changed relationship between the Palestinian leadership and its people. But that’s a story for another time.
After the Muqata’a came the real heart of the city centre: clothes shops that displayed their stock on mannequins that hung outside their doors; toyshops with colourful dolls and bicycles lining their shelves; a haberdashery shop with hundreds of different buttons dotted along its back wall; a pharmacy that smelled of Johnson & Johnson baby oil; minimarkets lined with American products like Skippy peanut butter and Hershey’s chocolate bars; shawarma shops emanating smells of spices and grease; coffee vendors with gigantic thermos strapped to their backs; currency exchangers that sat on plastic chairs with wads of dollars, dinars and shekels in their hands; and - my favourite of all - men pushing carts filled with freshly baked ka’ek: a long oval-shaped bread, slightly sweet in flavour and covered in sesame seeds.
Ramallah’s central roads were narrow and its pavements were crowded. Walking on the road rather than the pavement was (and remains) normal. The result is an intimate dance of people and cars, giving the city centre a beautiful bustling character.
At the time, the city was safe, even for unsupervised children. Ramallah was still relatively small, and most people knew each other - or at least each other’s families. There was also a palpable sense of people looking out for one another. It might be hard to imagine for outsiders, but it makes perfect sense that our parents let us go into the city centre alone.
Our trips to central Ramallah always consisted of three stops. The first was the ka’ek cart, where we each bought a piece of the sweet bread. The second stop was Beauty Center, a small shop selling cosmetics and accessories, where we bought the same pastel butterfly clips that adorned the hair of millennials across the globe. Ideally, we would have also gone to a toy shop, but toys were expensive and we wanted to save enough money for our final stop: Checkers.
Checkers was a new and divisive establishment: an American-style fast food restaurant selling burgers, fries and meal deals in a similar style to McDonald’s. Despite the absence of international chains, spin-offs of the same concepts had begun to pop up in Ramallah, mirroring the awkward neoliberal tendencies of the institutions that had come to rule us.
Checkers was situated on the first floor of one of Ramallah’s central buildings. The restaurant had a black and white tiled interior with red booths lining the large, slightly tilted windows that looked out on the shopping street.
We raced each other up the building’s stone stairs and wolfed down our burgers within minutes. We stayed long after our red trays were cleared, watching city life unfold below us, marvelling at its pace. There is something truly sensational about cities. They make you feel like you are both larger than life and invisible.
It was a good day.
Little did we know it would be our last time at Checkers.
In fact, it would be the last time we saw the city as we knew it.
If you are somewhat familiar with the Palestinian question, you will be familiar with the notion that the Second Intifada began in September 2000, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem with a team of armed guards. Palestinians were outraged at this, seeing it as a slap in the face in light of Israel’s exponential encroachment in East Jerusalem and beyond. Popular protests erupted, and Israel responded with military violence. This is true, but hardly the full story.
While Ariel Sharon’s visit provided a definitive spark, several underlying dynamics of everyday life under occupation had been building up for years under the framework of the Oslo Accords.
The Oslo Accords were agreements between Israeli and Palestinian representatives signed in 1993 and 1995. It is important to state upfront the two things that outsiders often get wrong about the Oslo Accords: first, they were interim, not final, agreements. They were meant to constitute a prelude to something bigger that would come years later. This “something bigger” never manifested. Second, the Oslo Accords were not peace agreements: they were economic and security arrangements.
Palestinians simply refer to the Oslo Accords as “Oslo”, so that’s what I will do from here on.
Commentators and intellectuals have spent a quarter of a century carefully dissecting and critiquing Oslo and its impact, and the consensus revolves around five main issues, all of which contributed to the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000.
One
The Oslo Accords ignored, by design, the most critical aspects of the Palestinian question. The delineation of borders, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their indigenous lands, the status of Jerusalem, and Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land were labelled as so-called “final status” issues. These were to be resolved in a more permanent peace agreement - one which never came.
These issues, which remain pressing today, have all been the direct result of Israeli policies towards Palestinians and their lands; policies which have been allowed to unfold for decades due to an imbalance in cultural, ideological and military power which has tilted heavily in Israel’s favour.
By deliberately ignoring key issues and failing to address the power imbalance, Oslo created a faciliatory framework for Israel to press on with its policies under the cloak of relative stability. Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees such as my grandparents continued to be denied return to their indigenous lands, nor were they offered reparations for that which was taken from them.
Two
One of the key outcomes of Oslo was the establishment of a limited Palestinian administrative authority in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Israel maintained control over air, sea and borders in the West Bank and Gaza - as well as over Israeli settlements within the two territories. East Jerusalem was excluded from the mandate of the Palestinian Authority as one of the aforementioned “final status” issues.
The distance between the West Bank and Gaza is short: around 90 kilometres (58 miles). This is the same distance as London to Brighton (or New York City to Princeton). In a country free from occupation, this would take an hour and a half at most, depending on traffic and speed limits.
In Palestine in 1999, after Oslo but before the intifada, the journey could take anywhere between two to four hours, depending on checkpoints. This meant that my family, which is spread between the West Bank and Gaza, saw each other infrequently and with difficulty.
In Palestine today, the journey between the West Bank and Gaza is impossible unless you obtain a special permit from Israel. These permits are so difficult to obtain that even cancer patients are frequently denied permits to leave Gaza to receive life-saving treatment. With rare exceptions, the two branches of my family haven’t seen each other in twenty years.
Three
Oslo created a further, equally detrimental subdivision of Palestinian living space. Within the West Bank, three types of security zones were created that still exist today. The zones were named Areas A, B and C.
Area A is where the Palestinian Authority has full civil administrative control, meaning it can run local governments, courts, healthcare, schools and other social and public services. In Area A, the Palestinian Authority is also responsible for security through its police force. (It does not have an army, nor is it allowed one under the provisions of Oslo.) Entry for Israeli citizens and settlers is forbidden and discouraged using road signs.
Area A comprises roughly 18 per cent of the West Bank.
Area B is where the Palestinian Authority maintains civil control but shares control over security matters with Israel.
Area B comprises roughly 22 per cent of the West Bank.
Area C is where the Palestinian Authority has no civil or security control. Instead, Israel maintains sole authority there as an occupying power. Area C is where Israeli settlements are located (with occasional spillover into Area B). These settlements are illegal under international law. Although around 150,000 Palestinians live in Area C today, they face severe restrictions on building dwellings, and Palestinian structures that do exist there are at constant risk of demolition.
Area C comprises roughly 60 per cent of the West Bank.
This system has separated Palestinian towns from one another, created limited spaces for Palestinians to build dwellings, facilitated land expropriation, and further enabled settlement growth by keeping Area C available for the construction of Israeli settlements.
In Area C, there is a network of roads that connects Israeli settlements to “mainland” Israel. Palestinians are not allowed to use these roads. Settlers have different number plates than Palestinians, and Israeli soldiers at checkpoints ensure that no Palestinian vehicles access restricted roads. It is no accident that, under the Oslo framework, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank has grown by 500 per cent to date.
It is, again, important to underline that this zoning system, which is reminiscent of Apartheid-style Banustans, was instituted by design and under international mediation. The devastating irony is that this was done at the same time that the world applauded the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
Four
The new Oslo arrangements included a sub-treaty called the Paris Protocol, which established a new economic infrastructure between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. This economic arrangement is often referred to as a customs union, although this is slightly misleading. Customs unions are usually signed by independent parties that agree to open up their sovereign borders to one another.
Yet, under Oslo, Israel was already set to maintain control over the borders of the West Bank and Gaza. The Paris Protocol was therefore simply a formalisation of the economic dependence of the Palestinian territories on Israel, not a mutually agreed customs union.
Part of this economic arrangement was that Israel would control imports and exports to the West Bank and Gaza, over which it would levy taxes that it would then (partially) transfer to the Palestinian Authority. These tax transfers still occur every month, and they have been used by Israel in the past as a means to leverage the Palestinian Authority.
The small benefit to Palestinians was the establishment of a system of work permits that enabled Palestinians (mostly manual labourers in agriculture and construction) to work within Israel. After Oslo, however, Israel made a conscious effort to attract manual labour from abroad to replace its Palestinian workforce. In fact, between 1992 and 1996, the number of Palestinian labourers working in Israel decreased from 116,000 (one-third of the Palestinian labour force) to 28,100 (one-twentieth per cent of the Palestinian labour force).
Overall, the Paris Protocol institutionalised the economic power disparity between Israel and the Palestinians, creating a Palestinian society with a capitalist class structure where those with a privileged connection to Israeli capital reap economic benefits, and those without constitute a disenfranchised working class - regardless of their level of education or expertise. It didn’t take long after Oslo for this to cause significant frustration amongst Palestinians, as well as distrust in their leadership.
Five
Some observers have noted that, as a result of Oslo, Israeli and Palestinian belief in violence grew as the 1990s passed. Often, this argument is presented in a way that suggests a false equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian violence. It is important to note that these ideas on violence were distinctly different.
From the Israeli perspective, Oslo affirmed its impunity and institutionalised the power imbalance in its favour. It created a new set of institutions and regulations that Israel used to enforce its policies and suppress Palestinian dissent. Israel had learned from the past, and after Oslo, that violent repression works.
What it did not yet understand is that it was dealing with a new generation; one that had never known life without occupation, and for whom Oslo was supposed to provide a way out. The disappointment of Oslo was something that didn’t just affect Palestinian daily life; it penetrated deep into the Palestinian spirit. Many Palestinians came to understand that their leadership provided no way out. The majority turned to popular protest. Some turned to violent resistance. Almost all began to form what we refer to as the Popular Cradle: a state of communal support for the Palestinian resistance movement.
These issues all point to a singular, devastating reality: that Oslo was never designed to facilitate justice, accountability or peace. It was designed to regulate Palestinians by keeping them tame in their Bantustans, not quite in a state of humanitarian collapse but also not in prosperity; out of the way of a Greater Israel.
Palestinians grew increasingly frustrated as the reality of post-Oslo life contrasted sharply with its hopeful promises; they experienced first-hand the continued expansion of settlements, the encroachment upon their already small living space, the continued Israeli repression of Palestinian political and social movements, the continued restrictions of movement through elaborate checkpoint systems between Palestinian towns, and an overall dire economic situation.
As a child, this was not lost on me. I felt the stress of the adults around me and overheard their tense conversations about the future. I knew I was living under occupation. I knew what Israeli soldiers were and the danger they posed. I knew I was living in a shrinking country that nobody in the world recognised as such.
But, as a child, I was easier to distract by small pleasures, content to be able to enjoy a day out with my sister and my friend, chewing on our greasy burgers without a care in the world. It would only be a matter of time before I outgrew this innocent naivety. In many ways, I am grateful that I didn’t until well into the intifada. I am grateful that I was too young to fully feel the rage that moved those around me.
Whereas many outsiders may have hoped that the Oslo Accords marked the start of something good, its aftermath did the exact opposite. Perhaps more than ever, Palestinian popular belief in confrontation as the only way to resist Israeli oppression became widespread, and Israel knew it had to break the Palestinian spirit swiftly and definitively.
On the eve of the Second Intifada, Israel had everything to gain from violence, and Palestinians had nothing more left to lose.
Still, we lost so much.