The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

plement the solution for the territories it had promised under the peace
agreement signed with Egypt in 1977; negotiations came to nothing.
Jordan washed its hands of the Palestinian territories in 1987 by relinquishing
all claims to sovereignty over the West Bank, so that its moderating
influence was lost there. The PLO failed to achieve anything for
the Palestinians.
Palestinians felt abandoned by their Arab allies. On the one hand, the
PLO had failed to destroy Israel and establish a Palestinian state in its
place as they promised. To many Palestinians it seemed they were prob -
ably doomed to remain politically impotent forever unless they took their
fate into their own hands.
It is hard to specify the official date of the beginning of the Intifada. The
stabbing of an Israeli by a Palestinian in Gaza, and an incident in which
four Palestinian workers were killed by an Israel car, rumoured to have
been deliberate revenge for the stabbing, are often cited. Then, a seventeen-year-old
threw a Molotov cocktail at an army patrol and was killed
by an Israeli soldier. His death supposedly became the trigger for
large-scale riots that engulfed the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. Unlike
the Second Intifada, the First Intifada was evidently unplanned, and
there was less violence. The PLO was relatively weak in the occupied
territories. It was headquartered in Tunis, and was concerned with the
survival of its organization, after having been expelled from Lebanon.
The First Intifada was characterized largely by leafleting and rock throw -
ing, primarily because Palestinians did not have many weapons.
The Israeli reaction to the First Intifada: The collapse of the false
notion of the “enlightened occupation”
Given the non-dramatic nature of Palestinian challenge, the Israeli reaction
is totally inexplicable. Israel killed a large number of Palestinians in
the initial part of the Intifada, most of them apparently in demonstrations
and riots. It is easy to claim it was due to brutality or insensitivity, but
most aspects of the policy were actually counter-productive. Brutalization
of the Palestinians and mass arrests could only sow the seeds of
the next Intifada.
176