Palestinians and the Peace Process ••• 407village refused to pay taxes to Israel's authorities. The intifada began spon¬
taneously as a homegrown protest movement, for the Palestine Liberation
Organization had been in Tunis since 1983. Some of the local leaders, dis¬
illusioned with the secularist PLO, founded a Muslim resistance move¬
ment, patterned on Hizballah, called Hamas (meaning "Courage" or
"Movement of Islamic Resistance"). It has since been proved that Israel
covertly aided its emergence as a rival to the PLO.
Why did the uprising break out in December 1987? If the Palestinian
Arabs had chafed under Israeli military occupation since 1967, why did it
take twenty years for them to try to shake it off? Actually, there had always
been resistance, both overt and covert, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel had benefited materially from its twenty-year rule, using the Pales¬
tinians as a cheap labor pool and a market for Israeli manufactures. Some
Palestinians prospered from entering the Israeli economy, but they saw
more and more lewish settlers occupying their land and using their scarce
water resources. There was much tension and little integration in their rela¬
tionship. No one could be sure whether Israel's gradual absorption of the
occupied territories would be reversed by an exchange of land for peace,
probably with Jordan and under US sponsorship, or brought to its logical
conclusion by outright annexation and possibly, as some Israeli extremists
proposed, by forced expulsion of all Palestinians. Many observers saw signs
of rising Palestinian unrest due to the policies of the Israeli occupying au¬
thorities and the vigilante actions of the well-armed Jewish settlers.
One key event shortly before the intifada was the summit meeting held
in Amman in November 1987, when the Arab heads of state paid lip service
to the Palestinian cause but permitted one another to resume diplomatic
ties with Egypt, which had been isolated from most other Arab govern¬
ments since 1979 for its separate peace with Israel. Soon Saudi, Kuwaiti,
and even Iraqi ambassadors were back in Cairo. In 1989 Egypt would even
be readmitted into the Arab League. The unspoken message to the Pales¬
tinians was that the Arab states were not going to punish Egypt any longer
and that the PLO should stop seeking their diplomatic and military sup¬
port. The Palestinians began fighting for their own freedom, gaining
respect from other Arabs, though more than a thousand were killed by the
Israeli army or, indeed, at the hands of other Palestinians, whereas few
Israelis died or even admitted to any hardship as a result of the intifada.
The PLO viewed this uprising as a means to achieve foreign recognition
and international legitimacy. King Husayn validated the rebellion by re¬
nouncing Jordan's claims to the West Bank in July 1988, leaving the PLO
responsible for ensuring that local officials got paid. In November of that