Intifada

The First Intifada erupted on 9 December 1987 in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, after an Israeli military vehicle collided with a civilian car and killed four Palestinian workers, and spread rapidly across the occupied territories. It was a largely grassroots mobilization — strikes, shop closures, tax and consumer boycotts, demonstrations, and stone-throwing — coordinated by clandestine local committees. Over its course, Israeli forces killed more than a thousand Palestinians. The uprising placed the Palestinian question back at the center of international attention and formed part of the background to the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the Oslo Accords of 1993.

The Second Intifada broke out at the end of September 2000, after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the compound revered by Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif and by Jews as the Temple Mount, and the lethal Israeli response to the protests that followed. It was far more militarized than the first: Palestinian armed attacks and suicide bombings against Israeli civilians were met with large-scale Israeli military operations re-entering Palestinian cities, and thousands of Palestinians and around a thousand Israelis were killed before the uprising subsided around 2005.

The word intifada predates its Palestinian usage — it described unrest in Iraq as early as 1952 — but through the two Palestinian uprisings it entered global vocabulary as shorthand for mass popular revolt.

Sources

• Intifada — Encyclopaedia Britannica