The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising

By December 1987 the occupied territories had been under military rule for twenty years and the PLO’s leadership was in Tunis, two thousand kilometres away and freshly humiliated: the Arab League summit in Amman the previous month had made the Iran–Iraq war its priority and treated Palestine as an afterthought. Inside, a generation had grown up that had never seen anything but the occupation, and it had grown up inside institutions — the student blocs, the trade unions, the women’s work committees, the medical and agricultural relief committees, the voluntary work movement — that the factions had spent fifteen years building in place of guerrilla bases they could not build. When an Israeli army truck killed four workers from Jabalia camp on 8 December 1987 and the funerals turned into a general revolt, the country already had the organisational tissue for an uprising. What it did not have was a command.

The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising was that command, and it was assembled in a fortnight. Its first coordinating committee brought together cadres of Fatah and the Democratic Front; a Popular Front representative joined days later, and the Palestine Communist Party in March. It issued its first communiqué as a leaflet on 8 January 1988, calling a general strike and the closure of businesses, and opening: “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. Our people’s glorious uprising continues. We affirm the need to express solidarity with our people wherever they are. We continue to be loyal to the pure blood of our martyrs and to our detained brothers.” Over the following years it issued more than seventy numbered bayanat, drafted in secret, typed or handwritten, photocopied in the thousands and distributed through the same networks — mosque to school to camp to village. Ilan Pappé has described the communiqués as functioning both as a newspaper and as a manual for the intifada; the historian Thayer Hastings calls them the key political texts of the era.

The leaflets are the reason the First Intifada is remembered as a disciplined uprising rather than a riot. They set the calendar: which days were general strikes, which hours shops could open, when to march and when to stay home. They organised the boycott of Israeli goods and of the civil administration, told policemen and tax collectors to resign — and thousands did — instructed neighbourhoods to form popular committees for food, medicine, education and guard duty, told villagers to plant “victory gardens,” and set rules for funerals so that burials did not become massacres. They also, repeatedly, addressed conduct: instructions against attacks on Israeli civilians inside Israel, and — as the uprising ground on and the killing of suspected collaborators rose into the hundreds — increasingly anxious instructions about who could be accused, by whom, and on what evidence. That internal violence is part of the record and the leadership’s own leaflets are the best evidence that it alarmed the leadership.

The leadership was anonymous by necessity: signing a communiqué meant years in prison. Israel arrested successive tiers of it, and each time a new tier assembled — the UNLU is estimated to have been reconstituted more than a dozen times. Alongside it, and in tension with it, worked the public figures of the occupied territories who could speak to the press and to diplomats: Faisal al-Husayni at the Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem, Hanan Ashrawi at Birzeit, Sari Nusseibeh, Zahira Kamal of the women’s committees, the communist editor Bashir Barghouti, Ziad Abu Zayyad. Several were repeatedly detained; several went on to form the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid conference in 1991, which was obliged to negotiate as part of a Jordanian delegation because Israel refused to sit with the PLO.

The uprising’s political product was Algiers. In November 1988 the Palestine National Council met in what its own Political Communiqué called “the session of the intifadah and national independence,” declared the State of Palestine, and accepted Resolutions 242 and 338 — a step the leadership in Tunis could take precisely because the uprising inside had made the Palestinians of the occupied territories an actor no one could ignore. It also ended the UNLU’s authority. The Madrid track and then the secret Oslo channel moved decision-making back to the PLO’s leadership abroad, the leaflets thinned out and stopped, and when the Palestinian Authority arrived in 1994 the popular committees were absorbed, defunded or dissolved. Palestinians have argued ever since about whether the most effective political instrument they ever built was surrendered or simply superseded. What is not arguable is what it demonstrated: that an occupied population with no state, no army and no leadership at liberty could govern its own resistance for six years, by photocopy.

Sources

• Communiqué No. 1 of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, 8 January 1988 — Revolutionary Papers
• Communiqués of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising — Wikipedia
• The First Intifada and the beginning of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Intifada: leaflets of the Palestinian uprising (PDF) — International Institute of Social History
• Political Communiqué of the 19th Palestine National Council, Algiers, November 1988 — UN Question of Palestine