The UNLU and the Leaflets of the Uprising

On 8 January 1988, one month into the uprising, the first numbered communiqué (bayan) of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising appeared on the walls and doorsteps of the occupied territories. It opened with the words “A call… a call… a call” and closed with the refrain “Until the fall of the occupation,” repeated twice. Behind it stood an underground coalition of the four main factions inside the territories — Fatah, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front, and the Palestine Communist Party — coordinating with, but not simply taking orders from, the PLO leadership in Tunis.

The leaflets became the uprising’s operating system. Printed clandestinely in runs of 35,000 to 100,000 and distributed at night under curfew — left at bus stops and doorsteps, pasted on walls, read out over radio from Damascus and Baghdad, smuggled into Israeli prisons where political prisoners transcribed them — each bayan named the strike days and demonstration days of the coming weeks, addressed merchants, workers, students, and drivers sector by sector, and warned of “revolutionary punishment” for strikebreaking. The Israeli army hunted the printing presses; the numbered series simply continued from new ones.

The UNLU’s communiqués organized a largely unarmed civil insurrection — general strikes, tax refusal, boycotts of Israeli goods, popular committees for schooling and food — and demonstrated something new: a national leadership operating inside the occupied territories, disciplined, anonymous, and obeyed. That shift in gravity from exile to the interior produced the political harvest of the era, from the Declaration of Independence in Algiers in November 1988 to the Palestinian delegation that faced Israel at Madrid in 1991 — a delegation drawn from the same interior the leaflets had mobilized.