Democratic Palestine : 38 (ص 8)
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- Democratic Palestine : 38 (ص 8)
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Meeting New Challenges
This article was written by the progressive US journalist Phyllis
Bennis after her visit to occupied Palestine in February 1990.
Two years and three months ago, the
intifada was all new. All at once, it was
spontaneous and deeply-rooted; it was
stone-throwing and tomato-growing; it
was building a new Palestine for a new
kind of Palestinian.
The intifada is older now, no longer
spontaneous and its roots have penet-
rated deep into the layers of a multi-
faceted Palestinian society. The uprising
looks different now, even to an outsider
visiting Palestine - but the most signific-
ant differences, those that herald the
structural and political shifts in the
intifada, do not appear so clearly on the
surface. Understanding those changes
means delving into the intifada’s roots,
analyzing the nature of the stages in its
development.
When I visited occupied Palestine
for the first time, in the spring of 1988, the
intifada was in its first months. No one
was sure how long it would last, and what
would be gained from it. No one knew
how high a price remained to be paid.
The intifada’s infancy was ending.
That first stage in which the spontaneous
reaction to the years of occupation
exploded in mass resistance, was coming
to a close. That stage was characterized
by the creation of new kinds of popular
institutions to organize and take respon-
sibility for the waves of unplanned mili-
tancy challenging the domination of the
occupation authorities at the street level.
Had the mass demonstrations, rock-
throwing and other early forms of protest
remained impromptu, the brutality of
Israel’s immediate efforts to crush the
intifada might have done just that.
By the spring of 1988, the intifada
was far from spontaneous. It had grown,
matured, transformed itself into a soci-
ety-wide challenge to Israeli occupation.
Its immediate demand was freedom from
the occupation’s brutality and humilia-
tion; its ultimate goal was - and remains -
an independent Palestinian state.
The next phase focused on con-
solidating the popular organizations and
8
transforming them into a network of
institutions that collectively serve as the
structures of the emerging Palestinian
state. Most of the work was mobilized
through various social sectors - virtually
all of which were pulled into political
motion by the power of the popular com-
mittees. Shopkeepers in the merchants’
committee designed rules for the now-
frequent commercial strikes; women’s
committees expanded their work to
include economic self-sufficiency pro-
jects as well as political mobilization.
Committees were created to carry out the
tasks of education, agricultural produc-
tion, medical care, guarding, food dis-
tribution and virtually every other aspect
of collective social life.
The popular committees them-
selves, responsible for governing the new
state-in-formation, took shape at every
level of society - from block to neighbor-
hood to city-wide, district and regional
formations, culminating at the top of the
pyramid in the Unified National Leader-
ship of the Uprising(UNL). It was in the
name of the UNL that the communiques,
the numbered leaflets that form the
«laws» of the nascent state, began to be
issued.
The phase of institutionalizing the
intifada seemed to culminate with the
Declaration of Independence at the
Algiers PNC in November 1988. The
announcement of the State of Palestine
gave new internal coherence, as well as
international credibility to the national
power structure being built. For Palesti-
nians living under occupation, the issue
of dual power with the Israeli occupation
was taking on a newly concrete form, for
every popular organization carried out
two functions. Alongside the «official»
task of providing medical services, coor-
dinating agricultural cooperatives or
guarding a village, for example, lay the
second role of challenging the capacity of
the occupation authority to govern.
When a six-week-long battle of wills
broke out in early 1988 between Israeli
soldiers and Ramallah’s shopkeepers
over the shops closing in accordance with
the UNL’s strike call, the real issue had
little to do with whether a grocery store
opened from 9 to 12, or from 3 to 6. Butit
had everything to do with who decided
those kind of questions. When the sol-
diers finally abandoned their failed
efforts to prevent the strike’s success by
forcing open shops, breaking locks, etc.,
the potential for Ramallah’s popular
committees to govern additional aspects
of life in the town took on a new resili-
ence.
Since the PNC, the consolidation of
the intifada’s infrastructure has largely
been a success. The 21-hour-day com-
mercial strike is an unchallenged reality
throughout occupied Palestine. The
boycott of Israeli goods has become sec-
ond nature, and factories are on double
shifts to keep up with the demands for
national products. Women’s committees
have created numerous small and large-
scale cooperatives that play important
roles in village and refugee camp
economic life.
But with the «normalization» of cer-
tain aspects of the intifada, a new stage is
coming to the fore. While direct, militant
resistance to the occupation’s military
and settler presence in Palestine con-
tinues unabated, its forms have changed.
Large-scale demonstrations are less fre-
quent these days - too many martyrs and
serious injuries have been the result of
such face-offs. But resistance is very
much the name of the game in 1990’s
intifada, and much of it takes the shape of
economic struggles to fight and defeat the
occupation’s efforts to strangle Pales-
tine’s national economic life and make
day-to-day existence on the individual
level so untenable that some, perhaps
many Palestinians would choose «volun-
tary» exile in the hopes of finding a better
life for their children.
Beyond the struggle to survive and
to resist Tel Aviv’s economic onslaught,
the new stage has also been shaped by the
effort to realize the gains of the intifadain
the diplomatic arena. The stage emerged
in the context of the dramatic opening of
a US-PLO «dialogue». While still not
recognizing the PLO as the sole legiti-
mate representative of the Palestinian
people, and still rejecting the creation of
an independent Palestinian _ state,
Washington’s move gave tacit accep-
tance to PLO involvement in any peace
Democratic Palestine, March-April 1990 - هو جزء من
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