The First Intifada and Arafat's Turn, 1987–88
Twenty Years of Occupation
By December 1987 the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been under Israeli military rule for twenty years. The Palestinian population had doubled. Around 60,000 Israeli settlers lived in roughly 130 settlements, and a network of bypass roads, military zones and water-allocation rules had hardened into what international lawyers called occupied territories. Permits regulated Palestinian work inside Israel; identity cards, military courts and curfews regulated almost everything else. The PLO leadership, exiled to Tunis since 1982, was 1,500 miles away. A new generation of Palestinians had grown up knowing only Israeli rule and a distant flag.
By 1987 the West Bank and Gaza had been under Israeli military rule for twenty years. The PLO leadership had been in Tunis since 1982. Around 60,000 Israeli settlers lived in roughly 130 West Bank settlements; the population now under occupation had roughly doubled since 1967.
Jabaliya, December 1987
On 8 December 1987 an Israeli army truck collided with two cars at the Erez crossing into Gaza, killing four Palestinian workers from Jabaliya refugee camp. Rumours spread that the crash was deliberate. The next day at the Jabaliya funerals turned into a riot; Israeli forces shot dead a seventeen-year-old. Within a week protests spread to every refugee camp in Gaza and to the West Bank. Schools closed; markets shuttered in commercial strikes. The Arabic press named what was happening the Intifada — literally ‘a shaking off’. It had not been planned by the PLO and it surprised them as much as it surprised the IDF.
Forms of Protest
The Intifada was driven from below by a network of local committees that came to be coordinated through the ‘Unified National Leadership of the Uprising’. Stone-throwing children became its public image, but the campaign also included general strikes, a boycott of Israeli goods, refusal to pay taxes (especially in the town of Beit Sahour), and the formation of unofficial Palestinian schools when Israeli authorities closed the official ones. Guns were deliberately kept off the streets in the early months; the strategy was civilian and visual. Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s ‘iron fist’ response — mass arrests, school closures and an instruction in January 1988 to ‘break the bones’ of stone-throwers — produced television footage that turned international opinion against Israel for the first time on the scale it had hoped to avoid.
Students often write that ‘the PLO launched the Intifada’. The strongest answers recognise the opposite. The uprising emerged spontaneously from refugee camps in Gaza in December 1987, organised through local committees that had no contact with Tunis when it began. The Tunis leadership scrambled to keep up: Arafat’s December 1988 speech is best understood as the PLO catching up with developments inside the occupied territories rather than directing them. The same point matters for understanding Hamas, founded in Gaza in the same month the Intifada began — the PLO no longer had monopoly representation of the Palestinians in the territories.
Hamas, December 1987
In the same week that the Intifada broke out, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and other leaders of the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood founded Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas’s 1988 charter rejected any recognition of Israel and any negotiated settlement, positioning itself in direct opposition to a PLO that was already moving the other way. Hamas built its base through mosques and welfare networks (clinics, schools, food kitchens) that had operated semi-tolerated under Israel because they were seen as alternatives to the secular nationalist PLO. From 1987 onwards there was a Palestinian movement on the ground in Gaza that did not answer to Arafat and did not accept partition.
The Algiers Declaration of Independence, November 1988
In July 1988 King Hussein of Jordan formally renounced his claim to the West Bank, leaving the PLO with sole responsibility for negotiating its future. The Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, met in Algiers from 12 to 15 November 1988. On 15 November Arafat read the Algiers Declaration, proclaiming an independent Palestinian state. By citing UN Resolution 181 — the 1947 partition plan — as the legal basis, the PLO implicitly accepted, for the first time, the existence of an Israeli state alongside it. Within a month, around eighty states had recognised the new declaration of independence.
Geneva, December 1988
Arafat had been due to address the UN General Assembly in New York to make the next political move. The Reagan administration refused him a visa. The General Assembly voted to relocate the session to Geneva. On 13 December 1988 Arafat made the speech and the next day, on US insistence, made it again in plainer language. He recognised Israel’s right to exist within the 1967 borders; accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338; and renounced terrorism in all its forms. Within hours the United States announced that it would open direct dialogue with the PLO. The legal block on US-PLO contact, in place since the 1970s, was gone.
On 13–14 December 1988, in Geneva, Arafat recognised Israel’s right to exist within the 1967 borders, accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338 and renounced terrorism. The United States opened direct dialogue with the PLO within hours, ending nearly two decades of diplomatic isolation.
A Mixed Reception
The reception of Arafat’s turn was sharply split. Around the world, eighty-plus states had already recognised the Algiers declaration; the European Community welcomed the speech. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir refused to negotiate with the PLO, insisting Arafat’s words were tactical rather than strategic. Inside the territories Hamas rejected the renunciation entirely and began its own campaign of attacks. On the Israeli left a minority of politicians began to argue for talks with the PLO — the position that would, after Shamir’s 1992 election defeat, bring Yitzhak Rabin to the secret Oslo negotiations. The renunciation did not end the Intifada (which continued in declining intensity until 1993) and it did not produce immediate negotiations — but it removed the international diplomatic alibi for treating the PLO as untouchable.
An importance question can name Arafat’s renunciation and ask about ‘attempts to find a solution in the Middle East’. That asks for consequences for solution-seeking, not a description of the speech. Strong answers explain how the renunciation unlocked direct US-PLO dialogue (December 1988), normalised the idea of a two-state solution as the Palestinian position, and made the 1991 Madrid Conference and the 1993 Oslo Accords possible because the PLO could now be a recognised diplomatic partner. Weaker answers describe what Arafat said without showing what it caused.