Palestinian Uprising Research Articles

Responding to Displacement: Bringing Together Palestinians across the Green Line and Beyond

In this interview, Amahl Bishara speaks with Nidal Al-Azza, director of Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, based in Bethlehem, and Rula Nasr-Mazzawi, a psychologist and founding member of Addar for Culture and Art, based in Nazareth, about their organizations’ collaborative initiatives. Al-Azza and Nasr-Mazzawi address displacement as an experience shared by most of the Palestinian people, including refugees and internally displaced people. They discuss their organizations’ innovative joint work to bring together Palestinian youth from across colonized Palestine, and the importance of connecting youth in face-to-face encounters to combat the fragmentation imposed upon Palestinians and to challenge stereotypes they may have of each other. Finally, they share how the Dignity (Unity) Intifada of 2021 heightened awareness for Palestinians across many locations about the unity of the Palestinian struggle and the role that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship play in Palestinian uprisings. Conducted in Arabic in December 2022 via Zoom, the interview was translated and edited for length and clarity. Reflecting the language of the interviewees, it uses ‘48 territories to refer to the lands Israel occupied in 1948.

REBELLION AND REJECTION OF HERITAGE IN MODERN HEBREW POETRY

This research deals with the image of rebellion and the rejection of heritage in modern Hebrew poetry. Poetry is considered a type of literature and one of its important basic forms. One of the literary genres, poetry has played an important role in shaping the cultural identity of nations throughout ancient and modern times. Where the Jewish writers distinguished themselves in this genre as one of the forms of social awareness, which occupies an important place and occupies an e ssential space in mobilizing societies and peoples and enlightening them to struggle for their liberation and crystallizing their revolutionary and civilizational awareness, in addition to the aesthetic function of poetry as an artistic value added to life. The phenomenon of rebellion and the rejection of the heritage emerged in Hebrew poetry in Israel and the departure from the official line of the ruling establishment in the wake of the wars that Israel waged with neighboring countries, the continuation of the occupation, the control of Jewish settlers over the Palestinian lands, and the increase in violence and injustice against the Palestinians. And the outbreak of the Palestinian uprisings since (1987-1993) and (2000) and Israel launched a war on Lebanon in 2006. All of this uttered cries of rebellion and rejection, and then expressed it in many poems. As a result, the phenomenon of rebellion and rejection poetry expanded in recent years. Hence, it can be said that the emergence of the literature of rebellion and rejection in Israel and the refusal of some Jewish writers to politicize literature and recruit it is tantamount to protesting and rebelling against the government and its institutions because they are trying to impose political dictates on their literary and intellectual writings... We will explain in this study the image of rebellion and the rejection of heritage by Jewish poets to the situation The ruling political and repressive practices in Israel and their impact on many poets as fertile material that poets derived and expressed in their poems

AN ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACTS OF THE FIRST PALESTINIAN UPRISING (INTIFADA) ON THE ISRAELI ECONOMY

The Palestinian uprisings, Intifada, is one of the important milestones in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. The first one began in 1987 and ended (at least at the official level) in 1993 with the Oslo Accords. The six years of protests affected both Israeli and Palestinian parts. In addition to the international area's criticism for Israel's brutal response, Israel's economy was also affected severely. Even though many Palestinians still criticize the Palestinian Authority for undermining the result of this series of protests, some argue that Oslo Accords are a significant gain for the Palestinians. Without concluding whether the negotiations went well, or Oslo Accords is a gain or a loss, this study argues that the economic aspect of protests was something that led the Israeli part to negotiate and agree with Palestine. This study examines some of the direct and indirect factors, such as the cost of general strikes, a boycott of goods, refusing to pay tax, and the rise in military expenditure.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan

The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan

The factionalization of Palestinian customary justice: sulh politics in the Balata refugee camp

ABSTRACT Having played a leading role in two Palestinian uprisings, the Balata refugee camp remains a bastion of oppositional political currents in the West Bank. This article explores how competing political factions have adopted a form of arbitration called sulh, or communal conciliation, to mitigate conflicts. Based on fieldwork and interviews with leading actors from Balata and the city of Nablus, it offers an up-close account of how the local administration of customary justice has evolved from past days of anti-colonial struggle to the present era of contested state-building. Drawing on Faleh Jabar’s concepts social and etatist tribalism, the article asks: Do the conciliation committees of Nablus and its refugee camps constitute a semi-autonomous legal order fostering communal resilience or an instrument of power reflecting the dominance of the political elite? The study shows that the committees’ embeddedness in the proto-state structures of the Palestinian leadership has challenged their autonomy. Structurally, ‘tribal law’ has increasingly become synonymous with the rule of the Fatah faction – a matter that long has driven wedges between leading conciliation men. This article contributes to our understanding of how political movements take part in shaping what is considered customary and traditional and use it to further their rule.

Emotionalising the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: on the civil society engagements of Israeli mental health professionals in response to the Palestinian uprisings

This article explores how Israeli mental health practitioners emotionalised the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by intervening in the public sphere. Based on a close reading of texts produced by two Israeli civil society associations of psy-professionals – Imut and Natal – we analyse and compare two languages of emotion that they developed in response to two Palestinian uprisings, the First Intifada of 1987–93 and the Al Aqsa Intifada of 2000–05. This allows us to point to differences and similarities in the ways these two associations articulated, conceptualised and represented emotions that they attributed to the Israeli-Jewish collective. Imut voiced a critical and openly political response to the outbreak of the First Intifada, while Natal adopted an ostensibly apolitical position that affirmed mainstream Israeli politics in response to the Al Aqsa Intifada. Though they differed in their politics, both Imut and Natal emotionalised the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a dual fashion. They depicted emotions as forces (a) whose dynamics have to be understood in order to grapple with the conflict, and (b) whose detrimental effects have to be controlled through proper management. Thus, both associations portrayed emotions as an instrument for understanding the political situation and as a powerful tool to achieve social and political aims. Though both Imut and Natal emotionalised the conflict in their civil society interventions, neither of them depoliticised it. Rather, they transposed the psychological from the individual to the social level, thus embedding it in a dialectic in which the politicisation of the psychological leads to a non-reductionist emotionalisation of the political.

Anticolonial Uprising and Communal Justice in Twentieth-Century Palestine

AbstractThis article examines the strategies, structures, and practices that allowed for the emergence of communities without police institutions during two Palestinian uprisings, the 1936–39 revolt and the 1987–91 intifada. For each period, the article identifies efforts to disengage from and disempower the state police, to establish alternative systems of anticolonial justice, and to employ disciplinary violence to serve the imperatives and enforce the decisions of Palestinian nationalist bodies. In particular, Palestinian systems of anticolonial justice drew on communal reconciliation (sulh) and other preexisting local iterations of communal justice. These local forms relied on discourses of egalitarianism and consensus, which produced stability in periods of upheaval but also obscured the inequalities they reproduced. Ultimately, the anticolonial structures that Palestinians established proved unable to withstand intense internal and external pressure, and some elements of the coercive forces that served them were absorbed into state police institutions.

Post factum clarity: failure to identify spontaneous threats

ABSTRACT This study explores an information interpretation explanation of strategic surprises using a non-traditional national security threat: a popular uprising. To explain why this type of assessments fail, I emphasize the role of information relevance when evaluating intelligence about civilian unrest. I posit that the dynamic nature of relevance is crucial for signals of popular dissent becoming dominant indicators that are incorporated into security assessments. A case study and observational data analysis of the Palestinian uprising (Intifada, 1987) demonstrate how information relevance contributed to the Israeli intelligence failure and how it affects the potential for strategic surprises facing a civilian threat.

Throwing stones in social science: Non-violence, unarmed violence, and the first intifada

Social scientists treat stone-throwing as a non-violent act or argue that protest movements may be primarily non-violent despite stone-throwing. However, this study of an iconic example, the first intifada (Palestinian uprising, 1987–1993), demonstrates that stone-throwing is better characterized as unarmed violence. Definitions of violence underscore that throwing rocks is a violent act. Moreover, informed observers and data collected on stone-induced injuries during four years of the intifada illustrate the bodily harm caused by stones. The throwing of stones was central to the intifada and its identity and definition. Stone-throwing was the most visible tactic Palestinians used in the first intifada. Lastly, most scholars emphasize the protestors’ perceptions when it might be that the targets’ perceptions matter more for understanding definitions of (non-)violence and subsequent policy changes. These findings challenge important social science work and the mainstream Israeli and Palestinian narratives about the first intifada.

The Threat of BDS

The Threat of BDS

‘We have a place to play, but someone else controls it’: Girls’ mobility and access to space in a Palestinian refugee camp

From the Palestinian uprisings to the Arab Spring, politics in the Middle East is often spectacularly represented by the visual images of (male) youths battling state forces in the street. This article seeks an examination of political and cultural change in the region from a different perspective by asking how the everyday lives of young(er) people – boys and girls alike – are implicated in such transformation. In doing so, this article seeks to highlight how young people act as agents of change not only in ‘The Street’, but also in the more mundane and intimate spaces of alleyways, doorsteps and homes. Through an examination of the everyday mobility of Palestinian girls and boys in a West Bank refugee camp, this article demonstrates how questions over access to space in the camp are central to the lives of young people, as well as to broader political struggles in Palestine and the region. Girls living in Balata Camp often see restrictions to their access to space as being the result of both internal Palestinian social inequality as well as the overarching geography of occupation and displacement. Girls often advocate for greater access to space in the camp by making appeals to both the Palestinian national struggle as well as Islamic ethics of gender equality and justice. By arguing that healthy girls and boys are better able to grow and resist occupation with new and spacious places of play in the camp, these young people mark a significant departure from the politics of older generations who have steadfastly avoided outward improvements to the camp out of a desire to maintain their refugee identity and right of return. Beyond their advocacy for greater access to space, girls in Balata also use a variety of embodied tactics and strategies to evade, resist and make do with the spatial restrictions imposed upon them. Counterintuitively, many girls use their spatial restriction to their advantage by using their time at home to study. Many hope that their academic achievement will enhance both their upward and lateral mobility later in life. In contrast, although boys are viewed as having the privilege of greater mobility in the camp, many boys complain that they have no quiet places to study and that the streets they play in are often violent and crowded. With mounting family obligations and dismal employment prospects, many boys see little hope in achieving a better life through education. By looking at how girls and boys negotiate access to everyday space, this article demonstrates how children’s lives are implicated in the broader politics of public space and gender in the Middle East.

Israel and the Arab Peace Initiative, 2002–2014: A Plausible Missed Opportunity

This article analyzes the Israeli position toward the Arab Peace Initiative (API), which was adopted by the 2002 Arab League Summit in Beirut. The API has been the most dramatic and progressive Arab initiative ever presented Israel, and has remained on the negotiating table ever since it was first proposed. Unwilling recognize the magnitude of the change in the Arab position, succeeding Israeli governments have never officially responded the initiative for various reasons. The main argument of the article is that by constantly evading the API, Israel has missed a genuine opportunity advance the peace process.The Arab League Summit in Beirut on March 27/28, 2002, adopted an initiative resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arab Peace Initiative (Mubadarat al-Salam al- Arabiyya), as it soon became known, was a modified version of a Saudi initiative, and was first unveiled in an interview of Crown Prince 'Abdullah of Saudi Arabia by Ameri- can journalist Thomas Friedman, on February 17 of that year. Israel learned of the API at the height of the second Palestinian uprising, the al-Aqsa Intifada, and therefore it did not elicit a serious response. However, it remained on the Arab League agenda ever since, regularly reaffirmed by successive league summits. In other words, the API has been an available policy option for more than a decade, yet no Israeli government has embraced it as a viable peace option.The aim of this article is analyze Israel's response (or lack thereof) the API. It will address the question of why Israeli decision-makers have continuously evaded this proposal, all the while declaring their support for making peace with the Arabs in general and with the Palestinians in particular. Though the API marked a major change in the Arab position toward Israel, academic research has not reflected its significance. Moreover, in spite of the fact that Israel is the addressee of the API, the question of whether it has represented a serious peace option for Israel has not been studied ad- equately. This article aims explore whether Israel, by failing seriously address the API, has missed a historic opportunity advance a peaceful solution the conflict.1The term plausible missed opportunity is defined as a situation in which one party a conflict or a third party offers an attractive, meaningful political alternative the status quo, which embodies an option for resolving the conflict or moving towards that end, but this alternative is not pursued for various reasons.2 The degree of missed op- portunity will be measured according four variables: the leaders' legitimacy, their determination pursue the peace track, the degree of trust existing between the parties based on previous contacts, and the extent of third-party involvement.3LAUNCHING THE APIIn February 2001, Ariel Sharon, the leader of the right-wing Likud party, was elected Israeli prime minister. His first priority was seek an immediate end the al-Aqsa Inti- fada that had been raging since September 2000, following the failure of the talks at the Camp David Summit in July of that year. The United States, which in the past attempted mediate negotiations, was also focused in 2001/2 on finding an acceptable political formu- la for ending the violence. All these efforts, however, failed.4 In light of the ongoing fight- ing, Crown Prince 'Abdullah of Saudi Arabia's peace overture caught many by surprise.On February 17, 2002, in an interview with Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, Crown Prince 'Abdullah proposed a new idea: full Israeli withdrawal from all the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, in accordance with United Nations reso- lutions, for full normalization of relations between Israel and the 22 Arab League states. The Crown Prince, who had been Saudi regent since 1995, said that his aim was to find a way make it clear the Israeli people that the Arabs don't reject or despise them. …

A Palestinian Uprising: Is it Possible or is it Too Late?

Four years ago, the Arab Awakening started out auspiciously. It caught many by surprise to say the least and its inception, strength and energy have continued to shock numerous commentators. While some observers noted that this powerful process had bypassed Palestine, others have offered a completely different view, arguing that the current situation is ripe for Palestine’s enactment of the Arab Awakening. This article examines the validity of arguing the possibility or the impossibility of a Palestinian Arab Spring-style uprising. Has the spring really bypassed Palestine? Does Palestine exhibit the circumstances and capacities whose presence in other Arab countries seemed to be prerequisites for uprising? Moreover, if developments and initiatives adopted by the collective are of any indicator and Palestinians opt for a mass populist non-violent uprising, then what goals, tools and tactics would the coming Intifada adopt? While attempting to place Palestine within a broader contextual analysis of the Arab Spring, the article seeks answers to these questions and argues that nonviolent resistance is emerging as the most potent means for reforming the Palestinian house and also for defying the occupation and exposing its crimes. The article presents a framework for the description and then provides recommendations.

“Palestine as a Woman”: Feminizing Resistance and Popular Literature

At the present time, when desires to resist are being conscripted, the rich history of historic Palestine is being devalued, and significant concepts (such as resistance) have become inferiorized, but particular powerful metaphors such as “Palestine as a woman” are maintained to subvert dominant thinking that re-inscribes colonial relations, and Palestinian women have collectively defied oppression, firmly wielded the weapons of the struggle contained in their culture, spoken a united language of resistance, and unearthed the colonial cultural matrix by feminizing resistance. The significance of the representation of Palestinian women in popular literary works reverberates in the symbols of Palestine, Beirut, Resistance, and the Palestinian Uprising (Intifada). Three renowned Palestinian intellectuals whose work informed the popular and national liberation discourse after the Nakba (the occupation of Palestine in 1948) have elaborated significantly on the interlacing of social and national liberation in t...

The Effects of Organizational Culture on Business Management Performance in Palestine

Organizational Culture is the set of shared values, beliefs and norms that influence the way employees think, feel and behave in the workplace. An organization's culture can have a pivotal impact on organizational management performance. This paper analyses the concept of organization's culture in manufacturing environment during the second Palestinian uprising (September 2000 – November 2004) against Israeli occupation. Israeli Defense Force (IDF) erected 648 check points that restrict Palestinians interlinks and the movement of their goods for security reasons. Palestinian economy was therefore in recession and businesses were feeling the pinch of reduced revenues. This empirical study draws upon a survey of 32 ISO 9000 certified manufacturing companies, which were asked to complete a questionnaire that focused on the means of encompassing aspects of organizational culture to guide employees' actions into emphasis on teamwork and sociality to foster loyalty and sense of tradition for business survival. This study has found that organizational clan (collaborate) culture type distinguishes the unique status of Palestinian organizations and in effect it places a premium on cohesion of teamwork participation and consensus. Clan culture has been effectively compatible with Palestinian organizational strategic objectives; it showed a strong source of motivation and behavioural control towards collective ends in economic crisis.

Counter-Suicide-Terrorism: Evidence from House Demolitions

This paper examines whether house demolitions are an effective counterterrorism tactic against suicide terrorism. We link original longitudinal micro-level data on houses demolished by the Israeli Defense Forces with data on the universe of suicide attacks against Israeli targets. By exploiting spatial and time variation in house demolitions and suicide terror attacks during the second Palestinian uprising, we show that punitive house demolitions (those targeting Palestinian suicide terrorists and terror operatives) cause an immediate, significant decrease in the number of suicide attacks. The effect dissipates over time and by geographic distance. In contrast, we observe that Palestinian fatalities (regardless of whether or not they were killed in a targeted killing operation) do not have a consistent effect on suicide terror attacks, while curfews and precautionary house demolitions (demolitions justified by the location of the house but not related to the identity or any action of the house’s owner) cause a significant increase in the number of suicide terror attacks. The results are consistent with the view that selective violence is an effective tool to combat terrorist groups and may have contributed to bring an end to the Second Palestinian uprising. On the contrary, indiscriminate violence backfires.

Autonomous Motivation in Palestine through Self-Determination Theory

Motivation which is broadly defined as a set of forces that cause people to behave in certain ways, and it is part of managerial directing function. One employee may be motivated to work hard to produce as much as possible, whereas another employee may be motivated to produce just enough to escape the sack. Managers must comprehend these differences in behavior and the reasons for them. This behavior becomes intrinsically complicated because Palestinians endured 648 Israeli army check points that restrict Palestinians interlinks and the movement of their goods for security reasons, and businesses were plummeting in economic crisis through the second Palestinian uprising (September 2000 – November 2004). A survey of 32 ISO certified manufacturing firms in Palestine were asked to complete a questionnaire that focused on the means of motivating their employees to keep the firms afloat during that period of socio-economic crisis. Palestinian firms embarked on autonomous motivation that stems from coherent goals, local cultural values, and self-worth performance to overcome business constraints and contingency hindrance. Self-determination theory that has steered up survival rate of firms in Palestine, explains organizational behaviour and performance throughout.

Society–Military Relations in a State-in-the-Making

The participation of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA’s) security agencies in the armed struggle against Israel in the second Palestinian uprising (2000–2005) is analyzed in this article as a response to the demand of Palestinian society, thus as a unique case of armed forces which, in the lack of political directive, became more attentive to public opinion. The article shows how Palestinian public discourse in the late 1990s–early 2000s, that was shaped by the Islamic movement of Hamas, portrayed the PA’s security officials as traitors. Members of the PA security agencies (mainly Fatah members) sought to reposition themselves in the “national camp,” and this motivated them to raise their weapons against Israeli targets. By doing so, they also removed the mental burden of turning their weapons against fellow Palestinians that was one of the major sources for their image as collaborators.

OTTOMAN MODERNITY, COLONIALISM, AND INSURGENCY IN THE INTERWAR ARAB EAST

AbstractThe foundations of both Arab and Turkish nationalism lay in the late Ottoman mass education and conscription project and in the region-wide struggle against colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s. The anticolonial insurgencies of the 1920s and 1930s have passed into history as the formative expressions of new nations: the Turkish War of Independence, the Iraqi revolt of 1920, the Syrian Battle of Maysalun, the Great Syrian Revolt, and the Palestinian uprisings of 1920, 1929, and 1936. But all insurgents of the 1920s had been Ottoman subjects, and many and probably most had been among the nearly three million men mobilized into the Ottoman army between 1914 and 1918. The Ottoman State, like all 19th-century European powers, had made mass education and conscription a centerpiece of policy in the decades before the Great War.

Assessing the Impact of Ongoing National Terror: Social Workers in Israel

The main goal of this study was to explore the connections between social workers' personal and professional exposure to national terror in Israel and their professional and personal distress experienced due to ongoing terror attacks. Data were collected from 406 social workers from Israel who worked in agencies that provide help to victims of terror and their families. The social workers reported low levels of burnout, low levels of stress, and medium- high levels of intrusive memories. Levels of personal and professional exposure were not associated with burnout, intrusive memories, or stress level. However, professional distress (burnout and intrusive memories) was positively associated with personal distress. In addition, a two-step hierarchical regression was conducted, revealing that when burnout and intrusive memories were added to the regression equation, the explained variance of the stress level increased. Neither burnout nor intrusive memories were found to be significant mediators between the independent variables and personal stress level, except in one case. Although the social workers coped relatively well with ongoing terror, it was clear that professional distress was associated with their personal stress. KEY WORDS: burnout; national terror; resilience; social workers; stress ********** The present study focused on the impact of ongoing national terror on social workers in Israel providing help to terror victims, their families, and communities. Living under the threat and horror of national terror attacks has been part of Israelis' daily experience in recent years, especially between 2000 and 2004, a period known as the Second Intifada (the Palestinian Uprising). The reality of national terror attacks in Israel places social workers on the frontline at three types of agencies: (1) municipal social service departments, where their tasks are to assist families searching for missing loved ones following a terror attack, accompany them to the morgue, make funeral arrangements, and offer crisis intervention to individuals, families, and communities; (2) hospital social service departments, where their tasks include informing families about injured relatives and intervening with the injured and their families during hospitalization; and (3) the National Insurance Institute, where they engage with a victim's family several days after injury or a funeral and offer long-term intervention, including supportive treatment and case management tailored to rehabilitation process requirements. Due to the continuous threat of national terror, most of the agencies have already developed organized operational procedures for such situations. Attention is also paid to the impact of these tasks on social workers. However, existing knowledge fails to address several main issues: What happens to social workers who intervene in an ongoing situation of terror attacks? What happens to those who have the same reality as their clients? How does the penetration of terror into the supposedly safe setting of psychosocial intervention affect social workers' professional roles and personal stress levels? Thus, the main goal of this study was to explore the connections between social workers' professional and personal exposure to national terror and the professional and personal distress they experienced due to ongoing terror attacks. IMPACT OF TERROR National terror is defined as an act or threat of violence against noncombatants that has the objective of exacting revenge, intimidating, or otherwise influencing an audience (Primoratz, 1990; Stern, 1999). This definition highlights the two main elements that distinguish terrorism from other forms of violence: First, it is aimed at noncombatants and, therefore, differs from conventional military action; second, it uses violence for dramatic purposes, usually to instill fear in a targeted population. Studies of direct victims of national terror attacks confirm that these individuals are at high risk of suffering from a distress reaction. …