Late Modern Palestine

The subject and representation of the second intifada

Laura Junka-Aikio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138933903
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317382454
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Late Modern Palestine looks at the ways in which the relationship between the subject and representation and the political problematic of postcolonial late modernity is articulated in the context of the Palestinians' struggle for liberation. Junko-Aikio provides a rich, theoretically and empirically, and in part also visually grounded study of the complex ways in which ordinary Palestinians face, negotiate and resist multiple regimes of power and desire in the context of everyday life in the West Bank and Gaza.

The volume examines the early years of the second Palestinian uprising, an intifada, whose political status remains highly disputed. The book examines the ways in which Palestinian politics during the second intifada has been entangled with the broader social and political changes that are associated with postcolonial late modernity. It is argued that the dislocation between modern colonial and late modern/postcolonial regimes of power and subjectivity greatly complicates the map of power and resistance in contemporary Palestine, and also renders articulation of national unity and hegemonic political strategy increasingly unlikely.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Postcolonial Studies, International Relations, Political Sociology, Critical Security Studies, and Political Theory.

1 Late modern subjects of colonial occupation

The second intifada began in September 2000, two months after the Camp David II summit, which ended in failure. The stated aim of the summit was to bring to a tentative conclusion seven years of political negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority under the aegis of the Oslo Interim Accords, and to reach an agreement on a number of central issues relating to the prospective two-state solution. These issues included the political status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees, and the borders of the possible Palestinian state.¹ However, the meeting was unsuccessful, and led Yasser Arafat to reject the conditions of agreement stipulated by Ehud Barak’s government. Since the two parties did not reach an agreement, there exists no official documentation on the precise content of the Camp David II negotiations and hence the causes behind their failure are subject to an intense debate. Initially, Barak’s offer to Yasser Arafat was framed primarily as ‘generous’ in the international media, and the blame for the diplomatic dead-end was placed strongly upon Yasser Arafat’s shoulders. Later on, a great number of studies have exposed the actual contents of Barak’s offer as entirely incongruous with the most basic Palestinian political demands. Most importantly, the offer would have left almost intact the system of checkpoints and cantons that had been introduced to the Palestinian landscape during the Oslo agreements, offering the Palestinians the prospect of a state that consisted of a fragmented and divided patchwork of isolated territories and enclaves (Cook 2008; Finkelstein 2007; Reinhart 2002).

When Ariel Sharon paid a provocative visit to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque in September 2011, the sense of political confusion and tension that followed from the multiple failures of the Oslo negotiations turned into open confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians. The visit was deliberately offensive in both national and religious terms, and resulted in violent clashes between Israeli police and the Palestinians at the site of the mosque. Following the visit, tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel proper took to the streets to express their anger and frustration. These demonstrations are generally seen as the beginning of the second intifada, also known as the al-Aqsa intifada.

At first, by describing the unrest in 2000 in terms of a new intifada, the international media as well as the Palestinians themselves seemed to locate these events in a direct succession with the wider narrative of Palestinian national liberation. Demonstrations in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza indicated that the Palestinians had lost faith in the peace process, and that they were still willing to fight for a more just solution to the problem of Israeli occupation. However, already during the first weeks and months of the new uprising, views on its political character became ambiguous and divided. Importantly, there was disagreement and debate on whether the uprising should be understood as a genuine intifada at all, that is, as a positive mass-based popular struggle for national self-determination (Allen 2003; Carey 2002; Hammami and Tamari 2001; Johnsson and Kuttab 2001; MERIP 2000). Instead of persuasively representing a people’s struggle against a colonial occupation, it appeared as if the uprising itself, and the years that have followed, were reflective of a political dead-end and of a deep crisis of the Palestinian national struggle for liberation. This chapter elaborates on some of the questions and problems that the discrepancy between the expectations carried by the idea of an intifada, and the reality on the ground, invites in regard to the analysis of the Palestinian political subject and the politics of its representation.

The first intifada

Literally, the Arabic word intifada means ‘shaking off’, but in political contexts it tends to refer to comprehensive and formative grass-roots movements against ruling groups. When people talk about an intifada, they generally are designating a democratic people’s struggle, which proceeds on every possible front in the thick texture of everyday life. The word became known internationally during the first Palestinian uprising against Israel, which lasted from December 1987 until the early 1990s.² That intifada was highly successful in mobilising various layers of the Palestinian population in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and at turning the world’s attention and sympathy to the Palestinians’ cause for national liberation.

Until the first intifada, the onus of the struggle for Palestine had rested largely outside the OPT, in the hands of Arab governments and guerrilla movements which operated in the Palestinian Diaspora. For the first two decades following the establishment of Israel in 1948, Palestinian political imagination drew almost exclusively on the promises of the pan-Arab movement, which emphasised state-led action as a means to liberate Palestine. When this ideological structure crumbled in the late 1960s, the leadership of the struggle was taken over by Palestinian guerrilla movements and militant organisations which were based in Jordan and Lebanon, and led by the Palestine Liberation Organisation – the PLO (Khalili 2007; Peteet 2005; Sayigh 2007). These movements were able to pose a powerful challenge to Israel and draw the world’s attention to the Palestinians’ cause in the 1970s, but by 1982 they were significantly weakened, and ultimately defeated, as a result of Israeli invasions into Lebanon, the Lebanese civil war, and the PLO’s forced expulsion to Tunis. This caused a vacuum in Palestinian leadership and paved the way for a spatial shift whereby the fulcrum of the Palestinian national movement moved, for the first time in its history, from Arab governments and the Diaspora into the Occupied Palestinian Territories themselves.

The spatial shift was congruent with a qualitative shift in the practice of resistance, for it was in the context of the first intifada that ordinary, unarmed Palestinians became recognised as the main agents of Palestinian resistance. Naturally, pan-Arabism and the guerrilla movements had enjoyed wide and active support among the Palestinian populations at large, but in the end both were based on a hierarchical structure of command and rule, which confined resistance activities against Israel to a limited realm. Despite articulating a trans-state ideology, in practice pan-Arabism took on state-centred forms, which were predisposed for politics on high levels and which tended to imagine political agency as the privilege and responsibility of postcolonial Arab governments. Conversely, in the ideology of guerrilla movements, agency is placed largely on the shoulders of exemplary and dedicated men (and sometimes women), who supposedly liberate the nation at large through armed struggle and through personal effort and sacrifice. This did not erase the agency of the wider Palestinian population, including Palestinian women, during the revolutionary period of the 1970s. Indeed, given the high level of national unity and support for the militant strategy, it may well be argued that the struggle then did encompass all layers of the society (see, for instance Khalili 2007; Peteet 1991). This notwithstanding, even at the height of popular mobilisation, there was a clear hierarchy between different forms of political participation, between actual resistance – armed struggle – and everyday activities that would support the conduct of armed struggle.

In contrast with these movements, the first intifada began as a spontaneous and unmediated popular revolt that emerged from below and took place directly at the heart of the occupation, on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip and to a lesser extent, Israel proper. The first intifada began in Gaza in December 1987 when a number of street protests broke out in response to rumours over the intentional nature of a traffic accident in which an Israeli military jeep had crushed four Palestinians to death. As Mishal and Aharoni (1994: 1) point out, the occurrence of street protests as such was nothing new in Gaza. This time, however, the protests were different from anything that had taken place before them.

First, instead of dying off in a few days, these street protests kept intensifying and spreading to other parts of the OPT as well. Second, alongside the street protests and a more confined campaign of armed struggle, soon also a variety of other innovative resistance activities, such as widespread general strikes, economic boycotts, cultural and educational programmes and collective refusals to pay tax to Israel, were developed. The main aim of these activities was to make the occupation unsustainable and costly for Israel and to build Palestinian economic, social and political independence from the occupation authorities. At the same time, they supported the unity and continuity of the uprising and consolidated Palestinian resistance on a grass-roots level.

The extent and particular qualities of the different forms of popular resistance during the first intifada have been described in great detail in several existing studies (Hiltermann 1991; Hunter 1993; Nassar and Heacock 1990; King 2007; Lockman and Beinin 1990; Pearlman 2011). Particularly central was so-called ‘quiet everyday resistance’ (Hunter 1993: 120), which consisted of several tactics to survive curfews and other Israeli anti-insurgency measures collectively. For instance, when the Israeli military sought to control the insurgency by closing Palestinian schools until further notice, the Palestinians promoted the continuity of primary and secondary education by transferring school classes to private spaces and by running them on a voluntary basis. Glenn Robinson (1997: 100–105) argues that ultimately, this practice amounted to the creation of ‘an informal education system’, which substituted almost entirely for the losses incurred by Israeli closure policies. Yamila Hussein (2005) goes as far as to suggest that instead of putting down the uprising and depriving Palestinians of education, Israeli countermeasures ended up creating a space in which the Palestinians assumed responsibility for their own education and in which they were able, for the first time in their history, to decide ‘what their children should learn, who would teach them, and how’.

Another aspect that merits attention was the invigoration of several agricultural food self-sufficiency and ‘backyard farming’ schemes under the guidance and coordination of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU)³ and local relief committees, most importantly the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC).⁴ These self-sufficiency schemes encompassed the distribution of seeds, seedlings, fertilisers and livestock for free or at minimal cost to local households, as well as the provision of assistance and advice on how to produce food locally on small farms, in backyards and even on balconies and rooftops. The immediate aim was to secure the steady supply of food despite Israeli closures, but they were also regarded as an important long-term strategy. In particular, promoting West Bank and Gaza food self-sufficiency was understood as instrumental in enforcing a greater degree of separation of the Palestinian economy from the abusive colonial regime, and in depriving the colonial regime of any chance to profit economically from the Palestinians (Robinson 1997: 74–6).

Through these and other means, the intifada articulated Palestinian demands for self-determination clearly and compellingly. In addition to promoting popular participation, hope and feelings of togetherness among the Palestinians themselves, the first intifada located the Palestinians’ cause firmly and effectively within the wider framework of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, and generated wide international support. The highly effective yet democratic nature of Palestinian grass-roots struggles was particularly successful at gaining the Palestinians wide admiration among left-wing and human right activists across the world, and at turning the Palestinians’ cause not only into an object of solidarity, but also into a central source of political inspiration. Palestine became a political space par excellence, which received a steady stream of international solidarity delegations and groups wishing to both support the cause and learn from the Palestinian’s struggle (see Jean-Klein 2002).

The heroic images of children and teenagers who defied Israeli soldiers and tanks with stones and slingshots supported this aura of glory. ‘The public face of this remarkable insurrection’, recalls one commentator,

. . . called to mind the biblical story of David and Goliath, but with a potent symbolic inversion: the Palestinian stone throwers were both obliterating and appropriating Israel’s long-standing definition as a tiny, youthful nation surrounded by powerful enemies. (Collins, 2004: 2)

Such images challenged the legitimacy of the occupation, and exposed Israel as a military regime that was colonising a largely unarmed population.

Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation continued on several fronts from 1987 up until 1993, but much of the spontaneity, immediacy and vibrancy was arguably lost after the first year or two (Pearlman 2011: 114–23). The Palestinian society was worn down under Israeli countermeasures, internal divisions deepened, and third parties outside the OPT – above all the PLO – began to exercise increasing control over the direction of the uprising. The formal end to the intifada came in 1993, when Israel and the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles, also known as the Oslo Accord, and began a process of political negotiations for the tentative establishment of a Palestinian state.

Whether the intifada actually achieved anything is therefore a matter of dispute. In so far as one sees the Oslo peace process as a direct outcome of the uprising, and as the culmination of years of struggle, the answer must be negative. Instead of paving a way for Palestinian national independence, the Oslo process has led to increasing misery, impoverishment and de-development of the OPT and to their further geographic diminution and fragmentation (Beinin and Stein 2006; Cook 2008; Efrat 2006; Hass 1996; Roy 2001).

However, if one looks at the uprising itself rather than at the negotiations that followed, the image is very different. Despite the fact that the outcomes of the intifada were more than disappointing, the intifada was highly successful as a moment of collective political subjectification, and even today the Palestinians in the OPT remember it with excitement and pride, as a period which brought the fragmented Palestinian society together (Collins 2004). The first intifada was effective also in so far as it gave international exposure to Israel’s violence against the Palestinians internationally, and substituted images of Palestinian militants, which had dominated the representation of the Palestinians’ cause in the 1960s and 1970s, with a new iconography of a non-violent popular uprising. This shift was in accordance with the international political environment of the 1980s, in which the centrality of armed struggle as an acceptable means of resistance was quickly declining. Mounting international pressure caused by the intifada, and the challenge that Palestinian campaigns of civil disobedience and resistance presented to Israel’s ability to govern the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, forced Israel to recognize the PLO and the Palestinian nation, and to formally acknowledge Palestinian demands for an independent Palestinian state.

The second intifada

Against this narrative of liberation, the second intifada occupies a position that is very different. Firstly, the second intifada erupted not only against the Israeli occupation, but also in response to the immanent failures of ten years of negotiations in Oslo, and as a rebellion against the Palestinian Authority, which was held responsible for these failures. Instead of providing the foundation for a Palestinian state, Oslo led to a sharp deterioration of living conditions on the West Bank and in Gaza, and worked to undermine the very possibility of Palestinian independence. During these years, Israel imposed an increasingly strict system of closure on the West Bank and Gaza, and expanded the construction of illegal settlements and by-pass roads. In addition to strangling and immobilising Palestinian economic and social life, they turned the Occupied Palestinian Territories into a fragmented patchwork of isolated enclaves or ‘bantustans’, thus negating the very possibility and potential for a geographic entity called a Palestinian state (Farsakh 2005).

Although these transformations were the result of Israel’s unilateral practices, they took place under the implicit consent of Yasser Arafat and his negotiating team. Despite the magnitude of political issues and decisions that were at stake, the Oslo negotiations were conducted in secrecy, between a small group of Palestinians, the state of Israel, and the US lead...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Late Modern Palestine
• Interventions
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Palestine and the Politics of Postcolonial Late Modernity
• 1 Late Modern Subjects of Colonial Occupation
• 2 Hybrid Resistance: The Politics of Gaza Beach
• 3 Postcolonising Palestine through State-Building
• 4 Mobile Phones and the Rise of Neoliberalism
• 5 Transnational Political Discourses and the Aesthetics of Living Against Occupation
• Conclusion: The Differend of the ‘Palestinian Spring’
• Index