Behind the Intifada

Labor and Women's Movements in the Occupied Territories

Joost R. Hiltermann

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691024806, 9780691078694
• eBook ISBN: 9781400843763
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Before the intifada began, Joost Hiltermann had already looked at local organizations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and seen there the main elements that would eventually be used to mobilize the Palestinian masses. In the first comprehensive study of these organizations, Hiltermann shows how local organizers provided basic services unavailable under military rule, while recruiting for the cause of Palestinian nationalism.

Chapter One

MASS MOBILIZATION UNDER OCCUPATION

THE START of the Palestinian uprising in December 1987 sent persons both inside and outside the Israeli-occupied territories scrambling for explanations as to why the uprising occurred when it did and, to a lesser extent, how it occurred at all. Explanations focused on possible influences, like the successful hang glider penetration of Israel’s northern border in November 1987, which punctured the myth of Israeli invincibility, and catalysts, like the incident in the Gaza Strip when an Israeli truck driver allegedly swung his vehicle directly into the path of a vanload of Palestinian laborers returning from work in Israel, killing four. The incident sparked demonstrations in Jabalya refugee camp on 9 December, which spread to other areas of the Gaza Strip, and soon thereafter to the West Bank as well.¹

Many Western observers have also pointed to the “Extraordinary Arab Summit” in Jordan earlier that fall as another spark that helped ignite the uprising. Palestinians, they said, finally saw, through the lack of attention paid to the question of Palestine and King Hussein’s snub of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, that they could not rely on the Arab states to help them in their struggle for national liberation. The summit reinforced Palestinians’ disillusionment with the Arab regimes and, it was said, Palestinians realized that they had to take their struggle completely into their own hands.²

For many Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, however, the greatest surprise, with hindsight, was that the uprising had not occurred before December 1987. Smaller uprisings, usually lasting not more than one or two months, had repeatedly broken out in the preceding decade, led by political organizers linked to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). From late 1986 on, there was definitely “something in the air,” with continual demonstrations in various locations in the Occupied Territories fueled by ever-harsher Israeli military reprisals and encouraged by the crucial reconciliation of PLO factions at the eighteenth meeting of the Palestine National Council (PNC) in Algiers in April 1987.

Only a decade earlier, however, the assessment was that no collective action against the occupation could occur. In 1981, Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari remarked in reference to social changes in the Occupied Territories that a number of analysts had concluded “that there is widescale differentiation leading to proletarianization, that this proletarianization automatically gives rise to a new class consciousness, and that this, in turn, translates into resistance against occupation.” Tamari claimed to the contrary that this “is not borne out by analysis of political events. The main source of resistance has been the towns, and not the countryside. . . . Indeed, shopkeepers have played a major role in shaping and leading urban strikes, whereas peasant workers and migrant workers to Israel have, in general, been rather quiet in these movements.” One of the reasons for this, according to Tamari, was that the number of unionized workers remained very small, and urban-based unions were unable to recruit effectively in the villages. “Thus, peasant consciousness remains the main force among Palestinians employed in Israel.”³

The question then arises of what took place within Palestinian society during that brief ten-year period that allowed the uprising to occur, given that mass mobilization is a complex phenomenon requiring that numerous stages of recruitment, organization, and perceptions of common interest reach levels sufficient to ignite and sustain a national movement. Why the uprising started when it did becomes secondary to the question of how the elements necessary to enable it to take place at all emerged within the specific socioeconomic formation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian struggle for national liberation is articulated by a national movement that falls squarely in the classic twentieth-century tradition of national movements arising in colonial settings, but it has features that differ significantly from those of other movements of national liberation because of its unusual inside and outside wings, and the particular conditions created by a prolonged military occupation. In order to analyze the Palestinian national movement in the context of other such movements, it is necessary to mention briefly a number of crises in Palestinian history that caused the development of the Palestinian movement to differ from other movements that may exhibit a more “regular” pattern of development. These crises, stemming both from wars and from an active policy of the occupier further to dispossess the Palestinian population, resulted in large parts of Palestinian territory being alienated from Palestinian control, and in the expulsion and dispersal of thousands of Palestinians.

The first such crisis, the war and subsequent establishment of the state of Israel in 1947-48, an event referred to by Palestinians as the Disaster (al-Nakba), not only dealt a severe setback to the national movement that had emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire; it altered the terms of the conflict in the area.⁴ While first a native population had found itself pitted against white settlers protected by a European power, it was now dispersed and placed under the rule of various Arab governments while the settlers ensconced themselves in their own state. The colonizers and the colonized, except for the small and powerless Palestinian minority in Israel, were no longer interspersed. As a result, resistance to colonialism took the form not of guerrilla warfare leading to mass insurrection and revolution in a nationalist context, but—to the extent possible, given Palestinians’ dependence on the Arab governments that hosted them—of commando attacks across national boundaries.

The particular character of Israeli colonialism, and the destruction and exile of Palestinian society, gave rise to an idiosyncratic Palestinian nationalist movement, first embodied by Fatah, the organization established by Yasser Arafat in 1965. It was a movement that opposed imperialism, and in particular Israel as imperialism’s beachhead, but it was faced with an enemy that was organized in a coherent, relatively homogeneous society enjoying overwhelming support from the world community, the Soviet Union not excluded. This, in other words, was not a colonialist regime desperately clinging to its remaining, and weakening, ties with the metropolis, as had become the pattern in most of Africa and Asia in the 1960s. This was not simply an outgrowth but truly an organ of the West, implanted in foreign soil. Fatah, on the other hand, which in the late 1960s took control of the PLO, lacked the coherent societal base that other movements of national liberation found in their home societies, and it was forced to use the entire Arab world, in all its diversity and contradictions, as a base for its operations, recruiting supporters from among the Palestinian masses in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.⁵

The second crisis, the June War of 1967, both worsened the Palestinian predicament—through more dispossession, expulsion, and dispersal—and for the first time made it possible to opppose the colonial enemy from within, as the two populations, Israeli and Palestinian, became progressively interspersed during the next two decades of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Only in the 1970s, after more than five decades of Palestinian nationalism, did a nationalist movement of classic design begin to emerge in what remained of Palestine. This movement, however, had to exist in the shadow of the preexisting, overarching Palestinian movement led by the PLO that matured in the diaspora and whose program and ideology reflected that of the diaspora. The local movement consisted of two branches: the underground military-political branch, whose members adhere directly to one of the factions of the PLO and carry out resistance operations on the orders of their commanders, who are usually outside the area; and the semilegal social-political branch, consisting of institutions and popular organizations set up by local activists who have attempted to mobilize the Palestinian masses by offering them services that were otherwise not available, while articulating nationalist concerns and aspirations as part of their day-to-day work. It is especially the second branch, the popular movement in the Occupied Territories, that provided the local institutional infrastructure as well as the leadership for the uprising that began in December 1987.

How was this movement born? What has its trajectory been? Its character? And how is it linked to the Palestinian national movement? To answer these questions, it may be helpful to look at some comparative cases, using a model developed by Jeffery Paige in his seminal study, Agrarian Revolution.⁶ Paige studied particular forms of agricultural organization and rural class conflict in the Third World, drawing correlations between “different forms of political action and different configurations of interests," and then predicting actions from interests.⁷ We will look only at those economic systems dominated by landed estates employing a migratory wage-labor force, because these, despite considerable differences, come closest to the Palestinian situation.

Although in the Palestinian case there are no landed estates in the Occupied Territories like the grape estates of colonial Algeria or the coffee estates of colonial Kenya, a parallel structure of a Palestinian migratory wage-labor force employed in Israeli enterprises prevails. Most Palestinians employed in Israel work on agricultural estates like the kibbutzim and moshavim, on construction sites, in industrial enterprises like textile companies, and in hotels and restaurants. What these workplaces have in common is that they, like the colonial landed-estate system, are economically weak and cannot survive without a cheap, disenfranchised labor force. While Israeli employers may not have had to use legal or extralegal force to secure a ready supply of labor as in the colonial tradition,⁸ the Israeli state has instituted mechanisms of labor control to ensure a constant flow of cheap and unorganized labor from the Occupied Territories to Israel. It should be remembered that the availability of Palestinian labor results in large part from continued expropriation of Palestinian lands, with Israel currently in control of over 50 percent of West Bank lands.

In explaining the occurrence of revolts in societies where migrant labor predominates, Paige notes that since the work force must return to subsistence agriculture during the landed estate’s off-season, workers remain dependent on the villages from which they hail. According to Paige, when

revolutionary movements do form in such systems, they are therefore likely to combine both wage laborers and traditional communal organizations. The ideology uniting these disparate elements cannot be based on class but can be based on national or racial hatred of a settler class. Settler-owned estates affect not only the wage laborers but the traditional subsistence cultivators they frequently displace. Thus revolutionary movements in migratory wage labor estate systems are likely to involve coalitions based on communal ties.⁹

In the Palestinian case, workers’ ties with their communities are reinforced, not by the off-season in Israeli agriculture, but by the irregularity of work in Israeli construction and agriculture, the high turnover of workers due to their uncertain legal status as “frontier workers,” and the seasonal need for Palestinians to be employed temporarily in agriculture in the Occupied Territories themselves, especially in the crucial olive harvest every two years. In addition, the experience of work in Israel (higher wages, a different worldview) is radically altering the structure of leadership in the villages as the power of the landed elites is being eroded by the new class of migrant workers.

Itinerant day labor in Israel has constituted the backbone of the Palestinian economy for the past two decades. As such, it became the source of the fundamental developments that made collective action possible. From the migratory wage-labor force stemmed the Palestinian labor unions, which arose, in part, from the failure of organized labor in Israel to protect the rights of Palestinian workers. These unions have proven particularly adroit in linking the workers’ daily experience to the military occupation, thereby placing their programs within the overall nationalist framework. Through alliances with other sectors of the population (organized in service-oriented popular committees, such as women’s committees and medical relief committees), they became a mainstay of the national movement in the Occupied Territories.

However, as Paige has argued, given the disparate nature of the migrant-labor community, which militates against the effective mobilization of its members, political organization must be introduced from outside the workers’ community. In his analysis this role is played by the traditional agrarian elite.¹⁰ In the Palestinian case, however, there is hardly an agrarian elite left that is strong enough, compared with other social sectors in Palestinian society, to serve as a powerful partner in a coalition with the migrant-labor force. In its place, however, a petite bourgeoisie of traders, merchants, labor contractors, and professionals, which in other social formations might be relegated to a secondary position behind the main social classes, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip constitutes the main pillar of the Palestinian national movement next to the “working class” of itinerant and locally employed workers. In the Occupied Territories, as in Angola and elsewhere, a dynamic coalition emerged that was based not on class but on a shared perception of a common enemy, and a commonality of interest in fighting that enemy.

Paige’s model posits other prerequisites for successful mobilization and collective action. One is the presence of political structures that can provide the organizational and ideological framework for the popular movement.¹¹ In the Palestinian case, this framework exists in the form of the PLO and its institutions, which have formulated strategy and tactics for Palestinians both in the Occupied Territories and in the diaspora. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, some local political structures already existed from the pre-1967 period; these were mobilized for the national cause, while activists who identified with the PLO began organizing the masses in new structures in the mid-1970s.

Lack of local economic development is another structural precondition. This tends to lessen class differences in colonial situations, and may give rise to a national alliance of classes opposed to the colonial power.¹² In the Palestinian case, the Israeli authorities have laid obstacles in the path of economic development in the Occupied Territories, especially in commodities that compete with Israeli production, and have generally made acquisition of permits conditional on “good behavior” and payment of taxes (during the intifada). This has brought collective hardship to the Palestinian community, and has thereby reinforced alliances across class lines, enabling collective action against the occupation. For example, the trade unions in the West Bank decided in the early 1970s to “freeze the class struggle” and to engage in a “national alliance of classes” with the Palestinian managerial sector, creating social peace as the requisite environment for collective struggle against the common enemy.

The crucial point in Paige's analysis is the blurring of class lines in the face of wholesale dispossession and exploitation, and the emergence of class coalitions opposed to the settler society. The struggle of the Palestinians against the occupier does not arise directly out of the relations of production. In the words of Roger Simon, who analyzes Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the “war of position,”

hegemony has a national-popular dimension as well as a class dimension. It requires the unification of a variety of different social forces into a broad democratic alliance expressing a national-popular collective will, such that each of these forces preserves its own autonomy and makes its own contribution in the advance towards socialism. It is this strategy of building up a broad bloc of varied social forces, unified by a common conception of the world, that Gramsci called a war of position.¹³

It may not be socialism that Palestinians (or at least followers of the dominant trend in the Palestinian movement) are after, but the basic features of a movement that entrenches itself to undermine the prevailing relations of power appear to be present in the Palestinian case. Again, it is the idea of “freezing the class struggle” that is significant here.

Who are the main actors in this nationalist coalition? Historical examples support the Palestinian case. In colonial Africa, according to Immanuel Wallerstein, social and economic changes brought about by colonial rule led to the growth of a new elite that began to challenge both traditional sources of authority and the colonial power itself.¹⁴ In the case of the West Bank, labor migration in the 1950s and 1960s further undermined the power of the landed elite, which was already weakened by land fragmentation and a discriminatory Jordanian policy against the West Bank economy. Some urbanization took place (though probably not to the extent witnessed in African countries), and growing numbers of Palestinians sought a formal education. At the time Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, it found two elites vyi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Index of Organizations
• Chapter One: Mass Mobilization under Occupation
• Chapter Two: The Structural Context
• Chapter Three: The Political Context
• Chapter Four: The Labor Movement
• Chapter Five: The Women’s Movement
• Chapter Six: Popular Organizations and the Uprising
• Chapter Seven: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index