The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine by Michael Scott-Baumann

Author:Michael Scott-Baumann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615199518
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Personal Testimony

Remembering the First Intifada

Khaled Ziadeh was seventeen years old when the intifada started. He was born in Gaza City but moved to Bureij refugee camp at the start of the uprising. The refugee camps in Gaza were centers of some of the most intense nationalist feeling and frequently the targets of Israeli fire power:

We decided to protest and resist the military occupation with the little means we had. Markets, shops and schools stopped and crowds went on the streets in protest. Tear gas and the smoke of burning tires changed the color of the sky and all you heard was the sound of guns shooting live ammunition or rubber bullets that injured or killed. Taxis were used to carry the injured to local clinics. There were funerals almost every day.

It was even during these conditions that a unified leadership emerged and factions came out of hiding to mobilize the population, and the intifada was a mixture of organized action and spontaneous acts of resistance. The young people felt empowered and realized that history was on their side. Israel opened two new prisons, Ansar 2 and Ansar 3, to put behind bars the increasing number of detainees. Most of my friends were arrested more than once and it became clear that every young person knew he was waiting his turn to be incarcerated. The then Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin issued an order to break the bones of young Palestinians. They did break bones and some days all you could see were people walking around in casts.

In the camp, a daily curfew was imposed for 12 hours a day, and sometimes, in response to protests and clashes, they would impose a curfew for a week or two to exhaust the people and sap their energy. Another form of collective punishment was that they would order everyone between the age of 16 and 50 to come out and make them sit from two till six in the morning in the cold. We paid a heavy price for the uprising: unemployment rose significantly and freedom of movement was restricted. Schools were out of bounds so we began informal education, at homes.

Everyone who lived and witnessed the intifada has a story to tell, some happy memories and some sad ones. It was wonderful to see the youth getting together and mobilizing to confront the army, and then hear them dancing the dabke [traditional Palestinian dance] in the streets and singing nationalist songs out in the open, unlike before when such activities were banned. Before the uprising, they banned performances of the dabke and you could receive a punishment of six months in prison if you defied this order.

For me, the intifada was when I began to feel what it means to be Palestinian. It is the same for all of my generation. You know, many Palestinians did not talk about the 1948 and 1967 defeats because they felt humiliated and ashamed. My grandfather did not talk about 1948 and all he talked about was the great life he lived before.

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