First Intifada
Beginning in December 1987 with a spontaneous explosion of Palestinian civil unrest in Gaza — triggered by a traffic accident involving an Israeli military vehicle that killed four Palestinians — the First Intifada (1987-1993) was a mass popular uprising that used stone-throwing, commercial strikes, and civil disobedience rather than military operations. The images of Palestinian youth throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, broadcast internationally, transformed global public opinion and framed the conflict as a military occupation of a civilian population rather than a security threat from a guerrilla force. The Intifada's political effect was to demonstrate that Palestinian agency was not dependent on the PLO leadership in Tunis: the uprising was organised locally, by neighbourhood committees, mosques, and professional associations. It also produced Hamas, founded in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which from the beginning framed the conflict in religious rather than nationalist terms and rejected the two-state solution the PLO was moving toward. The Intifada's internal politics — the tension between the PLO's secular nationalism and Hamas's Islamism — defined Palestinian political competition for the following three decades.
- Year: 1987 CE
- Category: Political
