The Modern Middle East (59 page)

The increasing prominence of the Palestinian counterelite in the politics of the Occupied Territories has been reflected in two other aspects of Palestinian identity, the Palestinian community’s general class composition and its orientations toward religion. Approximately 10 to 12 percent of Palestinians are Christians. The rest of the population, nearly 90 percent, are Sunni Muslims. Historically, most Palestinian Christians have resided in larger towns and cities, and therefore their ranks have been overrepresented among the middle classes and urban professionals. Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, for example, where living standards are markedly lower than in the West Bank, are almost entirely Muslim. From the very beginning, Christians constituted a substantial minority in the PLO, and this in turn largely accounted for the organization’s avowedly secularist ideology.
³⁷
In recent years, with the rise of the more locally based counterelite within the Occupied Territories, Palestinian Islamists have found an especially receptive audience among the Gazans.
³⁸

During the past few decades, a somewhat deeper process of socioeconomic transformation has been at work in Palestinian society. Gradually, the more established class of notables, the
a
ʿ
yan,
have been losing much of their traditional power and social prestige to an emerging counterelite that is generally younger and less willing to tolerate Israeli occupation. Traditionally, Palestinian society was composed of a small class of landed elites and local notables and a large class of landless peasants, farmworkers, and residents of refugee camps. Throughout the twentieth century, several factors—chiefly Israeli occupation, involuntary exile or the voluntary departure of those who could afford it, and a general absence of economic opportunities and sources of mobility—combined to hinder the emergence and deepening of an indigenous Palestinian middle class. Whatever middle class did emerge or managed to retain its status did so primarily in the bigger urban areas of East Jerusalem and Bethlehem and, to a lesser extent, in Jericho and Gaza City.
³⁹
By the early to mid-1970s, however, the emerging
counterelite was rapidly acquiring the political dispositions and articulateness of the middle classes, if not necessarily their economic standing.

This transformation was largely the unintentional result of Israel’s economic and political policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after 1967, when it repeatedly confiscated Palestinian lands and opened its economy to migrant day laborers and farmworkers from the territories. Both practices undermined the patronage powers of the traditional Palestinian elites and their sources of influence in local communities, instead facilitating the emergence of a younger, increasingly more confident and articulate generation of dispossessed Palestinians.
⁴⁰
The opening of various West Bank universities—namely Bir Zeit (1972), Bethlehem (1973–74), and al-Najah (1977) Universities—helped sharpen the younger Palestinians’ organizational skills, mobilizational possibilities, and, most importantly, sense of the self.
⁴¹
By the mid-1980s, the Palestinian counterelite had started to eclipse not only the traditional notables but also the PLO, which by now had been run out of Lebanon and was in exile in distant Tunisia. Within this context the popular uprising known as the
intifada
began in late 1987.

The actual events that precipitated the
intifada
and its unfolding will be discussed in the next section. For now it is important to pay attention to the transforming effects of the uprising both for the structure of Palestinian society and for Palestinian identity. The
intifada
signified the start of a new phase of Palestinian nationalism, one in which the expression of Palestinian identity assumed a popular, grassroots form. The period from 1948 to 1967 had been the “lost years” of high-level but hopelessly inconsequential diplomatic-military negotiations by Arab leaders on behalf of the Palestinians. The “PLO years” of the late 1960s to the mid-1980s turned out to be equally frustrating for the Palestinians (table 2). The
intifada
signified a qualitative shift in the structure of Palestinian society and the expression of popular sentiments—or, more aptly, popular frustrations—by new groups that had now come to the fore. The PLO’s geographic distance from the territories belied an even wider subjective and emotional chasm between its seemingly inconsequential leadership and an increasingly restive, steadily changing constituency. Even the notables who had been traditionally associated with the PLO saw a significant decline in their prestige and stature, with their traditional functions of patronage replaced by the thousands of local popular committees (
lijan sha
ʿ
biya
) springing up throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

Insofar as contemporary Palestinian political history is concerned, the
intifada
turned out to be an incomplete revolution. As will be shown shortly, the PLO, in collusion with Israel, eventually hijacked the
movement and used it to give legitimacy to its own efforts at establishing a statelike institution, the PNA. But neither the PLO nor the burgeoning apparatus of the PNA could easily contain the new popular structures and identities to which the
intifada
had given rise. The
intifada,
generally dated from late 1987 to 1993–94, was far from a monolithic, cohesive movement. In fact, in its last year or two, the movement in many ways turned on itself, degenerating into a bloody hunt for suspected Israeli informants and collaborators. But it left behind an important imprint on the Palestinian mind that the PNA’s emerging authoritarianism has not been able to erase. For one thing, the extensive participation of women and children in the uprising—their “contributions to the national struggle,” as the Palestinians saw it—challenged the patriarchal nature of Palestinian society and, by implication, the influence and legitimacy of the chief patriarch, PLO leader Yasser Arafat.
⁴²

Figure 28.
Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, first president of the Palestinian National Authority. Corbis.

Equally important, the
intifada
reoriented Palestinian identity toward the actual conditions of the Occupied Territories. The reference points for Palestinians’ identity—as inhabitants of historic Palestine; as victims of first Zionist colonialism, then Arab betrayal, and finally Israeli repression; as faithful soldiers of the PLO’s struggle—underwent a subtle shift. The weight and repression of the occupation and the impotence of the PLO
caused Palestinian identity to be defined more by immediate, existing circumstances. In addition to everything else that composed Palestinian identity, being Palestinian meant having your land confiscated, being at the mercy of an Israeli employer, experiencing prolonged water and electricity shutoffs, being harassed at local military checkpoints, being confined for weeks to the house or to specific areas as a result of frequent “closures” by Israeli authorities, being reminded daily of limited opportunities and inferior living standards as compared to those of Israeli settlers, struggling with bureaucracies to secure identity cards and other necessary documents, and enduring everything else that made daily life unbearably difficult. The
intifada
made Palestinian identity more realistic and sober, defined less by political institutions or historic events than by the actual circumstances that governed life from one day to the next. It also led to the steady emergence of local leaders with little or no affinity for the PLO, who, especially in Gaza, would emerge as serious alternatives to the PNA’s secular, PLO-affiliated leaders.

The Oslo Accords enabled the PLO, or, more specifically, the “outside” leadership of the Palestinians, to once again reassert its control over the Palestinian community, but only under very tight Israeli control and supervision. The establishment of the PNA in many ways signified, initially at least, the institutionalization of Palestinian identity, the birth of a set of actual and symbolic institutions that had risen from the collective struggles and aspirations of Palestinians. Now Palestinian national identity had a flag, an anthem, a president, a representative assembly (the Palestine National Council), a police force, and many of the other necessary accoutrements of a state.

It did not take long, however, for the Palestinians to realize that their initial euphoria had been misplaced. Apart from symbolic acts and empty promises, the PNA was no more capable of alleviating daily stresses and miseries than the PLO had been before the
intifada
started. The Oslo Accords did stop the
intifada,
but they could not put the genie back in the bottle unless, of course, they brought tangible improvements to the lives of Palestinians. And that they could not do. As we shall see shortly, before long, in the late 1990s, the Palestinian powder keg once again exploded. By late 2000, what came to be known as the Al-Aqsa
intifada
was under way.

Like the first
intifada,
the second uprising arose in response to the frustration of rising expectations, increased repression by the Israeli occupation authorities, and the continued inability of the PNA leadership to meaningfully improve the harsh realities of daily life, or, for that matter, to contain the spiraling violence of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad (more of which
below). By now, the manifold failures of the “outside” leadership had also led to the discrediting of its ideological stance of secular nationalism. For many in the ranks of the ever-more-strident counterelite, political Islam became increasingly attractive.

Islam had long served as one of the pivotal elements of Palestinian national identity and as a main source of mobilizing opposition to Israeli occupation. Not until the late 1970s and 1980s, however, was it able to emerge out of the shadows of the PLO’s secular nationalism and, in many ways, to shape and dictate the events unfolding in the Occupied Territories. In fact, the rise in the popularity and spread of political Islam can be traced to the 1980s and even earlier, when a general trend in the politicization of Islam began sweeping across the Middle East following the Arab “victory” in the 1973 War and the success of the Iranian revolution. The harsh repression of Israeli occupation, the seeming impotence of the PLO, the social and cultural resonance of Islam, and the religion’s actual and perceived abilities to deliver on the promises that the PLO had abandoned all combined to enhance Islam’s legitimacy as a powerful political force. Not surprisingly, from 1967 to 1987—from the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza until the eruption of the
intifada
—the number of mosques increased from 400 to 750 in the West Bank and from 200 to 600 in the Gaza Strip.
⁴³
The Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, which had started in Egypt in 1928, had also long been active in the Occupied Territories and, throughout the mid-1980s, had experienced a rise in its prestige and popularity concurrent with the PLO’s mounting difficulties.
⁴⁴

Nevertheless, the outbreak of the
intifada
caught the Muslim Brotherhood by surprise as much as it did the PLO. Both organizations scrambled to establish their own institutional hegemony over the uprising. The PLO encouraged the establishment of a Unified Leadership of the Up---rising (ULU), made up of secular individuals sympathetic to or loosely affiliated with the PLO. For its part, the Muslim Brotherhood created a parallel organization called Hamas (meaning “zeal” and constituting an acronym of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement). A smaller, slightly older organization, the Islamic Jihad, which had started as a more radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and become officially established in 1980, also saw in the
intifada
the opportunity to expand its social and political base. All three entities—the ULU, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad—actively participated in organizing the demonstrations, strikes, and other events that collectively constituted the
intifada.
Of the three, the actions of the Islamic Jihad were by far the most
violent. The organization saw the uprising as a perfect opportunity to carry out a
jihad
(in this sense, “crusade”) against Israel and its occupation. Most of its members came from modest backgrounds in Gaza, and many had spent time in Israeli prisons, having become even more radicalized by their experience.
⁴⁵
But radicalism alone was hardly sufficient to maintain the Islamic Jihad’s popularity during the course of the
intifada,
and, as time went by, the organization sought to compensate for its ideological limitations by launching spectacular attacks on Israeli targets. Grenade attacks and car bombs, along with other actions that risked the “glory of martyrdom,” only served to further weaken the Islamic Jihad because of the severity of Israeli retaliations. Often Israel, having realized the radicalizing effects of prison sentences, retaliated by deporting the organization’s leaders or assassinating them.
⁴⁶