Edited Transcript of Remarks by Dr. Mary King
“For the Record” No. 289 (9 December 2007)

Twenty years ago today, the Occupied Palestinian Territory erupted in a massive nonviolent uprising against decades of Israeli military occupation. In A Quiet Revolution (Nation Books, 2007), Dr. Mary King shows that three forces brought about the first Palestinian intifada: networks of committees relied on popular participation and nonviolent means as they built a civil society; activists and intellectuals pushed for political compromise, negotiations with Israel and rejection of armed struggle; and knowledge circulated from social movements elsewhere in the world. King argued that from the 1987 uprising would emerge the most cogent pressure to date to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel with directly implied acceptance of Israel. Yet, this moment was essentially squandered by all sides.

The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
25 October 2007

Dr. Mary King:

Thank you very much. A Quiet Revolution originated with two trips taken to Israel/Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East with a private philanthropic foundation, after the outbreak of the intifada in 1988 and again in 1989. Milton Viorst is here today and was one of our external resource persons, and I want to acknowledge his role.

Nonviolent resistance is a technique for pursuing social justice that is frequently the only realistic way to oppose military occupations. I shall concentrate on how the appearance of nonviolent strategies in the Palestinian territories in the first intifada against Israeli occupation resulted from three seminal developments: (1) movements of committees built a Palestinian civil society under occupation and became the wellspring for the intifada; (2) activist intellectuals redefined the orthodoxies of armed struggle by advancing alternative ideas on political compromise and negotiations that affected outlooks and approaches concerning negotiating with Israel; and (3) knowledge and techniques transmitted from movements elsewhere in the world circulated among Palestinians.

From the 1987 uprising would emerge the most cogent pressure to date to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel with directly implied acceptance of Israel. Yet, this moment was essentially squandered by all sides.

Nonetheless, the basic political accomplishment stands.

Let me make some general remarks about the book. I was privileged to have been given access to the leaders of the first intifada, and their Israeli counterparts, during the uprising and for portions of 18 years in conducting the interviews on which this book rests. Virtually, all of my interviews were carried out with two tape recorders running, for subsequent verbatim transcription. In some cases, I interviewed sources seven times to make sure that their stories remained the same. In general, I was offered extraordinary cooperation and was able to collect information and data that no other has gathered, one reason why I have been able credibly to explain the forces that brought about the intifada. The uprising was not a spontaneous eruption, as news accounts led many to believe. It was nearly 20 years in the making. I also explain the functioning of the clandestine Command (Unified National Leadership Command) in a way that has not been possible before, having interviewed representatives from the four groups that comprised it.

This account is in essence a story of a struggle within a struggle. Within the Palestinian community in the Occupied Territories, there was dynamic exertion and contestation on the question of how best to fight the military occupation. In a situation not unlike that of the Tibetan and Burmese nonviolent struggles recently in the news, voices began advocating the use of nonviolent resistance to fight to lift the military occupation in 1969, if not before. The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories during the 1970s and 1980s, in the period leading up to the intifada, admitted that they had no one else to turn to but themselves. Their secession from violence during the period of December 1987 to March 1990 is highly significant for the peoples of the region.

The military command structures of the guerrilla units could not protect Palestinian communities from the repressive violence of military occupation, and they did not generate democratic leadership. Very few democracies, if any; have resulted from militarized national liberation struggles. The 1987 intifada—and the five discernible nonmilitary movements of the two preceding decades that produced the uprising—did more for coining a model of authentic democratic governance in the Arab world than any other intervention or any force to date. If you are interested in democracy in the Middle East, it is the first intifada that you need to be examining.

One of the great tragedies of the contemporary era is that none of the outside forces that might have capitalized on the massive nonviolent mobilization in the Occupied Territories to press for a permanent settlement had sufficient background and understanding of the technique of nonviolent struggle to grasp the parameters of what was going on. This applies to the Israelis, to exiled Palestinians and the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] and to the United States and the international community. Thus, the destiny of the Palestinians inside the Occupied Territories was ultimately controlled by three parties that were unable or unwilling to interpret the significance of the political thinking—a new politics—that had evolved under occupation. I found no evidence of any Israeli reinforcement being given to those who were working to rebut the dogma of violent strategies among the Palestinians. The PLO failed fully to support the collective nonviolent action of the intifada. Yasser Arafat’s immediate response was to speak of “our generals,” using military nomenclature to refer to the youth in the uprising. The United States, the EU and the rest of the international community failed to grasp the passkey that had been forged in the crucible of the uprising.

News coverage was major. Huge space and a great deal of ink were devoted to the first intifada. Yet, most news reports missed the tale of how virtually the entire Palestinian society worked to lift military occupation with the same nonviolent methods used by Gandhi in India, the civil rights movement in the United States, the Czech and Slovak Velvet Revolution and other nonviolent struggles of the Eastern European satellites against the Soviet Union, which were also underway at the time. The news media was unable to interpret accurately the nature of the uprising. (The news coverage has slightly improved regarding the October 2007 Burmese monks’ struggle against the military junta, as the monks walked with upturned alms bowls, but only somewhat.)

North American and European diplomats and diplomats all over the world are not trained in the theory and practice of nonviolent struggle. Journalists are not trained in this technique of struggle. Hence, their ability to recognize, understand and interpret it is very limited. A demonstration is not a riot. The best that reporters could do in most instances was to recognize a boycott or civil disobedience, but they could not differentiate the more than one hundred classic nonviolent methods from an international inventory that were used by the Palestinians in the first intifada.

I spent more than one year scouring British colonial records for the historical chapters, including on a research fellowship from an institute at the University of Oxford. Some of the material from the 1920s and 1930s may surprise you, for example, a meeting in October 1929 when women leaders met with the British High Commissioner in Jerusalem and, as they sat down, simultaneously threw off their veils as a gesture of discontent with British policies.

The 150 or so interviews on which the book rests allow me to disentangle internal issues, dialogues and discourses and to disclose sub-cultures of evolving political thinking among the Palestinians. Although the major architects and human agents cooperated with me and were willing to disclose internal disputes, in general, as a global phenomenon, very little is understood of what goes on inside nonviolent mass movements, including by social mobilization specialists. The book is actually very serious social science research, but I have threaded through it the personal stories of the individuals, the key human agents, who were working to overturn the mythologies of armed struggle so that it is also accessible for the general reader. Palestinians themselves are generally not aware of the contents of the book.

In the book, I demolish the myth that the leaders of the intifada were robotic, subordinated to and guided from Tunis. This is nonsense. The intifada was a homegrown movement. Human agency is a powerful part of this narrative.

The Boston scholar Gene Sharp was willing to share with me reports of his three trips to Israel/Palestine—in November 1986, February 1988 and July 1989. His lectures in the West Bank were influential with Palestinians, as were his lectures in Israel. The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] former chief psychologist, Reuven Gal, confirmed what was in Sharp’s reports about his meetings with Israelis and described to me the impact that Gene Sharp’s engagement with the Israeli security establishment had in urging restraint in the Israeli response to the uprising. (The Israelis did not use tanks as had the Chinese in Tiananmen Square, in the same timeframe.) Among the important factors in the development of the new politics in the Occupied Territories was the translation and dissemination of Sharp’s works.

Having worked for four years at the heart of the United States’ civil rights movement, I was aware of the need for transmission of knowledge for any mass nonviolent movement. Knowledge must be carefully disseminated, and that often means materials. How the knowledge spread is a salient question in the case of the Palestinian people because the population was in large part peasants and refugees. How did people learn the theoretical basis for nonviolent struggle and its methods? I went in search of critical documents. In the book’s Appendix are excerpts from six pivotal, primary documents.

When I mention the U.S. civil rights movement, let me point out that even the most uneducated Mississippi sharecroppers in the 1960s understood that the only way to reach negotiations with the oligarchs of the South, who were hugely more powerful than they, was through nonviolent struggle. The asymmetry between the Palestinians and the Israelis was extreme. The only way to balance such a relationship, or achieve parity, would be through the use of collective nonviolent action. One of the properties of nonviolent resistance is its capacity to balance a steep disequilibrium between parties so as to achieve parity.

Let me emphasize that to speak of nonviolent struggle is not to speak of spirituality, faith, belief or religion. I am not speaking of a creed. Nonviolent movements are defined by the behavior of the participants. How people act in a nonviolent movement defines the mobilization as nonviolent. Nonetheless, misperceptions are very common. Perhaps this is why onlookers, looking at the intifada, failed to understand the significance of what was underway. Gandhi never anticipated that all Indians could join him in his strict personal beliefs. What Gandhi wanted was a policy of nonviolent struggle. Until 1928, [Jawaharlal] Nehru still thought that India would have to use violence to get rid of the British. A policy is also what was being fought for within the Occupied Territories. A group of about two dozen activist intellectuals pressed for a policy of nonviolent struggle, believing it to be the best way to reach negotiations with Israel, in order to achieve an independent state.

Nonviolent resistance is an active response in which the taking of action is not violent; it does not refer normatively to the values of tolerance or nonviolent interaction that in modern political thought constitutes civil society, although one may influence the other. We are speaking of a technique for achieving social justice that relies on the use of nonviolent sanctions. The nonviolent sanctions are enacted through strategies. This is a much more complex form of theory than is military strategy. Therefore, the question of how an entire population could learn to fight military occupation through nonviolent methods is a very intriguing one.

One of the early stages of nonviolent mobilizations is grappling with the question “what should we call it?” “What do we name this action?” The word intifada came from student struggles during the 1980s against Israeli Military Orders 854 and 947, considered by the Palestinians to be an assault on their academic freedom. The students chose a deliberately, specifically, linguistically nonviolent word with no connotations of retaliation or vengeance. They chose intifada, meaning shaking off. (In this sense, the term “second intifada” is a complete misnomer.) In Poland in the 1980s in Solidarity Union, with its ten million members, the Poles chose the term social self-defense because “nonviolent” did not translate well into Polish. Burma’s 1988 prodemocracy movement chose the term political defiance; again, “nonviolent” did not translate well into Burmese. The Tibetans use wise action for the same reason. When you think about it, “nonviolent” is not much of a word in English. It tells you what it is not, not what it is.

Faisal Husseini, influential in the nonmilitary movements of the 1980s and a leader of the 1987 intifada, preferred the term aggressive nonviolence. The terms nonviolent struggle, nonviolent resistance, collective nonviolent action, nonviolent strategic action or militant nonviolence all represent a technique of fighting for social justice that only attacks the political power of the opponent. It does not attack the well-being, the lives or limbs of the target group. Some experts prefer civil resistance.

I mentioned three decisive developments that led to the first intifada. The first was the development of networks and movements of committees within Palestinian society, in which girls, boys, women, youth, students and academic faculties throughout the Occupied Territories began organizing small, free-standing institutions. In 1969, the communist party, two years after the imposition of the 1967 military occupation, first broke its ban on political organizing. The communists emphasized the building of institutions and small independent organizations. Eventually, others followed suit. A large portion of Palestinian society would not have been candidates for the military cadres in any context. Authority fragmented, as power diffused through many centers throughout the Occupied Territories, because of the different organizations and networks that were actively forming.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Palestinians of all walks of life assumed the responsibility of ridding themselves of occupation, and hundreds upon hundreds of committees proliferated, offering leadership opportunities to Palestinians who would not have joined guerrilla units in any instance. Organizers created institutions based on diversified leadership, anticipating the survival needs of communities under harsh reprisals. They prepared for incarcerations. Diffusion of power assured management of the committees no matter the number of arrests, as new leaders stepped forward to assume the duties of their imprisoned predecessors.

Prisoners organized the “prisoner’s movement” within Israeli jails. The first hunger strike was in 1970. Twenty-two years later, as many as fifteen thousand Palestinian prisoners were involved in a fast to the death, coordinating across separated prisons with no apparent means of communication. Women’s organizations became phenomenally important in the 1970s and 1980s. Youth clubs, student groups, faculty unions, voluntary work committees formed—despite occupation and as a result of it. Tens of thousands of organizations were establishing themselves in an evolving civil society, enhancing a capacity for self-reform and self-criticism.

The writings of the twentieth-century Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci were influential in the growth of this civil society. His eleven years spent in the prisons of Mussolini’s fascist regime and opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power through violence attracted Palestinian professionals and intellectuals to identify with him. Do not start with violence in creating a state, Gramsci maintained, but begin by gaining nonviolent agreement throughout the entire society and organizing small groups, then proceed to form your state once you have consent. In his view, resistance movements could be successful when the struggle possessed broad popular backing and permeated the structures of civil society before attempting to wrench control of state power. This would require forming alliances among those working in popular and democratic efforts, such as movements on behalf of women, students, peace or civil liberties. Remember that there were ten thousand university graduates who were unemployed and available for action and mobilization at that time in the Occupied Territories. Sari Nusseibeh, one of the key Palestinian activist intellectuals, was organizing faculty unions in the 1980s.

As early as 1968, Eqbal Ahmad, a Princeton-educated Pakistani political scientist, advocated “highly organized, militant, nonviolent struggle” by Palestinians as the preferred alternative to armed struggle. He advocated not trying to “outfight” the occupation but “outadministering” it. A reflex to outadminister the occupation encouraged the growth of what the head of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA) in East Jerusalem, Mahdi Abd al-Hadi, told the New York Times: 45,000 committees were in existence by 1987 and able to act as the organizational base for the intifada, including student groups and trade unions. In other words, a corporate resistance capacity had developed, part of the reason why an entire society was able to resist military occupation and, just as importantly, the crackdowns and reprisals that immediately came against the intifada.

The second critical development concerns the role of the Palestinian activist intellectuals. Academicians, journalists, editors and professionals began publishing in Arabic, English and Hebrew in the early 1980s. As early as 1968, some began speaking to Israeli audiences in Hebrew. Their publications during the 1980s advocated a quest for reaching negotiations with Israel for a future state, and this end affected the means of fighting to reach those negotiations. Military means would not work, they said, as they openly used information technologies to explain the new thinking. Gone were braggadocio and grandiose phraseology, noms de guerres and Marxist slogans.

The first visible harbinger of the new politics in the Occupied Territories was the emergence of joint Israeli Palestinian committees in 1981, led by Faisal Husseini and Gideon Spiro, a former Israeli paratrooper. Spiro was a conscripted, decorated, Israeli war hero who emigrated from Berlin and was among the Israeli soldiers who took military control for Israel over Arab East Jerusalem in 1967. He would become a founding member of Yesh Gvul (There Is a Limit), a movement of Israeli reserve soldiers, which even now advises selective refusal, urging that no Israeli soldier serve in the Occupied Territories. As a series of Israeli Palestinian committees began conducting demonstrations against the occupation, their picket signs were written in three languages: Arabic, English and Hebrew. I was granted access to all of the joint committees’ minutes and records, which I think have now since disappeared. My research on the committees is based not only on interviews but also on documents.

The third development was the transmission of knowledge of how other peoples in other settings had been able to fight for social and political justice without a military option. Professor Hisham Sharabi of Georgetown University was instrumental in the start of the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in East Jerusalem in 1984, led by Mubarak Awad, now teaching in the adjunct faculty of the American University. Volunteers from the Center, including Haj Abd Abu-Diab and Abd al-Jawad Saleh, passed insights from other historical civil resistance movements into villages and refugee camps, through mimeographed pamphlets, handouts, translated materials and organizing lectures.

Jonathan Kuttab and Mubarak Awad had begun circulating materials a year before, in 1983, and they were thus running workshops four years before the outbreak of the intifada. Their workshops were open to anyone (Palestinian or Israeli). Pilot marches, parades and demonstrations were often co-sponsored by the Israeli branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Israelis such as Amos Gevirtz remained involved with the Center through thick and thin. When conducting training sessions on the theories and methods of nonviolent struggle, they disseminated materials that argued that nonviolent resistance would be more successful in redressing fundamental injustices than armed struggle and could more readily lead to a lasting solution.

They translated works of Gene Sharp and distributed them in the thousands, with between four and seven thousand copies of one work alone circulated by the center. Trial applications of nonviolent action were demonstrated in 40 to 50 villages. This included the hamlet of Tqu (Tekoa), near Beit Sahour and not far from Bethlehem, where in 1986 the volunteers from the Center and the villagers together succeeded in getting a group of Israeli settlers to pull back to their original contours. That property was retrieved by 300 villagers standing unified, as the settlers fired shots into the air. Again, I used interviews as well as working from the files and records of the Center.

Once the intifada broke in 1987, for a month there was chaos, with everybody doing something different. Suddenly, the emergence of a unified coordinating body became discernible. Called the Unified National Leadership Command, or the Command, it was a coordinating group of the four main factions, including the communists. It rarely met yet was able to coordinate appeals for action that appeared in mimeographed leaflets that would mysteriously materialize approximately every two weeks.

In the book, I share analyses of the leaflets and their appeals for mostly nonviolent actions. The leaflets often emphasized the popular committees. They were often distributed at Friday prayers at mosques, where, as people bent down to pray, from their pockets leaflets would be disgorged. As people emerged from churches on Sundays, the leaflets would be distributed. Many of the demonstrations started after either Friday prayers or Sunday church services.

As noted, the Palestinians employed more than one hundred methods of nonviolent struggle from an international repertoire of nonviolent methods, at least from December 1987 to March 1990, the period of my focus. Demonstrations occurred almost daily in the first three months. Women alone held more than one hundred demonstrations between December 1987 and March 1988. There was a great deal of civil disobedience, such as resignation from jobs—six hundred police officers resigned in one day. There were many forms of strikes. The 1988–89 siege of Beit Sahour was an almost perfectly implemented, methodologically, program of tax resistance.

From the category of nonviolent methods called “nonviolent intervention,” the most difficult to implement and most advanced category of nonviolent sanctions, the Palestinians used hunger strikes, pray-ins, defiance of blockades and, most importantly and the hardest to organize, alternative institutions. Alternative institutions (also called parallel institutions) involve the nonviolent challengers removing themselves from the power of the target group, while taking it upon themselves to organize alternative institutions that are not reliant on the authority of the adversary. (This is what the Kosovars did in the 1990s after [Slobodan] Miloševic fired all the teachers and doctors; they went out and organized their own clinics and schools.) What the Palestinians did was to organize “popular committees.” The popular committees were self-governing, often started and run by women.

A long, protracted policy debate is disclosed by the leaflets on “full civil disobedience,” meaning suspension of all dealings with occupation authorities and the replacement of its services by those who possessed “popular authority,” boycotts of Israeli products and abstention from paying taxes. This policy debate on extensive noncooperation with the military occupation ran for a year and a half through the leaflets clandestinely appearing fortnightly. The proposal for full civil disobedience was part of the program laid out by the “Jerusalem Paper,” drafted by Sari Nusseibeh in February 1988, and planned eventually to lead to a declaration of independence and, thereafter, negotiations with Israel for an independent state alongside Israel. Inherent was the idea that military occupation was a web of contact points between occupier and occupied, the great majority of which are sustained by the implied submission of the occupied and only a small proportion of which are based on coercion. To end the occupation, one had to change the state of submission, largely by cutting off the points of exchange maintained by the occupied, thereby revealing to the international community in clear form the force used by the occupier.

In January and February 1988, the Israeli authorities closed the universities, sending the professors and students home. Within the popular committees, the physics professor sat with the baker to plan the distribution of bread. One of the reasons that the Palestinian first intifada could happen is that the universities were closed down, allowing the students and faculties to mingle in their home communities. This is part of the explanation for why the society was so remarkably unified, with no disjuncture between the intellectuals and rural folk or refugees.

A new leadership emerged that was not groomed on how to cooperate with Israeli officials. Tested in the intifada, very young people might take life and death responsibility for whole communities. They would be recognized as leaders, no matter the social status of their parents.

The response of many hearing about my research was to say, “But was it really nonviolent? Stones were thrown!” I have a section in the book on the stones, but to consider this question, one must examine deaths of Israeli soldiers. There may have been as many as 70,000 Israeli soldiers posted in the territories on active duty at the time the uprising started. Even if smaller, the number would still have been large. Moreover, Israeli soldiers were on rooftops, in alleyways and on street corners. The IDF spokesperson gave me the official figures on the deaths of Israeli soldiers. According to Lt. Col. Yehuda Weinraub, only four Israeli soldiers were killed in the West Bank and none in Gaza in 1988. Two were killed in the West Bank and two in Gaza in 1989. Twelve Israeli soldiers were slain in a four-year period in the West Bank and Gaza. This is statistical evidence of the restraint and discipline manifested in the uprising.

Yet, the profound opportunities presented by this pivotal moment in contemporary world history were squandered by Israel, the PLO and the international community. It took years for the Israelis to recognize that the uprising had political rather than military goals. The PLO, mired in an ideological insistence that nonviolent and violent resistance could be blended (an impossibility because they work in different ways), was more concerned about preventing a new political leadership from arising in the territories than in capitalizing on the intifada for a long-term solution. The international community failed to grasp the passkey to peace that had been forged in the foundries of the intifada.

You can evaluate how extraordinary was the consensus preserved for more than two years in light of the triangulation of counter-resistance employed by the Israelis, the PLO and those in the Occupied Territories who resumed the propounding of desiccated theories of military retaliation. Eventually, the unity of the intifada broke down, and masked youths reintroduced violent retribution, as chagrin with the meager fruits spread. Israeli officials refused to acknowledge that they faced a nonviolent mass movement; they continued to call it war. The PLO was preoccupied with control rather than support for the uprising. The rest of the world did not try to save the activist intellectuals who had led this epochal transformation, and the key figures were deported or thrown in jail.

The accomplishments of the intifada coincide with its most nonviolent phase. These achievements include the Madrid 1991 international conference and the opening of political space for the Oslo Accords, notwithstanding its subsequent invalidation by all parties to the conflict. It produced the capacity, conditions and circumstances that led to the Oslo Accords, which for all its flaws, omissions and, we could say, crimes ended the opprobrium against direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians. The civil society that produced the intifada could be highly significant for the future. The implications of the first intifada apply far beyond the Middle East. An entire society living under occupation unified itself based on changes in popular thinking about how to transform their predicament.

Dr. Mary King is an expert on collective nonviolent action and work alongside Martin Luther King Jr. as a student. She is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the UN-affiliated University for Peace and Distinguished Scholar of the American University Center for Global Peace in Washington, D.C.

(Source : The Palestine Center. The speakers' views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.)

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