The meaning of Intifada or “shaking off”
The word means “uprising” or “shaking off” in Arabic. In the Palestinian context, it refers to popular movements of resistance against Israeli military occupation. Both the First Intifada (1987–1993) and the early stages of the Second Intifada (2000–2001) were rooted in mass popular mobilisation and largely nonviolent resistance.
This important context — that both intifadas began with largely nonviolent Palestinian resistance — is often deliberately omitted in Western accounts, distorting the reality of how the Israeli occupation of Palestine escalated.
The First Intifada erupted in December 1987 after decades of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It began with widespread, largely nonviolent protests: mass demonstrations, general strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, civil disobedience, and refusal to pay Israeli-imposed taxes. Stone-throwing by youths, while symbolic and often cited, was the main form of confrontation against heavily armed Israeli soldiers; the use of firearms by Palestinians was extremely rare in the first years. Israel responded to these largely unarmed protests with brutal military repression: systematic beatings, mass arrests, house demolitions, expulsions, and widespread use of live ammunition against civilians. Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s Defence Minister at the time, explicitly ordered troops to “break the bones” of demonstrators to crush the uprising without relying on mass killings, though Palestinian deaths were widespread. The First Intifada exposed the cruelty of the occupation to the world and fundamentally changed the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic.
The Second Intifada began in September 2000 after Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in a move widely perceived by Palestinians as a deliberate provocation. The initial Palestinian response was again overwhelmingly nonviolent. Demonstrators, many of them young people, protested at Israeli checkpoints, settlements, and occupation forces across the West Bank and Gaza. As during the First Intifada, Israeli forces immediately responded with brutal violence, firing live ammunition at unarmed demonstrators and killing large numbers of civilians in the early days. This military repression, extensively documented by human rights organisations, played a direct role in escalating the situation. Only after months of relentless violence did armed resistance to the occupation begin to emerge. The later armed resistance became the focus of Western media coverage, but the crucial fact that the Second Intifada did not begin as a violent Palestinian uprising is deliberately omitted in many accounts.
In both uprisings, the initial Palestinian strategy was mass mobilisation and largely nonviolent resistance against Israeli occupation. In both cases, Israeli military violence against unarmed protesters directly triggered the escalation from nonviolent resistance to armed resistance. Recognising this sequence is essential to any honest account of the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine.
No country or people in the entire world would tolerate the occupation, injustice and suffering that the Palestinians have suffered. No decent human being can side with the horrors we have been witnessing for the past 18 months. Gaza is under the same sky as you and me. Gaza is not on the moon. It’s on the same earth. If we truly want peace, we must truly demand justice.