6 December when an Israeli was knifed to death in Gaza’s main market. Two days later, the driver of an Israeli truck lost control and hit a car, killing four Palestinian day labourers. A flyer connected the two events as an act of revenge by the Israelis for the earlier stabbing, although the two episodes were wholly unconnected. Thousands of mourners attended the funerals of the four men, shouting ‘Jihad! Jihad!’ at the fifty-five Israeli reservists holed up in their post in Jebalya, with its sixty thousand inhabitants, the largest of the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. When patrols sallied forth they came under hails of stones from demonstrators who would not disperse. Further patrols the following day got into difficulties when one unit stopped to pursue a rock-throwing teenager into a house, a move that resulted in their being surrounded by an angry mob. The reservists had no equipment or training to deal with a civilian riot. Warning shots in the air, which had become so frequent during riots that they were ignored, were followed by shots at the demonstrators’ legs, and the death of a seventeen-year-old boy. Rioting spread to other sites within the Gaza Strip, each flashpoint marked by acrid smoke from piles of burning rubber tyres. The uprising quickly spread to the West Bank, where similarly only one in eight Palestinian graduates of the seven universities entered a profession, while tensions simmered over such issues as electricity and water. Palestinians needed permits for everything, which were sometimes irrationally denied. In the early 1990s the Israeli authorities rejected a request from Yehiya Abdal-Tif Ayyash, a Palestinian electronics graduate from Rafat, to do a masters degree in Jordan. He had no terrorist hinterland or connections, and, as became abundantly clear, it would have been better had the Israelis let him progress in his chosen career. General Ariel Sharon’s provocative purchase of an apartment in east Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter, despite his Negev ranch and his right as a minister to use the capital’s luxury hotels, seemed symbolic of a wider, abrasive stance, whether from American or Russian settlers seeking to establish facts on the ground, or a Likud party whose rhetoric tilted rightwards to dark talk, on the part of Israeli right-wing blow-hards, of transferring the Palestinians to Jordan.
The storm-like force of this ‘rock revolution’ caught both the Israelis and the PLO napping, although the latter’s functionaries hastened to take charge. The leadership of the Intifada was elusively mysterious, while its footsoldiers quickly encompassed labourers and devout shopkeepers. As they picked up the first hundred or so putative ringleaders, Israeli interrogators were baffled to discover how apolitical the demonstrators appeared to be. Most were ignorant of even the most elementary PLO platforms. They were young male labourers, rather than students, who had had enough of high-handed treatment by the Israelis. Their tactics mutated too, from a straightforward riot to more sophisticated passive resistance, involving a wholesale disengagement from the Israeli economy. Bits of ground were used to grow vegetables, while chicken coops and rabbit hutches proliferated on roofs.
Nor did the Israelis have a coherent strategy for dealing with riots that involved women and children as well as young men. If it had once sufficed for an Israeli soldier to expose himself to send prudish Palestinian women fleeing, now women appeared to be egging on the demonstrating males. A fifth of the casualties of the first three months’ riots were among women, a further outrage to Muslim sensibilities. Soon even grannies were involved, although as they were the bearers of the inter-generational national flame this is perhaps unsurprising.
Historically, revolutions often develop when a regime has many soldiers but few police; the opposite was true of nineteenth-century London, which had plenty of police and no 1848 revolution. The Intifada exposed a fatal blind-spot in Israel’s security capability. Soldiers were useless against