Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 37 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

More than any other event in the years of conflict, the Israeli invasion brought the Islamic movement to Lebanon. Islamist parties had faced isolation and condemnation for their actions against their own governments and societies in Egypt and Syria. However, the Lebanon conflict provided external enemies for the Islamist movement to fight. Any party that inflicted pain and humiliation on the United States and Israel would gain mass support in Lebanon and the broader Arab world. These were perfect conditions for the emergence of a new Shiite Islamist movement that would develop into the scourge of Israel and the United States—a militia that called itself the Party of God, or Hizbullah. Hizbullah emerged from the training camps set up by the Iranian revolutionary guards in the largely Shiite town of Baalbek in the central Bekaa Valley in the early 1980s. Hundreds of young Lebanese Shiites flocked to Baalbek for religious and political education and advanced military training. They came to share the ideology of the Islamic Revolution and grew to hate Iran’s enemies as their own. Ironically, Hizbullah owes its creation as much to Israel as to Iran. The Shiites of South Lebanon had not felt particularly hostile toward Israel in June 1982. PLO operations against Israel since 1969 had brought untold suffering to the inhabitants of the south, and by 1982 the Shiites of South Lebanon were glad to see the backs of the PLO fighters and initially received the invading Israeli forces as liberators. “As a reaction to the hostility towards Palestinians that had engulfed some inhabitants of South Lebanon,” Hizbullah deputy secretary general Naim Qassem recalled, “the [Israeli] invaders were welcomed with trilling cries of joy and the spraying of rice.”²⁸ Shiite opposition to Israel intensified, however, in response to the siege of Beirut, the enormity of the casualty toll, and the arrogance of Israeli occupation troops in South Lebanon. Iranian propaganda exacerbated this emerging hostility, nurturing rage against Israel and the United States, and their common project in Lebanon, the May 17 Agreement. From its very inception, Hizbullah was an organization distinguished by the courage of its convictions. Its members were united in their unswerving faith in the message of Islam and their willingness to make any sacrifice to achieve God’s will on earth. Their role model was Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, whose death in the southern Iraqi town of Karbala fighting the ruling Umayyad dynasty in A.D. 680 still stands for Shiite Muslims as the ultimate example of martyrdom against tyranny. The example of Imam Husayn gave rise to a culture of martyrdom within Hizbullah that it turned into a lethal weapon against its enemies. Hizbullah’s prolific use of suicide bombers have led many analysts to try to link Islamic Jihad, the shadowy organization that claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of the American and French barracks, to the embryonic Hizbullah movement that took shape between 1982 and 1985—though Hizbullah itself has always denied any involvement in those attacks. The struggle against Israel and the United States were but the means to a greater end. Ultimately, Hizbullah’s goal was to create an Islamic state in Lebanon. However, the party has always maintained its unwillingness to impose such a government against the will of the diverse population of Lebanon. “We do not want Islam to rule in Lebanon by force, as the political Maronism is ruling at present,” Hizbullah leaders asserted in the February 1985 Open Letter declaring the establishment of the party. “But we stress that we are convinced of Islam as a faith, system, thought, and rule and we urge all to recognize it and to resort to its law.”²⁹ Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, Hizbullah hoped to replace man’s law with God’s law. The leaders of Hizbullah were convinced that the vast majority of the people of Lebanon—even the country’s large Christian communities—would willingly opt for the greater justice of God’s law once the Islamic system of government had proven its superiority to secular nationalism. The Hizbullah leadership believed that nothing could better demonstrate the superiority of Islamic government than a victory over Israel and the United States. Young Shiite men were willing to sacrifice their lives, like their role model the Imam Husayn, to achieve this goal. The first Shiite suicide bombing in Lebanon was organized by the Islamic Resistance, a progenitor of Hizbullah, in November 1982. A young man named Ahmad Qasir conducted the first “martyrdom operation” when he drove a car laden with explosives into the Israeli army headquarters in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, killing seventy-five Israelis and wounding many others. Journalist Robert Fisk went to Tyre to investigate the bombing. He was shocked by the number of Israeli casualties pulled from the wreckage of the eight-story building, but it was the method of the bombing that he found hardest to accept. “A suicide bomber? The idea seemed inconceivable.?³⁰ A number of attacks following the bombing of the Israeli headquarters confirmed suicide bombing as a dangerous new weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of America and Israel: the U.S. Embassy bombing in April 1983, the attacks on the American and French barracks in October 1983, and a second attack on Israeli headquarters in Tyre in November 1983, killing sixty more Israelis. Israeli intelligence was quick to identify the threat posed by the Islamic Resistance and struck back with targeted assassinations against Shiite clerics. Far from subduing the Shiite resistance, the assassinations only served to escalate the violence. “By 1984,” one analyst noted, “the pace of [Shiite] attacks was so intense that an Israeli soldier was dying every third day” in Lebanon.³¹ In the course of that year, the Shiite militias also diversified their tactics and began to kidnap Westerners in a bid to drive the foreigners out of Lebanon. By the time Hizbullah emerged on the scene in 1985, their enemies were already on the retreat. The first defeat the Shiite insurgency dealt Israel was the destruction of the May 17 Agreement. The besieged government of Amin Gemayel had been unable to implement any part of the agreement and, within a year of its signing, the Lebanese Council of Ministers abrogated the treaty with Israel. The Islamic Resistance’s next victory was to drive the U.S. and European armies out of Lebanon. As American casualties in Lebanon mounted, President Reagan came under growing pressure to withdraw his troops. Italian and American troops evacuated Lebanon in February 1984, and the last French soldiers pulled out at the end of March. The Israelis also found their position in Lebanon increasingly untenable, and in January 1985 Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s cabinet agreed to withdraw from the urban centers in South Lebanon to what they termed the South Lebanon Security Zone, a strip of land along the Israel-Lebanon border that ranged from 5–25 kilometers (3–15 miles) in depth. The Security Zone was to prove the most enduring legacy of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The idea behind the South Lebanon Security Zone was to create a buffer to protect northern Israel from attack. Instead, it created a shooting gallery for Hizbullah and other Lebanese militias to carry on the fight against the Israeli occupier. For the next fifteen years, Hizbullah gained support from Lebanese of all religions, if not for an Islamic state, then at least as the national resistance movement against a much-hated occupation. For Israel, the 1982 invasion ultimately replaced one enemy—the PLO—with a yet more determined adversary. Unlike the Palestinian fighters in Lebanon, Hizbullah and the Shiites of South Lebanon were fighting for their own land. In Cold War terms, the Lebanon conflict had proved a major defeat for the United States in its rivalry with the Soviet Union. However, the Soviets were in no position to celebrate. Their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan had provoked a sustained insurgency, attracting a growing number of devout Muslims to join the ranks of the Afghan mujahidin fighting to expel the ?atheist Communists.? If Lebanon was the Shiite school for jihad, Afghanistan became the training ground for a new generation of Sunni Muslim militants.

In 1983, a twenty-four-year-old Algerian named Abdullah Anas took the bus from his native village of Ben Badis to the market town of Sidi Bel Abbиs, where there was a newsstand, so that he could catch up on world events.³² Anas had been one of the founders of the Islamist movement in western Algeria, and he continued to follow political developments in the Islamic world with great interest. On that day, Anas remembered buying a copy of a Kuwaiti magazine that had captured his attention with a fatwa (legal opinion by Islamic scholars) signed by a number of religious scholars. It declared that support for the jihad in Afghanistan was a personal duty for all Muslims. Anas went to a nearby coffee house and settled down to read the fatwa in detail. He was impressed by the long list of famous clerics who had signed the declaration, including leading muftis from the Arab Gulf states and Egypt. One name in particular stood out: Shaykh Abdullah ’Azzam, whose publications and tape-recorded sermons circulated widely in Islamist circles. Born to a conservative religious family in a village near the Palestinian town of Jenin in 1941, Abdullah ‘Azzam had joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager in the mid-1950s.³³ After completing his high school studies, he went on to study Islamic law at the University of Damascus. Following the June 1967 War, ’Azzam spent a year and a half fighting against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank in what he called his “Palestinian jihad.” He then moved to Cairo, where he took his masters and doctorate from al-Azhar University. While in Egypt, ’Azzam came to know Muhammad and Amina Qutb, the brother and sister of the late Sayyid Qutb, who had been executed by Nasser’s government in 1966. ’Azzam was profoundly influenced by the writings of Qutb. With his academic credentials, ’Azzam joined the faculty of Islamic studies at the University of Jordan in Amman, where he taught for seven years before his inflammatory publications and sermons landed him in trouble with the Jordanian authorities. He left Jordan for Saudi Arabia in 1980, taking a post at the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Just before ‘Azzam moved to Jeddah, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The Communist government in Afghanistan and its Soviet ally had proven their hostility to Islam, and the Afghans were fighting “in the path of God.” ’Azzam gave their cause his full support, confident that victory in Afghanistan would revive the spirit of jihad in Islam. As his later writings attest, ’Azzam saw victory in Afghanistan as a way to mobilize Muslims to action in other conflict zones. A native of Palestine, he saw Afghanistan as the training ground for future action against Israel. “Do not think we forget Palestine,” he wrote:Liberating Palestine is an integral part of our religion. It is in our blood. We never forget Palestine. But I am certain that working in Afghanistan constitutes a revival of the spirit of jihad and a renewal of allegiance to God, no matter how great the sacrifices are. We have been deprived from waging jihad in Palestine because of the borders, restraints and prisons. But this doesn’t mean that we abandon jihad. It does not mean either that we have forgotten our country. We must prepare for jihad in any spot of the earth we can.³⁴

’Azzam’s message of jihad and sacrifice gained wide circulation both through his writings and recordings of his fiery sermons. He awakened the spirit of jihad in Muslim men across the world, reaching even remote market towns like Sidi Bel Abbиs in Algeria. The more Anas read the text of the fatwa ’Azzam had signed, and weighed its arguments, the more he was convinced that Afghanistan’s fight against Soviet occupation was the responsibility of all Muslims. “If a stretch of Muslim territory is attacked, jihad is an individual duty for those who inhabit that territory and those who are neighbours,” the fatwa asserted. “If there are too few of them, or if they are incapable or reticent, then this duty is incumbent upon those who are nearby, and so on until it spreads throughout the world.”³⁵ Given the gravity of the situation in Afghanistan, Anas felt that the duty of jihad had reached him in rural Algeria. This was all the more remarkable for, as Anas confessed, he didn’t know a thing about Afghanistan at the time—he couldn’t even place it on the map. As Anas would soon learn, Afghanistan is a country of rich cultural diversity and a tragic modern history. Its population is composed of seven main ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Pashtun (roughly 40 percent of the population) and the Tajiks (30 percent), with a Sunni Muslim majority, a large Shiite minority, and two official languages (Persian and Pashto). The country’s diversity reflects its geographic location, situated between Iran in the west, Pakistan to the south and east, and China and the (then Soviet) Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to the north. Diversity and geography have not afforded much stability to land-locked Afghanistan, and since 1973 the country has been wracked with political turmoil and wars. The origins of the Soviet-Afghan war date to the 1973 military coup that toppled the monarchy of King Zahir Shah and brought a left-leaning government to power. The republican regime of President Mohammed Daoud Khan was in turn toppled by a violent Communist coup in April 1978. The Communists declared the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, a single-party state allied to the Soviet Union, bent on rapid social and economic reforms. The new Afghan government was openly hostile to Islam and promoted state atheism, provoking widespread opposition within the largely religious Afghan population. With Soviet backing, the Communist regime instigated a reign of terror against all opponents, arresting and executing thousands of political prisoners. However, the ruling Communists were themselves split by factionalism and succumbed to in-fighting. After a spate of assassinations, the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, sending an invasion force of 25,000 men to secure the capital city of Kabul and to install its Afghan ally Babrak Karmal as president. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provoked international condemnation, but no country was in a position to intervene directly to force a Soviet withdrawal. It fell to the Afghan resistance movements to repel the Red Army, and the Islamist parties led the fight. They received extensive covert assistance from the United States, which saw the conflict strictly in Cold War terms, in which the anticommunism of the Islamist fighters made them natural allies against the Soviets. The United States provided the Afghan resistance with military supplies and sophisticated hand-fired antiaircraft missiles through Pakistan. During the Carter administration, the United States gave some $200 million in aid to the Afghan resistance. Ronald Reagan stepped up American support, providing $250 million in assistance in 1985 alone.³⁶ The government of Pakistan served as an intermediary between the Americans and the Afghan resistance and aided with intelligence and training facilities for the Afghan mujahidin (literally, “holy warriors,” Islamic guerrillas). The Islamic world provided significant financial assistance and, starting in 1983, began to recruit volunteers to fight in the Afghan jihad. Abdullah ‘Azzam led the call to recruit Arab volunteers to fight in Afghanistan, and Abdullah Anas was one of the first to respond. The two men met by chance while on pilgrimage in Mecca in 1983. Among the millions who gathered for the rituals of the pilgrimage, Anas recognized the distinctive face of Abdullah ’Azzam, with his long beard and broad face, and went up to introduce himself. “I read the fatwa that you and a group of clerics published on the duty of jihad in Afghanistan, and I am convinced by it, but I don’t know how to get to Afghanistan,” Anas said. “It is very simple,” ’Azzam replied. “This is my telephone number in Islamabad. I will return to Pakistan at the end of the Hajj. If you get there, call me and I will take you to our Afghan colleagues in Peshawar.”³⁷ Within two weeks, Anas was on a plane to Islamabad. Never having been outside the Arab world, the young Algerian was disoriented in Pakistan. He went straight to a public telephone and was relieved when ‘Azzam answered and invited him over for dinner. ?He received me with a human warmth that touched me,? Anas recalled. Welcoming Anas into his home, ?Azzam introduced him to his other dinner guests. ?His house was full of the students he taught in the International Islamic University in Islamabad. He asked me to stay with him until he went to Peshawar because I would not be able to meet with the Afghan colleagues if I went to Peshawar on my own.? Anas spent three days as a guest in ‘Azzam’s home. It was the beginning of a profound friendship and political partnership, sealed when Anas later married ’Azzam’s daughter. While at ‘Azzam’s home, Anas got to meet the first of the Arab men to respond to ’Azzam’s call to volunteer for the Afghan jihad. There were no more than a dozen Arab volunteers in the Afghan jihad when Anas arrived in 1983. Before their departure for Peshawar, ’Azzam introduce Anas to another Arab volunteer. “I present you Brother Osama bin Ladin,” ’Azzam said by way of introduction. “He is one of the Saudi youths who love the Afghan jihad.” “He struck me as very shy, a man of few words,” Anas recollected. “Shaykh Abdullah explained that Osama visited him from time to time in Islamabad.” Anas did not get to know bin Ladin well, as they served in different parts of Afghanistan. But he never forgot that first encounter.³⁸ While still in Pakistan, Anas was sent with two other Arab volunteers to a training camp. Having done his national service in Algeria, he was already proficient with a Kalashnikov submachine gun. After two months, the volunteers were given their first opportunity to enter Afghanistan. Before they set off from their camp in Pakistan to join the Afghan mujahidin, ‘Azzam explained to his Arab protйgйs that the Afghan resistance was divided into seven factions. The largest were the Pashtun-dominated Hezb-e Islami (the Islamic Party) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the Jamiat-e Islami (the Islamic Society) headed by the Tajik Burhanuddin Rabbani. ’Azzam warned the Arab volunteers to avoid taking sides in Afghan factionalism and to see themselves as “guests of the entire Afghan people.” Yet as the Arabs volunteered for service in the different Afghan provinces, they came under the command of specific parties and inevitably gave their loyalty to the men with whom they served. Anas volunteered to serve in the northern province of Mazar-e Sharif, under the command of Rabbani’s men of the Jamiat-e Islami. The handful of Arab volunteers set off with their Afghan commanders in the depth of winter, crossing territory under Soviet control, in a caravan of 300 armed men, all on foot. The perilous journey took forty days. Once he reached Mazar-e Sharif, Anas was discouraged by his first experiences of the Afghan jihad. The local commander in Mazar had just died in a suicide operation against the Soviets, and three of his subordinates were vying with one another to control the resistance forces in the strategic town. Anas recognized he was out of his depth. ?We were young men with no information, training or money,? Anas wrote of himself and the two other Arabs who were with him on the journey. ?I realized that participation in the jihad required a much higher standard [of preparation] than we had reached.? Within a month of his arrival in Mazar, Anas decided to leave the “explosive situation” and return to Peshawar as soon as possible. His first impression of Afghanistan was that its problems were too big to be solved by a handful of well-intentioned volunteers. “Inevitably the Islamic world would have to be called upon to assume its responsibility. The Afghan problem is bigger than five Arab men, or twenty-five Arabs or fifty Arabs.” He believed it was essential to brief Abdullah ’Azzam of the political situation inside Afghanistan “so that he could present the situation to the Arab and Islamic worlds, and request more assistance for the Afghan problem.”³⁹

The frontier town of Peshawar had undergone significant changes over the months Anas had spent in Afghanistan. There were now many more Arab volunteers, their numbers swelling from a dozen, when Anas first arrived, to seventy or eighty by the beginning of 1985. Abdullah ‘Azzam had created a reception facility for the growing number of Arabs who were responding to his call. “While you were away,” ’Azzam explained to Anas, “Osama bin Ladin and I established the Services Office [Maktab al-khadamat] with a group of brothers. We established the Office to organize Arab participation in the Afghan Jihad.”⁴⁰ ’Azzam saw the Services Office as an independent center where Arab volunteers could meet and train without the risk of getting caught up in the political divisions of the Afghans. The Services Office had three objectives: to provide aid, to assist in reform, and to promote Islam. The office began to open schools and institutes inside Afghanistan, as well as among the swelling Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. It provided aid to orphans and widows of the conflict. At the same time, it engaged in active propaganda to attract new recruits to the Afghan jihad. As part of its propaganda effort, the Services Office published a popular magazine, distributed across the Arab world, called al-Jihad. The pages of al-Jihad were replete with stories of heroism and sacrifice intended to inspire Muslims young and old. Leading Islamist thinkers contributed articles. Zaynab al-Ghazali, who had been imprisoned by Nasser for her Islamist activities in the 1960s, gave an interview to al-Jihad while on a visit to Pakistan. Now in her seventies, al-Ghazali had lost none of her zeal for the Islamist cause. “The time I spent in prison is not equal to one moment in the field of jihad in Afghanistan,” she told her interviewer. “I wish I could live with the women fighters in Afghanistan, and I ask God to give victory to the mujahidin and to forgive us [i.e., the international community of Islam] our shortcomings in bringing justice to Afghanistan.”⁴¹ Al-Ghazali idealized the Afghan jihad as ?a return to the age of the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, a return to the era of the rightly guided Caliphs.? The magazine al-Jihad reinforced this heroic narrative of the Afghan war against the Soviets, publishing accounts of miracles reminiscent of the Prophet Muhammad’s times. Among them were articles describing a group of mujahidin that killed 700 Soviets, losing only seven of their own men to martyrdom; a young man who single-handedly shot down five Soviet aircraft; even flocks of heavenly birds that created an avian curtain shielding mujahidin from the enemy. The magazine sought to convince readers of divine intervention, in which God rewarded faith with victory against impossible odds. Abdullah Anas was a pragmatist, however, and he’d been on the ground in Afghanistan. There were no miracles in his own dry-eyed account of the war. He returned to Mazar-e Sharif in 1985, where he served under the commander of Jamiat-e Islami forces in the northern Panjshir Valley region, Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud was a born leader, a charismatic guerrilla commander in the mold of Che Guevara. He regularly withdrew with his forces to the forbidding terrain of the Hindu Kush, creating bases in the deep mountain caves where he could withstand weeks of punishing bombardment, only to emerge from the rubble to inflict heavy casualties on Soviet forces. Yet his men suffered too. On one occasion, Massoud was retreating through a narrow valley with one of his units when they were surprised by Soviet rocket fire. “In less than five minutes, more than ten of our men fell as martyrs,” Anas recalled. “It was an unimaginable sight.”⁴² Anas described another battle, in which Massoud led 300 of his men (including fifteen Arab volunteers) to victory over the Soviets. The engagement lasted a full day and night, and Massoud suffered eighteen dead (including four Arabs) and many more wounded.⁴³ The Afghan mujahidin and their Arab supporters fought a desperate and ultimately successful battle against superior forces. A decade of occupation had proven very costly to the Soviet Union in men and materiel. At least 15,000 Red Army soldiers died in Afghanistan, and 50,000 were wounded in action. The Afghan resistance managed to shoot down over 100 aircraft and 300 helicopters with antiaircraft missiles provided by the United States. By the end of 1988, the Soviets came to recognize that they could not impose their will on Afghanistan with an invasion army of 100,000 men. The Kremlin decided to cut its losses and withdraw. On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet units withdrew from Afghanistan. Yet this great victory of Muslim arms over a nuclear superpower was ultimately a disappointment for the men who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan. The Afghan resistance’s victory over the Soviets did not lead to the ultimate Islamist objective—the creation of an Islamic state. Once the Soviet enemy was outside their frontiers, the Afghan factions turned against each other in a power struggle that quickly degenerated into civil war. Despite Abdullah ’Azzam’s best efforts, many Arab volunteers divided along Afghan factional lines, taking sides with the party they knew. Others chose to leave Afghanistan. The violent turf battles between rival warlords did not constitute jihad, and they had no wish to fight fellow Muslims. The Arab volunteers did not make much of an impact in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. In retrospect, Abdullah Anas declared that the Arab contribution to the Afghan war amounted to no more than “a drop in the ocean.” The group of volunteers who came to be known as the “Afghan Arabs” probably never exceeded a maximum of two thousand men, and of those, “only a very small proportion entered Afghanistan and took part in the fighting with the mujahidin,” Anas claimed. The remainder stayed in Peshawar and volunteered their services “as doctors and drivers, cooks and accountants and engineers.”⁴⁴ Yet the Afghan jihad had an enduring influence over the Arab world. Many of those who answered the call to jihad returned to their native lands intent on realizing the ideal Islamic order that had eluded them in Afghanistan. Anas estimated some 300 Algerian volunteers served in Afghanistan; many of them would return home to play an active part in a new Islamist political party, the Islamic Salvation Front (more commonly known by the French acronym, the FIS). Others gathered around Osama bin Ladin, who established a rival institution to Abdullah ’Azzam’s Services Office. Bin Ladin called his new organization “the Base,” but it has come to be better known by its Arabic name, al-Qaida. Some of the Arabs who served with Anas in the Panjshir Valley chose to remain in Pakistan and became founding members of al-Qaida. The man who inspired the Arab Afghans was himself laid to rest in Pakistan. Abdullah ‘Azzam was killed on November 24, 1989, with two of his sons when a car bomb detonated as they approached a mosque in Peshawar for Friday prayers. There have been many theories, none conclusive, about who might have ordered the killing of Abdullah ’Azzam: rival Afghan factions; the circle of Osama bin Ladin; even the Israelis, who saw ’Azzam as the spiritual leader of a new Palestinian Islamist movement called Hamas.

By December 1987, the people of Gaza had spent twenty years under Israeli occupation. The Gaza Strip is a narrow finger of coastland 25 miles long and 6 miles wide, then populated by about 625,000 Palestinians. The residents of Gaza, three-quarters of whom were refugees from those parts of Palestine conquered by the new state of Israel in 1948, had suffered great isolation between 1948 and 1967. Gazans were confined to their enclave by the Egyptian authorities and cut off from their lost homeland by the hostile frontier with Israel. With the Israeli occupation of 1967 came new opportunities for Gazans to cross into the rest of historic Palestine and meet the other Palestinians who had remained on the land?in the towns and cities of Israel and the occupied West Bank. Gaza also enjoyed something of an economic boom after 1967. Under the occupation, Gazans were able to secure jobs in Israel and moved back and forth across the border with relative ease. Israelis shopped in Gaza to take advantage of tax-free prices. In many ways, life for the residents of Gaza had improved under Israeli rule. Yet no people is happy under occupation, and the Palestinians aspired to independence in their own land. But their hopes for deliverance by the other Arab states were dashed when Egypt concluded a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, and their hopes for liberation at the hands of the PLO collapsed after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon dispersed Palestinian fighting units across the Arab world. Increasingly, over the course of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Palestinians within Gaza and the West Bank began to confront the occupation themselves. The Israeli government recorded an escalation of “illegal acts” in the West Bank alone, rising from 656 “disturbances” in 1977 to 1,556 in 1981 and 2,663 in 1984.⁴⁵ Resistance within the occupied territory provoked heavy Israeli reprisals: mass arrests, intimidation, torture, humiliation. A proud people, the Palestinians found the humiliation hardest to bear. The loss of dignity and self-respect was compounded by the knowledge that their occupier saw them, in the words of the Islamist intellectual Azzam Tamimi, as “sub-human and not worthy of respect.”⁴⁶ Worse yet, Palestinians felt complicit in their own subjugation through their cooperation with the Israeli occupation. The fact that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were taking jobs in Israel and attracting Israeli customers to their shops implicated them in the occupation. Given that the Israelis were engaged in land confiscation and settlement building on occupied Palestinian land, cooperation with the Israelis felt more like collaboration. As the Palestinian scholar and activist Sari Nusseibeh explained, “The contradiction of using Israeli paint to scribble our anti-occupation graffiti was becoming so insufferable as to make an explosion inevitable.”⁴⁷ The explosion finally came in December 1987, sparked by a traffic accident near the Erez checkpoint in northern Gaza. On December 8 an Israeli army truck drove into two minivans carrying Palestinian workers home from Israel, killing four and wounding seven. Rumors spread throughout the Palestinian community that the killing was deliberate, raising tension in the territories. The funerals were held the next day and were followed by major demonstrations, which Israel troops dispersed with live fire, killing demonstrators. The killings on December 9 sparked riots that spread like wildfire across Gaza and into the West Bank, rapidly transforming into a popular uprising against twenty years of Israeli occupation. The Palestinians called their movement the “Intifada,” an Arabic word that means both an uprising and a dusting off, as though the Palestinians were shaking off the decades of accumulated humiliation through direct confrontation with the occupation. The Intifada began as an uncoordinated series of confrontations with the Israeli authorities. The demonstrators ruled out the use of weapons and declared their movement nonviolent, stone-throwing notwithstanding. The Israeli authorities responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. Israeli forces killed twenty-two demonstrators before the end of December 1987. Instead of quelling the violence, Israeli repression only served to accelerate the cycle of ad hoc protests and confrontations. In the opening weeks of the Intifada, there was no central leadership. Instead, the movement developed through a series of spontaneous demonstrations across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As Sari Nusseibeh recalled, it was a grass-roots movement in which “every demonstrator did what he thought best, and the more established leaders raced to catch up with him.”⁴⁸