Sometimes time folds in on itself like a fan, and you find yourself looking back at an event in your life 35 years ago, as if it happened this morning. In 1988 I found myself in the middle of the First Intifada in East Jerusalem. We’d crossed the border from Jordan into the West Bank, to see the sights of the Holy Land. Our Christian Palestinian hostel had a crucifix on the bedroom’s otherwise bare walls.
The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was a protest against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, seized in 1967 during the Six Day War, and occupied in contravention of international law. The Palestinians there are subject to military law while their Jewish neighbours enjoy full rights as Israeli citizens.
The uprising was triggered after a settler vehicle crashed a car carrying four Palestinians, killing them all, at Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian demonstrations swiftly descended into riots. The world turned its attention to the Palestinian boys caught throwing stones and molotov cocktails. News cameras filmed them pinned down by Israel soldiers, who broke their limbs with rifle butts. Then the Israeli government banned the press from the West Bank and Gaza and, years before the internet, the world looked away.
This wasn’t a few soldiers going feral, it was a widespread practice, alleged to be an official “break-their-bones” policy against stone-throwers.
When I got back to Britain there was scant interest in my story. Broken boys were old news. My article was published in the now defunct magazine City Limits. Here’s an edited extract.
Extract (edited) from City Limits
Nidal
Just before I arrived, 16-year-old Nidal Rabadi was riding his bike to his schoolfriend’s house in Beit Hanina outside Jerusalem, when he was shot. A group of children was stoning an Israeli bus when the occupants – soldiers or settlers – fired into the crowd. The bullet in Nidal’s lung killed him.
Nidal was the first Palestinian to die in Jerusalem. He was a Christian, a pupil at the Roman Catholic College des Freres in Jerusalem’s Old City, where he also lived.
Nidal’s family took his body home against the orders of the police. But as the soldiers arrived to seize the corpse, the Old City’s boys – both Christian and Muslim – spirited it away through the alleys and over rooftops. Nidal was buried four hours later.
On the day of his memorial mass, troops barred entry to the Old City. After the Damascus gate reopened a few hours later, a demonstration took place. The army tear-gassed the streets until mid- afternoon and some 20 boys were arrested.
Ahmed
I’m sitting in the front room of a family whose son Ahmed was beaten up by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). We are joined by Ahmed’s friends and their fathers. We talk to the sound of a demonstration in the street outside.
Ahmed, 15 years old, shows me his right forearm. It has two nine-inch scars running down either side, the result of two operations and 50 stitches. Soldiers stopped him on the street at nine one night and asked for his ID card.
“They beat me for half an hour,” he says. His arm was broken in three places. He was not charged with any offence.
Abdullah
Sitting on the floor next to him, Ahmed’s friend Abdullah tells me he was picked up earlier this year, accused of throwing stones. He had just turned 14 at the time and he is small for his age. He spent four days in solitary confinement during questioning. His father, who has a shop in the market, nods in agreement.
“They hit me like this,” says Abdullah, miming having his head banged against the wall. “They hit me very much and with some big sticks. They hit me with the soldier’s radio on the back of my head. I had my foot in plaster for two months.”
“Have a look,” says his father, “you can still see the swelling.”
“After four days I sleep in a room with 13 beds and 80 boys,” Abdullah tells me. “All the night they come, 10, 11 police and hit me. They put a sack on my head with shit in it. They took my head and put it in hot water, then in cold water, then they beat us in a room. Then they took me to jail near Natania.”
He stayed there for two months and later received a two-year suspended sentence. His brother has been in jail for four months and goes to court in another two months’ time.
Fear on the Streets
The narrow dirt streets of Old Jerusalem are no longer safe for Palestinians. I notice soldiers on the corners harassing Arabs as they struggle past.
A house that bridges El-Wad, the main drag through the Muslim Quarter that joins Damascus Gate to Al-Aqsa Mosque, is festooned with Israeli flags and heavily guarded by soldiers. It was bought by Ariel Sharon, Government minister and.Likud Party member. Sharon visits this Israeli enclave once a week.
There’s an informal curfew In operation. “I don’t go out at night,” says a middle-aged shopkeeper. “I might get provoked or attacked by the soldiers.”
“My friend had an ID card that was a little torn on the top and they beat him up for it” says a student. “But if you’ve got an ID card from the [refugee] camps then you’ve had it!”
Another shopkeeper shows me his swingeing tax bill for £11,000. As part of the civil resistance, Palestinians are withholding their taxes. The Israeli response is the seizure of property, and the loss of identity card and travel permits.
The Shop Strike
We talk in a small cafe to the sound of shop shutters outside rattling down marking the start of that day’s trading strike. The shops are open only three hours a day. The soldiers have given up trying to keep them open. Israeli goods are boycotted. Guidance on the strikes and demonstrations comes in an illicit bulletin that everyone seems to have access to. But none of the Intifada leadership has been caught.
The timeline
Gaza and the refugee camps were worse hit by the Israeli army action. According to Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, it claimed the lives of 1,307 Palestinians (including 237 children). There were over 175,000 arrests.
This was only one place and at one point in a timeline that goes back a century. We can trace the conflict we see now to 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza: back further to the creation of Israel in 1948 with the forcible clearance of Palestinians in a process known as the Nakba.
Despite the carnage, a peace was agreed, brokered by then US President Bill Clinton and enshrined in the Oslo Accords of 1995.
The Israeli signatory to Oslo, then-premier Yitzhak Rabin, was killed with two shots to the lungs in November 1995, while he was on stage at an event celebrating the peace, before a crowd of 100,000. The assassin, a Jewish Israeli right winger called Yigal Amir, is currently serving a life sentence for the crime.
The death of Rabin killed off the peace and the terms of the Oslo Accord were never fully met.
The Second Intifada, from September 2000 to January 2005, cost 3,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli lives The aggression was more violent than in the First Intifada with use of tanks and bombings on the Israeli side, meeting suicide bombings and rocket attacks from the Palestinians.
The Israeli government launched the action Operation Summer Rain in June 2006 to avenge the deaths of two soldiers. 416 Palestinians including 58 children were killed.
Having formed in 1987, the Islamic fundamentalists Hamas took over Gaza in 2007. The response was the current Israeli and Egyptian blockade lasting 16 years so far, that has created an open air prison for Gaza’s 2.3mn inhabitants including 1mn children.
In the Israeli action Operation Cast Lead of 2008, over 1400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
These are some of the episodes of extreme violence since the First Intifada. They have taken place against a constant background of aggression that generates fear and retaliation. The invasion of mosques, the fence at the West Bank, the military checkpoints, and on both sides the missiles and rockets, and random killing of civilians. There’s also the stress on 2.3mn people, hemmed into the Gaza Strip for 16 years.
These are some of the episodes of extreme violence since the First Intifada. They have taken place against a constant background of aggression that generates fear and retaliation. The invasion of mosques, the fence at the West Bank, the military checkpoints, and on both sides the missiles and rockets, and random killing of civilians. There’s also the stress on 2.3mn people, hemmed into the Gaza Strip for 16 years.
In recent years, the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank has gathered pace. Palestinian land and homes are seized and Arabs are evicted. Jerusalem has seen repeated incursions by Israelis into the Al Aqsa mosque.
In recent weeks, the atrocities by both sides make peace even more remote. Since 7 October, 4,600 Palestinians have been killed in retaliation for the deaths of 1,400 Israelis and the taking of 212 Israeli hostages, according to the Guardian.
Hamas, who want an Islamic pan-Palestine, and Netanyahu’s Likud party, who want a Jewish greater Israel, both prefer to fight their holy wars of extremes to take sole possession of the Holy Land. Luckily, not everyone supports the extremists.
The only way that escalation can go is a regional war: Israel (read US) against Iran (read Russia).
* Some names have been changed.
