The Second Palestinian Intifada A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle RAMZY BAROUD Foreword by Kathleen and Bill Christison Introduction by Jennifer Loewenstein Photographs by Mahfouz Abu Turk and Matthew Cassel Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI BBaroudaroud 0000 pprere iiiiii 226/4/066/4/06 008:05:128:05:12 First published 2006 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Ramzy Baroud 2006 The right of Ramzy Baroud to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 2548 3 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2547 5 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the United States of America by Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group BBaroudaroud 0000 pprere iivv 226/4/066/4/06 008:05:128:05:12 To Zarefah, Iman, and Sammy, my life’s inspiration BBaroudaroud 0000 pprere v 226/4/066/4/06 008:05:128:05:12 Contents Foreword by Kathleen and Bill Christison viii Preface xiii Acknowledgements xvii Introduction by Jennifer Loewenstein 1 1 The Intifada Takes Off (2000–01) 16 2 Intifada International (2002) 36 3 Calls for Reform (2003) 53 4 Profound Changes, Insurmountable Challenges (2004) 90 5 End of the Intifada? (2005) 120 Epilogue 158 Appendix I Total Deaths and Other Losses During the Second Palestinian Uprising 166 Appendix II Timeline of Events During the Second Palestinian Uprising: 2000–05 168 Notes 196 Recommended Reading 207 Notes on Contributors 208 Index 210 BBaroudaroud 0000 pprere vviiii 226/4/066/4/06 008:05:128:05:12 Foreword Kathleen and Bill Christison In a poignant piece included in this book, Ramzy Baroud tells the story of his grandfather, a refugee from the Palestinian village of Beit Daras who spent nearly 40 years until his death at a very old age in a Gaza refugee camp constantly listening to a transistor radio, hoping that someday it would bring the news that Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to their homes, lost in 1948 when Israel was created and 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes.1 Ramzy’s grandfather, like the Palestinian people themselves, lived in what might be called a state of suspended animation, wrapped in memory, holding before him a vision of Palestine that would never be recreated. His long but ultimately, for him, fruitless vigil symbolizes at once the tragedy of the Palestinian people and their great strength. A predominant, and perhaps the most salient, feature of the history of Zionism and the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state has been the Zionist effort to ignore—and therefore ultimately to erase from the political landscape—the Palestinian people who were native to the land that became Israel. Throughout the nearly 60 years since Israel’s creation and the Palestinians’ dispossession, and for the several decades before this when Zionism was gaining strength, Zionists and their supporters in the United States and Europe have made a concerted effort to dehumanize the Palestinians, render them invisible, and delegitimize them as true claimants to a national life in Palestine. From the Balfour Declaration pledging British support for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, at a time when Palestinians made up 90 percent of the population; through the United Nations decision 30 years later to partition Palestine and give the Zionists over half the territory for a Jewish state, when Jews constituted no more than one-third of the population and owned only 7 percent of the land; through the Palestinians’ decades of statelessness and displacement following 1948; to the Second Palestinian Uprising, the most recent of the Palestinians’ struggles to assert their right to independence and self-governance in their own homeland, Zionism has persuaded much of the world that the Palestinians’ presence in and claim to the land of Palestine are of no consequence. viii BBaroudaroud 0000 pprere vviiiiii 226/4/066/4/06 008:05:128:05:12 Foreword ix The effort to ignore Palestinians continues unabated, even into the twenty-fi rst century. As the years have passed, it has become ever easier for people the world over, as well as for politicians and policymakers, to forget the Palestinians because they do not constitute a state (or an effective political lobby), and, in a cruel vicious circle, the longer Palestinian national aspirations are ignored, the less their claim to any kind of national sovereignty is seen as legitimate. A body of assumptions and misconceptions has grown up, centering on the notions that Israel is the victim, that Palestinians have no rational basis for their hostility to Israel, and that the only real issue is Palestinian hatred of Jews and refusal to accept Israel’s existence. These very fundamental misperceptions have never been adequately challenged and, with the passage of time, have become more widespread and fi rmly entrenched. As misperception has built on misperception, it has become easier for Israel to justify pushing the Palestinians aside, ever more openly oppressing the whole Palestinian population, and for the world to look away. Each Palestinian uprising, each attempt to assert a national right, seems to strengthen an ever-growing belief that Palestinians have no inherent rights in Palestine and are driven only by hatred of Jews to contest what is widely thought to be the Jews’ inherent right to patrimony there. Few remember, because it is now inconvenient to remember, that Ramzy Baroud’s grandfather and 750,000 other innocent civilians were displaced nearly 60 years ago and that their descendants still live under oppression and in exile. The body of misperceptions surrounding the Palestinians has not simply grown haphazardly, but has been carefully shaped and nurtured by a skillful pro-Israeli propaganda machine that operates around the world but primarily in the United States. As a result, the U.S.—from the public to the media to politicians and policymakers— has completely bought into the images of Israelis as innocent victims and Palestinians as unworthy of more than secondary consideration. This set of images, and the political mindset that accompanies them, has grown cumulatively with time, gradually blotting out the historical record, blurring memory, and creating what passes for political reality, until the prevailing mindset has become so dominant that few challenge it. What was once a tacit U.S. acceptance of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem and its undemocratic dominance over the territories’ three million Palestinians has become under President George W. Bush an eager endorsement of Israel’s policies. The growing U.S. inability to view the confl ict from any but BBaroudaroud 0000 pprere iixx 226/4/066/4/06 008:05:128:05:12 x Foreword Israel’s perspective, and the Bush administration’s outright animus toward the Palestinians, have opened the door to unrestrained Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. If it was not clear before, it is now indisputable that Israel’s actions are designed, with U.S. concurrence, to erase the Palestinians as a people and a national entity. Israeli settlements encircle Palestinian towns and cities. Israeli roads cut through Palestinian agricultural land, separating one town from another and preventing any Palestinian growth. The separation wall winds through the West Bank, destroying or confi scating prime Palestinian agricultural land and fresh water wells, razing thousands of Palestinian olive trees, destroying Palestinian markets and halting commerce, demolishing homes, separating children from schools and adults from workplaces, totally severing East Jerusalem from the West Bank, leaving Jerusalem Palestinians with no hinterland and West Bankers with no capital and no religious or civic center. Israeli tanks occupy Palestinian cities; Israeli bulldozers demolish Palestinian homes; Israeli authorities confi scate Palestinian residency permits; most maps published in Israel depict the West Bank and Gaza as part of Israel. Gaza is caged and in ruins, worse than Dresden of 1945. The Israeli occupation army has demolished every Palestinian government and security headquarters building throughout the West Bank and Gaza, ransacked every Palestinian civilian ministry, even destroyed Palestinian census records and land registry records. What is the Israeli purpose here other than to erase all trace of Palestinian existence? The Palestinian–Israeli confl ict has gone beyond being a mere political problem, beyond the stuff of cool political debate. It is a human disaster that can no longer be treated with dispassion, no longer addressed by an equal weighing of rights and wrongs on both sides. The Israeli appropriation of the Palestinians’ land, livelihood, and very existence is terrorist violence, as surely as any suicide bombing is terrorism. The massive difference between the terrorism of the two sides, however, is that one employs a few youth to express an entire people’s rage through individual acts of murder, while the other employs the vast military power of a strong nation to smother another people. There is another critical difference: in international media coverage of