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First Intifada

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Muntaha Aqel grew up among “the children of the rocks” of the First Intifada, and lived her life in service of her people’s liberation.

“The first Intifada was a struggle to end Israeli occupation by establishing an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories,” political scientist Ian Lustick writes. “I supported that struggle. Tragically, it failed. Three decades and half a million settlers later, that objective is no longer attainable. The BDS movement has effectively taken its place as a grassroots popular movement, based on an absolute commitment to nonviolence, a long-term strategy, a fundamental commitment to equality, and insistence on the realization of Palestinian rights, rather than calling for a specific kind of institutional arrangement.”

Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli soldiers in solidarity with Gaza Strip and Jerusalem near the Hawara checkpoint south of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus on May 15, 2021. (Photo: Stringer/APA Images)

Palestinians disconnected from each other have struggled immensely to maintain a national project with clear objectives. Now, struggling together across the entire geography of historic Palestine, the disintegrated parts of our body are coming back together.

Bari Weiss says antisemites convinced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to back out of a Rabin memorial. AOC actually was concerned with Rabin’s human rights record. But she and her supporters now join the “three-headed dragon of modern anti-Semitism” living in Bari Weiss’s imagination. And in Weiss’s perspective of sacred Jewish victimhood, defamation and dishonesty are no vice when fighting the enemies of the Jews.

The Gaza protests will mark their one-year anniversary in 2 weeks, with real political potential for the Palestinian struggle. Gaza has always been a crucible for political movements in part because its population has such a high percentage of refugees of the Nakba in 1948. Helena Cobban traces the history.

Palestinian activists of the First Intifada believed they would succeed in achieving their national rights. “Our leadership was aligned with our demands and suffered alongside us,” Nadia Naser-Najjab recalls. “There was no elite class benefiting from the colonial power.” She says Palestinian leadership must challenge colonialism, not cooperate with it.