The Uprising in Palestine

Abstract

Resistance by the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza has taken various forms during the nearly twenty-one years of Israeli occupation. The scale and character of the present uprising, however, are distinctly new, bearing the familiar earmarks of a people's struggle for national liberation. A sense of the magnitude of the revolt as well as the intensity of the repression can be gathered from the resulting death toll. In just the first nine months of the uprising, 221 Palestinians were killed. (The New York Times, August 19, 1988) Relative to the size of the population, this is equivalent to 38,800 in the United States—or 82 percent of the number of Americans killed in battle during the almost nine years of the Vietnam War. Reliable data on the wounded and imprisoned are not available. But it is clear that thousands were wounded by bullets, beatings, and tear gas. As of the end of June, it is estimated that there were more than 6,000 West Bank and Gaza Palestinians held in detention. Proportionately, this is as if a million protesters had been placed in U.S. prison camps.

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