Living the Intifada
by Andrew Rigby,  Zed Books, London and New Jersey.
Paperback #10.95 or US$19.95, 233 pp.

As the Intifada has faded from the world news and attention has shifted to
the new Israeli Government and the next round of "peace" talks between Israel
and the Palestinians, Andrew Rigby's analysis of the Intifada as a day-to-day
experience is a useful investigation of how it has changed Palestinian life. 
As a member of the War Resisters International (WRI) and convener of its
Middle East Working Group, the author - who dedicates the book to his
Gandhian parents, Krishnammal and Jagannathan in the Sarvodaya movement in
South India - has tried to bring out what made the Intifada possible as a
form of unarmed resistance involving an entire population.  Although Andrew
Rigby is a lecturer in Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, his book
is very much based on numerous research trips to the OccupiedTerritories and
is full of personal anecdotes, backed up with a sound analysis of the
different groups that emerged during the Intifada and how they operated.

Written very much within the framework of Gene Sharp's magnum opus, The
Politics of Nonviolent Action, Andrew Rigby considers the organisation of the
resistance and the repression that followed, then goes on to analyse how the
Intifada was based on resistance through the role of education, economic
resistance and the media.  As a member of the WRI, he also worked closely
with Israeli peace groups so was able to include a chapter on their response
and finally in his conclusion to examine the limitations of the Intifada as a
movement of non-cooperation and other contradictions that he was aware of.

From the start, the author acknowledges that the Intifada - a word which
derives from the Arabic verb, Nafada, to "shake off" or "shake out" - was not
a nonviolent uprising but he argues that it was an unarmed form of
resistance, insofar as the tools of confrontation used by the Palestinians
have not been lethal, primarily stones and Molotov cocktails.

The other side of Gandhi's model of nonviolent resistance is the constructive
alternative and here the most fundamental characteristic of the uprising is
portrayed as an attempt to undermine and transcend the structures of
dependency which have tied Palestinians to Israeli rule both psychologically
and in other ways.  The Palestinian community on the West Bank and in the
Gaza Strip set out to create their own institutional structures separate from
those imposed by Israel.

Andrew Rigby's focus within this framework is therefore upon the relationship
between the two main forms of resistance: the confrontations with the
occupiers and the efforts to lay the foundations of an autonomous Palestinian
society.

The Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence was able to list eleven
types of alternative institutions that sprang up throughout the Occupied
Territories, but as the author points out, these forms of resistance got
sandwiched between the often brutal repression of the Israelis and faction
fighting among the ranks of the Palestinians themselves, particularly Islamic
fundamentalists who have rejected the leadership of the PLO and turned to
Hamas - the Islamic Resistance Movement, which published its charter in
August 1988.  Not surprisingly, by mid-1991, there were figures to indicate
that more Palestinians were being killed by their own people than by the
Israeli security forces and settlers.  After more than three years of largely
unarmed resistance, it was evident that a push would develop in the direction
of vertical escalation of the struggle through resort to increased violence.

Obviously the decision to refrain from using arms was clearly taken by the
leadership of the uprising for pragmatic reasons rather than any moral
revulsion against the taking of lives as such.  Palestinians know full well
that the resort to armed revolt would invite massive retaliation and
horrendous bloodshed on both sides.  On the other hand, it is easy to
understand why many Palestinians, especially young people, have found it hard
to maintain unarmed resistance in the face of total Israeli intransigence,
particularly as the Intifada only developed some forty years after the
creation of the State of Israel and twenty years after the Israeli occupation
of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Six Day War.

As in South Africa, the schools and universities were very much the centre of
consciousness-raising, strikes and demonstrations, against the oppressor, and
predictably for much of the time, the main centres - such as Bir Zeit
University - have been closed down.  This gave the opportunity for
alternative popular education programmes to be developed, like the Irish
hedge schools of the nineteenth century, but class-based community
differences made such programmes hard to implement, as well as adaptation of
the rather formal approach to education that existed for Palestinians prior
to 1987.

Civilian-based resistance to occupation aims to impose such a cost on the
occupier as to make the option of withdrawal more attractive than maintaining
the occupation, and one of the key areas for this struggle is in the economic
sphere.  Strikes and boycotts were a regular phenomenon of the Intifada along
with tax resistance.  At the constructive alternative level, there was a move
reminiscent of the Gandhian concept of Swadeshi when the Palestinians tried
to become more self reliant through simplifying their lifestyle and meeting
more of their own basic needs through their own efforts.  This in turn could
be seen as part of the ultimate transition of laying the economic basis for
an independent Palestinian state, the ultimate goal of the Intifada.

Communication in terms of reaching out to the world with images of the
struggle was crucial in portraying the occupier as transgressing those values
to which they ostensibly laid claim - democracy, respect for human life and
human rights.  These images would then sow the seeds of moral doubt in the
ranks of the oppressor and Israel's supporters around the world, and
certainly in the early days of the Intifada, the Israeli Government found
itself with a public relations disaster on its hands.  On the home front,
"the battle of the walls" as a form of political graffiti came to constitute
a fundamental part of the popular culture of the uprising.

In his conclusion, Andrew Rigby considers the contradictions of unarmed
civilian resistance.  He also concedes the unequal degree of intransigence
displayed by the Israeli Government which has been prepared to pay an
exceptionally high price to sustain its rule over the Occupied Territories.
Because the Intifada was predominantly an unarmed uprising rather than a
nonviolent uprising, the author argues that the twin dimensions of conversion
and coercion have tended to work in opposition to each other. He also
concedes the political and strategic realities of the self-interest of the
United States and the way in which the rest of the world has drawn a line
between the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq and the occupation of the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip since 1967.  On the positive side, there is the practical
experience of direct action which involves the exercise of the capacity for
self-management and mutual care in all spheres of life, unprompted by any
external state-like coercive agency.  One day, Palestine will reappear on our
maps, like Slovenia, Croatia and Ukraine, and as such a redrawing of the map
is not likely to come about through armed struggle on a large scale, the
experience of the Intifada will in the long run be seen as a step on the way
to independence, despite its temporary failure to achieve its immediate
goals.  In the meantime, Andrew Rigby's solid study will remain a useful
acquisition for students of nonviolent resistance and people power, with many
fascinating examples of nonviolent action to perhaps inspire others.
Peter D. Jones