Fishing the World’s Memory Hole: The Second Intifada

21 min readMar 26, 2024

The Accusation The Settler Regime Is Brutal And Humiliating

The Failed Peace Process

On December 7, 1988 an historic breakthrough seemed to happen. Yasser Arafat, leader of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization ( PLO ), publicly announced that the PLO was renouncing terrorism and recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

Go deeper: 1988 NYT’s article covering Arafat’s announcement

While the suspicious allies, Israel and the US, reacted coolly at first, it seemed like possibly it could be the first real positive movement in the conflict between the Israeli Jews and the Arabs of Palestine in nearly 70 years.

By September 9, 1993, this first move had culminated in an historic exchange of agreements in which Israel and the PLO, recognized now as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, would be willing to negotiate with one another to achieve peace.

Go deeper: 1993 Declaration of Principles and Recognition of the PLO by Israel

Within just a few months after this exchange of principles, Palestinian guerilla forces began assaulting Israel with waves of terrorist attacks and martyr operations. Below is a list of just suicide bombings from 1994–1996,

A list of Palestinian sponsored suicide bombings inside Israel from 1994–1996, immediately following the Declaration of Principles and the beginnings of the Israeli / Palestinian Oslo peace process. Source: Wikipedia List of Suicide Bombings Inside Israel

This period of violence lasted for another year with a long tail trailing off into 1998 and 1999 before the Second Intifada began in earnest in 2000. This Baby Intifada in hindsight looks like rehearsal for the Second Intifada. Below is a picture of what the Baby Intifada looked like on the ground to Israelis living through it.

A bus destroyed by a suicide bomb in Jaffa in 1996. 2 were killed and 80 were injured.

Here is how the New York Times described what it was like to be an Israeli in 1994 just months after Israel had opened a serious peace process with the Palestinians,

A powerful bomb tore apart a crowded bus in the heart of Israel’s main commercial city today, killing at least 20 people and wounding 48 others in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Israeli history.
Believed by Israeli officials to have been carried by a Palestinian Islamic extremist on a suicide mission, the bomb packed such force that it sent people flying through the air, ripped bodies to pieces and reduced the bus to a charred, barely recognizable shell.
Initial reports said that 22 people were killed in the blast, but medical officials later scaled the death toll back to 20, The Associated Press reported.

Go deeper: The New York Times covers a 1994 suicide bombing in Tel Aviv

In an atmosphere where many Israelis were already suspicious of Yasser Arafat and the PLO, the continuing violence split Israeli society about the peace process. Rightwing elements felt Israel was being played, and the peace process was delivering it to its enemies for slaughter. The newly christened “Palestinian Authority’’ led by Arafat was either unwilling or unable to stop violent terrorist attacks against Israel. It appeared Arafat was letting other Palestinian groups run a terror mill under his nose while supposedly seeking peace with Israel.

The Palestinian terror led to an immediate response by people on Israel’s own radicalized right. Baruch Goldstein, a lone gunman, committed a grisly massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs near Hebron, killing 29 unarmed Muslim worshippers before being killed himself. The Palestinian terror attacks started before Goldstein performed his heinous act, but they were much boosted after it.

Convinced Rabin was betraying Israel, an Israeli rightwing gunman assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. In one anti-Zionist version of events, this killed any hopes for peace. In reality, the combination of continued Palestinian terrorism and Rabin’s assassination merely slowed Israel’s withdrawal of its presence from the West Bank. Peace negotiations continued, and in the year 2000 new Prime Minister Ehud Barak was more than willing to exchange land for peace, even agreeing with a proposal by Bill Clinton to give up parts of Jerusalem.

In the anti-Zionist narrative, Israel’s willingness to accept peace in 2000 was fake because the proposal did not rid the West Bank of settlements and checkpoints altogether. Again, in reality, the proposal offered compensatory land and a Palestinian chance to make counter proposals and negotiate away the more difficult land issues.

Yasser Arafat never made a single counter proposal; not a single one. He just walked away.

That is why the peace talks failed in 2000.

Why? What was that about? The United States and Israel had exposed a double game he had been playing and he had no other move left. His “acceptance of Israel’s right to exist” did not include accepting that Israel could be a Jewish state. The phrase “Israel’s right to exist” in his public communications was meant for Western ears, to gain sympathy by seeming to want peace and a two-state solution. On the side, he had been placating Palestinian factions and rejectionist Arabs by saying the PLO did not need to object to Israel’s mere existence because they could turn Israel into an Arab Palestinian state. That was his internal message, which was different from his message for Western ears.

To keep this promise to his domestic audience, he needed to deliver on the “right of return” for millions of descendants of the original displaced Palestinians from Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. It is something that no negotiated land swap could ever achieve, and a promise on which he could never deliver because it would require Israel to agree to its own destruction, in all but name.

When Arafat saw the generosity of the initial proposals, he knew his bluff had been called. To even negotiate over land proposals would put him in an increasingly bad position, as each concession Israel might make would clarify what his true aim was. So, he walked away.

By walking away without negotiating, Arafat could still make claims that it was a “bad deal” he could not possibly accept, saving face and providing anti-Zionism with more false ammunition to accuse Israel of sabotaging peace. Gullible leftists, already convinced Israelis are evil, and sympathetic Western liberals around the world would take him at his word.

Go deeper: The immovability of Palestinian rejectionism of the Jewish state

Anti-Zionists loudly reject this interpretation of events but they are wrong. There is very little doubt whatsoever about it. We know because Israel came back to the table with a similar but more generous offer in 2008, and the Palestinians rejected it again, again without making a counter offer. The new leadership of the Palestine Authority ( by this time, Arafat had died ) made it publicly clear what the issue really was. As Dror Yemini documents in the Go deeper link above,

But later on, the opposite happened. Olmert’s 2008 offer gave the Palestinians a plan similar to Clinton’s, and more generous than what was offered in Annapolis, with the addition of a symbolic right of return. In Condoleezza Rice’s book, No Higher Honor, she admits she was astonished when she first heard the details of Olmert’s generous offer, and was even more astonished the next day, when she heard the complete rejection of the offer, by Abu Mazen, who also explained: ‘I cannot tell four million Palestinians that they have no right of return.’ In an interview given by Abu Mazen on 29 May 2009 to Dixon Hill in the Washington Post, the Palestinian leader clarified that Olmert’s offer was rejected because ‘the gaps were too wide,’ and mainly because the Palestinians wanted more, especially mass refugee return.

Understanding the failure of the Oslo peace process is important to understanding the grave situation in the West Bank today. Very soon after Arafat walked away from peace in 2000, Palestinians started the Second Intifada, an extraordinary, five year long campaign of martyr operations, murder, and hate aimed by Palestinians at Israelis, directly leading to expansion of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the oppressive security regime in the West Bank the world sees now.

The Second Intifada

What is the purpose of the West Bank settlements? Why were they created the way they have been?

They have three uses: to accrue domestic political capital, as defense against Palestinian perfidy, and as an economic necessity.

The domestic political purpose: The Israeli hard right, mostly consisting of Jewish religious fundamentalists, wants all the land and to be rid of the Palestinians. Most of them seem to be motivated by religious belief and actually believe God gave that land to the Jewish people and ordered us to clear it. This is insanity. No one should support this activity.

Why is it supported or tolerated by other Israelis, then? To understand, we have to go back to the early 2000’s. At that time, at least half of Israelis supported a two-state solution, peace talks with the Palestinians were very serious and many Israelis hoped, despite setbacks, they possibly were close to success.

The main argument against the peace process, put forward by the hard liners on Israel’s right, was that the peace negotiations were a sham because the PA ( the Palestinian Authority, at that time the elected government of the West Bank ) couldn’t or wouldn’t control the Palestinians who wanted to fight. Most Israelis didn’t want to believe this, or at least thought it was worth risking.

Hard right leader Ariel Sharon thought he could prove it. He visited Al Aqsa mosque to show what would happen once the peace agreement was signed and Israeli security was in the PA’s hands.

Al Aqsa mosque is one of the holiest sites in Islam, and they prohibit Jews from visiting it, so it was a purposefully provocative act. However, Muslims built Al Aqsa on top of the ancient temple mount, where the ancient Jews built the early temple, which is the holiest site in Judaism, so Jews have always had a desire to go there.

Sharon was performing a purposefully provocative act, but it was non-violent and non-destructive. From a religious Jew’s perspective, it was an act of protest at Islam for building a mosque on top of the temple’s foundations and an act of defiance against Muslim prohibitions against Jews visiting the holiest site in Judaism. While every Israeli could recognize Sharon’s visit was a provocation, no Israeli would consider it a casus belli. It was a test.

Palestinians failed. What happened next was palpably evil and horrific. Palestinians started en masse blowing up hotels, buses, cafes, etc. while the Palestinian Authority did nothing. It showed they in fact were too weak to govern the violent factions of the Palestinian population, and were unwilling to risk their political positions for peace. This war was called the Second Intifada, and it only stopped years later, after thousands of Israelis were killed by Palestinians and thousands of Palestinians had been killed by the IDF, with a tremendous strengthening of the so-called “apartheid” system of checkpoints and settlements in the West Bank.

The world has flushed a few things about the Second Intifada down the memory hole, a terrible thing since it, as an event, is almost single-handedly responsible for the physical and security situation in the West Bank today.

The first thing is that it started at a time when Israelis and the world thought peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) were almost final, and the Oslo peace process was nearing completion. As part of the preparation for Palestinian independence, Israel had already withdrawn its troops from almost all the West Bank. The Palestinian people had, for a moment, the freedom they had been clamoring for decades to have, and the Israeli left was jubilant at being so near to having achieved lasting peace for both peoples.

The second thing is the scale of it. From 2000 when it began through 2005 when the new security regime went into place, at least 130 suicide bombings of buses, cafes, schools, hotels, bars, etc. occurred. To put this into perspective for American readers, adjusted for population it would be as if 4,550 suicide bombers came across the border from Mexico in a five year period, with the tacit approval of the Mexican government, which did nothing, just bombing the hell out of major cities across the American southwest and California, killing 35,000 Americans, almost all of them civilians.

The third thing is that Israelis didn’t know what it was about. I mean, there was nominally a trigger ( Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount and a sheik getting a turban knocked off his head in a scuffle there ), but there were no demands from the Palestinian side. Israel had already mostly withdrawn troops from the West Bank. Israel had already offered peace and an independent Palestinian state. Palestinians weren’t stating anything they wanted to make the violence stop. It was just violence for no purpose other than killing Israelis, and weakening the Israeli state as much as possible, apparently in hopes of destroying it. Israelis experienced it as pure, non-negotiable hate.

The fourth thing is that the Palestinian Authority (PA), the supposed government of the West Bank and the ones who were going to guarantee Israel’s security under the peace agreement, did nothing effective to stop the violence and egged it on in several ways. Worse, the Palestinian street had turned against the PA for even coming so close to making peace. It had no credibility or authority among its own people. Israelis asked themselves, “Who existed to even sign a peace treaty with?”

The violence and murder was not going to stop unless Israel stopped it. Israel built a wall to segregate themselves from the West Bank. Israel sent in the troops and established checkpoints to monitor movements, to make it hard to organize guerilla operations. Israel expanded the settlements, to create more pressure on the West Bank population and make the occupation more economically manageable. Israel began monitoring as much of the population as it could, to try to find out who was and was not planning to kill Jews. The Israeli political left, whose existence was predicated on the idea Palestinians would be willing to co-exist peacefully with Israelis, collapsed politically, completely discredited.

And that’s why and how the current physical and security situation between Israel and the West Bank came to be.

Now, anti-Zionists try to argue the settlements and checkpoints are the reason for Palestinian attitudes. They are not. They are the result of Palestinian attitudes. Israel’s government has an obligation to defend the lives of its citizens. The power of the anti-Zionist charges rests in the emotional strength of the visuals associated with these tactics, combined with the short memory of people in other parts of the world.

For Israelis, the problem is the second intifada was definitive proof that, for a large number of the Palestinians, the fundamental grievance is the very existence of a Jewish state on the land, and there is no one to negotiate with who is willing to protect Israel from that faction. Even if Israel signed a peace treaty with the Palestinian Authority, there is no one on the Palestinian side willing to jail or stop their own people who want to continue the fight to destroy Israel, and that’s a very substantial portion of their people.

So, the Palestinians proved the Israeli rightwing hardliners right in the eyes of Israelis. This collapsed the Israeli left and moved the political middle rightward, as no verbal arguments have any credibility in the face of the concrete violence Israelis faced as a result of Jewish feet touching Muslim ground.

I was one of those people who felt proven wrong. I was once really excited about the negotiations for a two-state solution and the prospect of finally having peace. Now I feel that was a very naive version of myself.

As a result of this rightward move inside Israel, I think there’s now no one on the Israeli side for Palestinians to negotiate with, either. For the rest of the world, they feel this is a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. For Israelis, it’s a war of survival against a substantial portion of the world’s two billion Muslims who are trying very hard to isolate them to destroy them.

Unfortunately, after the Second Intifada, the Israeli people’s belief in a two-state solution and the possibility of negotiating with Palestinians collapsed and has never recovered. This delivered the government over to a hard right coalition which includes religious zealots, and the settlements are one tool for placating them. Do the Palestinians want to change that political reality in Israel? Stop proving the religious zealots in Israel to be right about Palestinian intentions.

Go deeper: How the Second Intifada changed Israelis

The defensive purpose: The West Bank settlements, roads and checkpoints are designed purposely to isolate Palestinians on islands which restrict their movements and communications and make it difficult for them to organize guerilla activities. The settler/IDF force is a hybrid civilian/military battle deployment designed partly to punish Palestinians for what Israel experiences as their non-stop aggression, and partly to contain the Palestinians by preventing further martyr activities like the suicide bombings seen during the Second Intifada.

Effectively, the Palestinians on the West Bank are being treated like POWs, all of them, because they are suspected of being unprivileged combatants. But the goal is to contain the Palestinian violence to the settlement area, protect the rest of Israel, and perhaps ( long shot ) force a surrender in time. Israelis responded to the Second Intifada by taking the battle to the Palestinians by preventing them from taking the battle into Israel, as they had been doing.

And you know what? It works. Israel has mostly achieved its military goals with and for the settlement regime. Violence has largely been contained to the West Bank territory and spillage into greater Israel has been greatly reduced. Israel is possibly the first country which has figured out how to contain a guerilla force without actually slaughtering most of the people harboring the guerilla fighters.

The economic purpose: To stop the Second Intifada, Israel needed to re-occupy the West Bank and contain the population. Unfortunately, there would be no foreseeable end to this occupation and a traditional occupation would be very expensive. Israel is a developed country and economically well off compared to some of its neighbors ( unless those neighbors have oil ), but in absolute terms it is not a wealthy country. The cost of an indefinite traditional occupation of the West Bank would be prohibitive for a small country like Israel. However the sort of hybrid civilian/military force it has deployed through the settlement regime allows it to run a checkpoint system economically, without having to have a continual presence inside the Palestinian portions of the West Bank. The settlements only comprise 3% to 4% of the West Bank territory, and the IDF can concentrate their forces around these settlements. Rather than an economic drain, the settlements themselves can be economic assets for Israel.

In short, the West Bank is not traditional “occupied territory”. It is a battlefield with a lid on it. It is the latest phase in a war between populations, one of which is a guerilla force and one of which is a uniformed force ( using cooperative civilians on its own side ) tasked with keeping the battle on the enemy’s land and out of its own land. And it is a battlefield for a larger Jewish struggle spanning multiple generations of combatants, of both sexes and all ages. And the battle itself has been going on for more than one hundred years with no end in sight. Many of the methods by both sides fall outside the Rules of War, which were written to govern entirely different sorts of conflicts. There is not much precedence for this type and no good rules to govern it.

Crazy Israelis, Crazy Palestinians and Fatalism

No honest observer will deny both Israel and the Palestinians have factions of dead enders, those people within their populations who positively want to fight it out no matter what. The Israelis have biblically motivated ultra-orthodox who legitimately want to re-establish the boundaries of biblical Israel and maybe beyond. The Palestinians have an even larger faction who want to redemptively conquer Israel, retake the land, murdering, driving out and subjugating Jews and their “collaborators”.

I am a Zionist. I am pretty deeply knowledgeable about the history of tit-for-tat violence between all sides to the conflict, and I feel morally secure taking Israel’s side in saying they are doing the best they humanly can in a very difficult situation. I am quite aware of the ways anti-Israeli forces like to play up or exaggerate Israeli tits while hiding or downplaying Palestinian tats.

By saying this, I am not ever saying Israel is innocent of all provocation, of all crime or of all cruelty. Israelis are a large group of humans under violent pressure, and have bad factions which drive harmful policy and moments in which darkness controls their actions. I am just trying to cut to what I think is the heart of it, which is even if you take away all the darkness Israelis sometimes show, it doesn’t satisfy the Palestinian desire for justice before Allah. They want something more, which Israelis can never give.

For me, the difference is the crazy Muslims are the ones who are controlling the collective action on the Arab side, while the crazy Jews are ( for the time being ) just being used by other Israeli factions who would, if they had their way, prefer peace. I am aware the crazy Jews are having babies like crazy and gaining influence and power over time, which is a bad omen. But they don’t control things yet and never have in the past.

All rational observers agree ( I think ) a major, major problem is both sides have elements who are willing to sabotage any peaceful co-existence. If we differ among ourselves, it is how we view the possibility of controlling the crazies. The crazy Jew dream of re-establishing the boundaries of biblical Israel by war is not widely shared within Israel. The overwhelming Israeli collective dream is to one day live a quiet, safe, peaceful, everyday life in their homeland. If that day ever came, Israeli tears of joy would flow like rivers. It is probably impossible to get Israel to dismantle all the settlements, but some of them could be and certainly their expansion can be stopped. In short, the vast majority of Israelis look at the crazy Jews like they are crazy but maybe useful in a fight. If there’s no fight, the crazies lose a lot of their power.

I believe among Arabs the crazy Muslim dream of driving away, murdering and subjugating Jews to redemptively take back the land is pretty widely sympathized with, even by people who would not die for it themselves. In short, I believe the vast majority of Palestinians look at the crazy Muslims as crazy, but think they have a good point and hope maybe they’ll succeed somehow. They hope so in a way few Israelis hope the crazy Jews would ever succeed in their crazy ambitions. I don’t think Palestinians who aren’t in the fight themselves have any real desire to control the ones who are, and I also think the ones who are in it are a pretty big plurality ( maybe close to 50% ).

If you are an Israeli worried about threats to your children, that’s a big difference in the powers of the crazies.

But the key point rational observers probably disagree about most is the role of Jihadism. Going back all the way to the 1920’s and Mohammad Amin Al-Hussayni, Nazi collaborator and leader of the Arab resistance to Zionism, the Arab violent factions have framed their war explicitly as a religiously motivated one which does not permit compromise. Al-Hussayni called his paramilitary soldiers “fedayeen”, which is Arabic for “One who sacrifices himself for Allah”. This was just an older name for Jihadist holy warrior.

From 1919 on, they called themselves “fedayeen” and organized around the religious call until the PLO was established, when the Soviet Union advised them to tamp down the religious rhetoric to appeal more to Western leftists. As soon as the Soviet Union went into decline, fedayeen and holy war re-emerged under different names: Intifada, Jihadist, Jihad and Islamism. All of the violent “resistance” groups on the Palestinian side are explicitly Islamist in this way.

The issue with such “resistance” is its core objection is to Israel’s existence itself. They consistently say Jewish sovereignty is an affront to Islam, rather than just a material change in conditions for Palestinians to which they could adjust. If the problem is the presence of non-subjugated Jews on what they view as Islamic land, then they are after a kind of religious justice Israel cannot satisfy with any bargaining chip.

Unlike the rest of the world, Israel hears them and takes them at their word. Negotiation only works if each side can compromise, but ( on the Israeli side ) no one can compromise about their very existence and ( on the Palestinian side ) no one compromises on what they think is a God-given mission to destroy an enemy who has wronged them in front of God.

It is legitimately tough. It leaves Israel without many good options, and it leaves Israelis pretty fatalistic about what they can do. It just does. There’s no “meeting them half-way” in this thing. It just looks like either all out war or violence suppression ( through occupation or other means ) as far as the eye can see. It would require drastic cultural change on the Palestinian side to even be able to have a meaningful negotiation.

Many supporters of “Palestine” in the West simply do not want to honestly grapple with this truth. It is a core error in moral judgment on their side. They want to believe this is just a conflict about material conditions which can be satisfied by material concessions or change. They are engaged in fatally magical thinking.

The Sad Truth

Are the Israelis committing war crimes? Yes, sadly they occasionally are. The IDF sometimes harasses or beats Palestinians. They overuse administrative detention, which is arrest and detention without charge. They are sometimes using more force on suspected combatants than necessary. They are at times acting out of petty anger and revenge, such as with the way they restrict the water supply in Area C of the West Bank.

And so are the Palestinians, when they can. It is just that the Palestinians get to call their war crimes “resistance” and they can’t do it as often because the battle is going against them.

It is all just ugly and stupid.

These things happen in all struggles like this and this one is deeper and more personal than most.

In my opinion, Netanyahu has made the abuses worse and the IDF/settler union more aggressive. I cannot express how much I hate Netanyahu and what he and his supporters have done to Israel, much less to the Palestinians. There is no good reason for a Zionist to defend Netanyahu and the cadre of zealots he has allied himself with to stay out of jail.

This is why Palestinians are scared. This is why they get hurt. They live on a battlefield created in response to the Second Intifada and which is designed to keep the violence on their land.

If the pro-Palestinian forces were protesting, “Down with Netanyahu! Prosecute IDF abuse!” I’d be completely behind them. I’d be on the front lines of the demonstrations.

But they’re not. They are saying Zionism is racism, that Jews are the new Nazis, that Palestine must be free from the river to the sea. In polls of Palestinians, Marwan Barghouti is consistently the runaway winner in a hypothetical election of a Palestinian leader. Barghouti was the leader of the Intifadas and he is currently in an Israeli jail serving a prison sentence for murder. They are saying, “Curse all the Jews.” They are harassing Jews in other countries, who are not on the battlefield. They are promoting every hateful antisemitic trope which was ever created, and laughing about it.

You know what they’re not doing? They’re not trying to negotiate an end to the battle of the West Bank, much less the larger war with Israel. They are not saying the Palestinians should disarm and surrender, forsake their guerilla war, and live side-by-side with Israeli Jews. There are no “New Historians” of Palestinian history, teaching them about their crimes. The Palestinians are arming themselves and want more war. They are glorifying “martyrs” and supporting leaders who promise them more violence. They are banking on undercutting Western support for Israel, weakening it, and then taking Israel when it is weak and isolated.

I’d like not to have a war. That doesn’t seem to be a choice on the menu.

If we’re going to have war, I’d like to have one without war crimes. But this whole war is predicated on one massive war crime of Palestinian perfidy and incitement to genocide, and that’s going to spawn more war crimes. Perfidy is literally designed to require war crimes from the other side.

So it’s going to be a bloody, long, awful war unless the UN or someone else intervenes to move the Palestinians in Gaza out of Gaza, and the fake refugees in the West Bank out of the West Bank. And I don’t see that happening.

What else isn’t going to happen is Israel isn’t going to lay down its arms and allow several million Hamas supporters to roam free as equals throughout its streets. They’re going to stay on the battlefield on the outskirts of the country.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. Zionism, Arab Feudalism, and the Tragedy of the Serfs

10. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine