Abstract:
The thesis questions accepted premises that emphasize an exclusive role for the state in
directing political change and the prevailing wisdom that the intifada was inherently violent.
The fundamental question posed is how, despite decades of a Palestinian policy of armed
struggle, nonviolent strategies of opposition to Israel's military occupation came to dominate
for more than two years in the early Palestinian intifada. The answer is found in the
eighteen-year period preceding the start of the December 1987 uprising, in the
implementation of a new political consensus constructed through three seminal
developments. (1) A Palestinian civil society was created under occupation through civilian
movements of social mobilization, led by committees which became the organizational base
for the intifada. (2) Activist intellectuals around Arab East Jerusalem questioned
monopolistic assumptions of armed struggle by advancing alternative ideas and symbols of
political compromise and negotiations, which affected the means for reaching talks with
Israel. (3) Knowledge and techniques from movements elsewhere in the world were
transmitted in the occupied territories, including the insight that Palestinian cooperation with
the occupation was sustaining it. Once the uprising began, the civil society achieved
defacto self-governance; activist intellectuals propagated ideas and guided the Unified
National Leadership Command; and resistance m ethods drew from tested techniques of other
nonviolent struggles and the mostly nonviolent Palestinian resistance of the 1920s and
1930s. The balance of power shifted away from the PLO, to those inside the territories,
where nonmilitary leadership networks had for almost two decades been disputing
monopolies of power and Truth based on armed struggle and basing their strategies on
pluralistic participation in civilian defence. Although some sectors, such as Hamas, resisted
the strategy, a critical mass understood the new dialectic of power, and the greatest
achievements of the intifada coincided with its most nonviolent phase.
