The New York Times recently produced an obituary for Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist Ahmed Jibril, who was responsible for a series of airplane hijackings, kidnappings and murders in the 1970s and ’80s. While the article, penned by Alex Traub, did not obscure Jibril’s blood-soaked history, one passage in particular stood out:
Many commentators later described that event [the “Night of the Gliders”] as helping galvanize Palestinians at the outset of the First Intifada, or uprising, a period of rock-throwing protests against the Israeli occupation. Its immediate spark came about a month after Mr. Jibril’s attack, when an Israeli army vehicle killed four Palestinians at a refugee camp.” [emphasis added]
For years, the prevailing narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been characterized by a David versus Goliath paradigm, with downtrodden Palestinians facing a mighty Israeli military machine. Palestinian terrorists such as Leila Khaled are frequently the subject of romanticized coverage, depicted as icons or “Palestinian personalities” despite their documented incitement to murder innocent Israelis and destroy the Jewish state.
The First Palestinian Intifada was, arguably, when this distortion of reality began. Stirring images of rock-throwing youths facing armed Israeli troops and tanks were widely disseminated in media reports around the world.
But these pictures only told part of the story.
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While guns can be lethal, so too are rocks when hurled at cars or dropped from heights at passersby. Not that rudimentary weapons such as stones were the only ones deployed by Palestinians.
Neither were Israeli soldiers their only targets. Though media reports such as the NYT’s obituary tend to frame the First Intifada’s extreme violence as a form of “protest against the Israeli occupation,” as if Palestinians engaged only with Israeli soldiers, this is far from the truth. Between 1987 and 1993, more Israeli civilians were killed than troops and other security personnel (175 to 102).
From the very beginning of the Intifada, Israeli citizens were considered legitimate targets and many were attacked as they drove or walked through predominantly Arab areas. Most were unharmed, but media portrayals of the period almost invariably disproportionately focus on Palestinian youths armed with rocks and slingshots and not on their Israeli victims.
The Role of Terror Organizations in Directing the Intifada
When the Intifada broke out, an off-shoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was founded that sought to “liberate Palestine,” including modern-day Israel, and establish an Islamic state in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. After a few months, the organization was given a name: Hamas.
It swiftly rose to prominence during this time and one of its first terrorist attacks was the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers, Avi Sasportas and Ilan Saadon. A few years later in 1992 an Israeli border policeman, Nissim Toledano, was kidnapped on his way to his office in Lod. He was strangled and stabbed to death.
Another notable terror organization, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was also involved in the violence. The group masterminded several suicide attacks in Israel, including a suicide attack on a bus in 1989, when a PIJ terrorist killed 16 people after seizing the steering wheel of a bus and driving it off a steep cliff into a ravine in the region of Kiryat Ye’arim, located near Jerusalem.
In another PIJ attack at the height of the Intifada, a busload of Israeli tourists traveling not far from Cairo were ambushed by gunmen. Nine Israeli passengers and two Egyptians were killed in the carnage.
In short, the Intifada posed a far more serious threat to Israel than mere “rock-throwing protests,” as they were described by the Times. Over the course of six years, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza regularly participated in violent demonstrations and launched attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians alike.
According to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), tens of thousands of rock-throwing attacks took place during the first four years of the Intifada alone. There were also in excess of 3,600 assaults using Molotov cocktails, 100 hand grenade attacks and 600 incidents involving guns or explosives. Many thousands of Israelis — both soldiers and civilians — were injured.
Initially, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then headquartered in Tunis, was caught off-guard by the outbreak of violence. However, it swiftly moved to begin directing events through its role in the Unified Leadership of the Intifada (UNLI), which issued leaflets instructing Palestinian youth when and where riots should take place. Within nine months, the Arab League pledged to financially support the insurgency.
Intra-Palestinian Violence
Also often omitted from references to the Intifada are acknowledgments of the horrifying, large-scale intra-Palestinian violence. In fact, the leadership executed anyone suspected of collaborating with Israel. From 1989 to 1992, 1,000 Palestinians were shot, hacked to death with axes, stabbed, clubbed and burned with acid under this pretext.
Such extreme violence, perpetrated by Palestinians against their fellows, does not fit the simplistic David versus Goliath narrative that has been readily adopted by the media, and so news reports referring to the period rarely include mention of it.
Conclusion
The tendency of media outlets to focus on rock-throwing incidents while ignoring the thousands of attacks involving explosives, guns and bombs, as well as an apparent refusal to reference the violent riots that targeted Israeli civilians, serves to rewrite history. News organizations routinely describe rock-throwing elsewhere in the world as “rioting,”especially when petrol bombs are involved. By depicting attacks such as these against Israelis as mere “rock-throwing protests,” the media continue to excuse and romanticize extreme Palestinian violence.
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