RESISTANCE

It was some time until the indigenous Palestinian people ruled by the Ottomans, could realise how much of a threat the Zionist immigration would become in the future. Such arrogance, in the shape of large-scale expoliation and evictions, was probably unforeseeable.

Opportunist  landlords, a lack of political traditions of their own and the British occupation context restricted the Palestinian society's defence capacity when the threat became obvious through the first discriminations and expropriations. However, the first people's uprising happened in 1936 ruthlessly crushed by the British and the Zionist armed militias working together.

It took about a generation for the Palestinian people to recover from the Nakba trauma and the creation of the State of Israel. The Palestine Liberation Organisation was formed in 1964 later to be led by Yassir Arafat. Not only a political organisation, the PLO was supposed to be a blueprint for the Palestinian state to come, hosting several institutions and all political forces represented in a parlament in exile. The scope was a secular Palestinian state on all the territory where Palestinians of all religions even Jews of zionist immigration extraction, which implied the desmantlement of the state of Israel.

The PLO – a full-right member of the Arab League – endeavoured for many years a  diplomatic action alongside with armed resistance against Israel.

Meanwhile life was getting worse in the West Bank and Gaza strip. The whole people rose as one against the occupation forces in 1987 in what became known as the first Intifadah -uprising. The Intifadah showed to the world the Palestinian willingness to defy the occupation, the Israeli army's savagery and the Western powers' laissez-faire. World sympathy grew for the Palestinian people, while until then it had rather been a matter of the Arab countries and progressive intellectual circles of the Western world.

The Intifadah lasted for five years. Peace talks were held in Madrid -1991- and Oslo -1993- and reached their peak when the Oslo peace agreements were signed to grant some home-rule to some areas of the territories occupied in 1967, West Bank and Gaza strip.

However these agreements were never to be implemented. Israel carried on building settlements on Palestinian territories to be self-governed, tearing down houses, destroying fields and olive groves, diverting the scarse West Bank water resources to Israel and so on.

On September 28th, 2000, war criminal Ariel Sharon's visit  to the Dome of the Rock was responded as the provokation it was meant to be. It has been one spark for the Second Intifadah - also named Al-Aqsa Intifadah, in reference to Jerusalem's main mosquee and worldwide symbol of the Islam faith.

After the Sep. 11th  '01 attacks on the New York Twin Towers, the Palestinian people have to face a harsher repression, due to Bin Laden's instrumentalisation of the Palestinian conflict and the Western propaganda misleading confusion of these two phenomena.