As the Palestinian people commemorate the 34th anniversary of the launch of the great Palestinian popular uprising, they continue to confront the machinery of oppression, siege, repression and arrest on a daily and hourly basis. The Palestinian people defy racist Zionist colonialism throughout occupied Palestine, yearning for return, liberation and dignity, and continuing their valiant resistance despite all obstacles and challenges.

Today, on the anniversary of the glorious popular Intifada of 1987, which constituted a new milestone of struggle on the path to liberation and the history of the Palestinian national liberation movement. It remains an inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge and revolution, as the Palestinian people stand before that important stage, drawing from it lessons upon lessons, passed down from generation to generation of the Palestinian and Arab people. The great Palestinian popular Intifada is a source of pride and strength for all of humanity. Beginning on 8 December 1987, the Intifada was a natural outcome of a long revolutionary experience of struggle in combatting the Zionist occupation since 1948.

The popular uprising expressed the determination and will of a struggling people willing to sacrifice and contribute in order to extract their national and human rights. It revealed the maturity and momentum of the Palestinian liberation movement at all levels, especially through the women’s movement, labor movement and student movement. The Palestinian people’s boundless ability for popular organization and creativity flourished in the Intifada, creating a national alternative and building a national resistance economy. The Palestinian people showcased their skill and expertise in managing their civil and collective affairs, leading their agricultural, industrial, medical, educational, sports and cultural institutions and imposing popular authority in villages, camps and cities through the formation of Popular Committees and Protection Committees, whose reference was the masses. These committees were led by reliable revolutionary cadres and national leaders, foremost among them liberated prisoners with credible histories and experiences of struggle.

The Palestinian prisoners’ movement played an important role in leading and directing the popular uprising inside and outside the prisons. The liberation of 1,150 prisoners in 1985 in an exchange process between the Palestinian resistance and the Zionist state played a major role in the return of hundreds of revolutionary cadres from the prisons to the fields and spaces of popular, cultural, union and armed struggle. The prisoners’ movement transformed prisons and detention centers into revolutionary schools that received young adults, students and youth and bid them farewell to enhance the experience of the new generation and its leading role in struggle, especially as the occupation arrested and imprisoned tens and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, mostly youth.

The role of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement was not limited to leading daily tasks of struggle in developing and sustaining the flame of the popular uprising, but it also presented hundreds of important documents and studies written inside prisons in the experience of revolutionary work. The prisoners contributed to strengthening Palestinian national culture and transforming it into a weapon of revolutionary awareness and deep knowledge that took root from the culture of steadfastness in the dungeons of interrogation and the values of collectivity and social and human solidarity.

To the same extent that the Palestinian prisoners’ movement embraced the Intifada and guided and reinforced its action, the Palestinian people outside embraced the prisoners’ movement and considered the cause of the prisoners a critical daily and permanent issue of struggle.

Today, 34 years after the outbreak of the popular Intifada, we also remember the prisoners who are still detained who entered Zionist jails before this date, such as the leading strugglers Karim Younes, Nael Barghouthi and Walid Daqqa, and the martyrs of the prisoners’ movement in the occupation prisons and their revolutionary leadership, as we recall the internationalist Lebanese struggler Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, jailed in French prisons since 1984. We urge ongoing and escalating work to organize for their liberation, taking up the responsibility to expose the crimes of the occupation against the Palestinian prisoners in the racist Zionist colonial prisons.

Today, we reaffirm our rejection of all official policies of the Palestinian leadership that undermine the role and position of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, and the agreements that squandered their sacrifices and the achievements of the popular Intifada — especially the Oslo accords of 1993 and the devastating annexes and agreements that followed. These “agreements” have inflicted great damage upon the Palestinian people’s cause and struggle, including the prisoners’ movement.

Today, we also reaffirm that the Palestinian prisoners will remain the solid core of the resistance and the true leadership of the Palestinian liberation struggle in Palestine, on the front lines defending the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and the liberation of the land and people of Palestine from the river to the sea.

As we mark the 34th anniversary of the great Palestinian popular Intifada, which launched from Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza on 8 December 1987, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network salutes the ongoing struggle of the Palestinian prisoners, on the front lines behind bars, and the entire Palestinian people, inside and outside Palestine, on the continuing road to liberation and return. The steadfastness of the Palestinian prisoners is perhaps exemplified in the courage of the Freedom Tunnel self-liberators, who despite decades of imprisonment, continue to fight for freedom for themselves and for their land and people. 

The Intifada is not only a historical moment but an ongoing liberation struggle and an example to the world of the full mobilization of the people for justice and freedom. We join with the Masar Badil (Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement) in calling for a conference of Palestinian students in 2022 and the Week of Palestinian Struggle in May. Below, we are republishing an edited version of our 2020 statement on the Intifada anniversary. We are also providing two resources below: “Ansar III,” a historical documentation effort of the detention of Palestinians during the Intifada; and a collection of posters of the Intifada.

Launched by the murder of four Palestinian workers, mowed down by an Israeli occupation army truck in Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza, Palestinians took to the streets in massive numbers on 8 December 1987, building their movement, collectives and institutions, uniting around the messages of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, boycotting Israel and practicing all elements of popular struggle and collective resistance. Women, youth and workers played a central role in leading the intifada, organizing committees in every village, town and city to mobilize all efforts for a revolutionary society conceived in resistance to colonialism.

The Intifada not only unified Palestinians inside Palestine, but also those in exile and diaspora. It was the power of the Intifada that broke the siege of the refugee camps of Lebanon and sparked large-scale organizing in Palestinian communities around the world as well as a major upsurge in Palestinian solidarity organizing.

Of course, the Intifada was also met with vicious repression: mass imprisonment, vicious torture under interrogation, and Yitzhak Rabin’s infamous “breaking bones” policy. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were detained and imprisoned by occupation forces during the Intifada, over 120,000 wounded and hundreds killed.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – some estimates reaching up to 600,000 – were detained, and tens of thousands subjected to ongoing imprisonment by Israeli occupation forces during the Intifada.

There, they experienced severe torture under interrogation, harsh conditions of confinement, medical neglect and abuse, collective punishment and home demolitions targeting their families, brutal beatings and mistreatment and the widespread and systematic use of administrative detention, imprisonment without charge or trial. 

In a failed attempt to suppress the Intifada, the Israeli occupation launched new prison camps and detention centers to hold the thousands of Palestinians detained in mass arrests throughout occupied Palestine. Palestinian prisoners continued their resistance and their intifada behind bars, building and deepening the “revolutionary schools” from which emerged so many brilliant young organizers.

The Intifada continued despite the threatening international conditions – from the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc states, the threat of US imperialism dominating a unipolar world, to the first Iraq War and the attack on Arab self-determination.

It was also in this context that the Intifada, the sacrifices made by the Palestinian people and their accomplishments, were confiscated by a sector of the Palestinian ruling class in alliance with U.S. imperialism and Arab reactionary regimes, through first the Madrid conference and then to the Oslo accords signed in Washington, D.C., in 1993. This liquidationist “peace process” was an attempt to transform the revolutionary aspirations of the Palestinian people into a mere self-rule project adjacent to Zionist colonialism.

The vision of the Intifada has never been defeated, denied or suppressed. It lives on – just as it has for decades upon decades, in uprising after uprising. In Palestine, in the refugee camps, in exile and diaspora, and in every city of the world and every struggle for justice where the Palestinian flag remains a blossom of revolutionary hope, inspiration and vision for a liberated future.

On the 34th anniversary of the continuing Intifada, in honour of all those who sacrificed and fought for freedom, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network pledges to continue the struggle – until return, until liberation, from the river to the sea.

The following historical booklet, published in English in 1988 by ROOTS and Friends of Palestinian Prisoners, focuses on one such prison camp: Ansar III, “a barbed wire compound in the heart of the Negev desert.” At the time of the booklet’s publication, Janet Jubran of the Friends of Palestinian Prisoners noted in her introduction, “In one year, since the Intifada began, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been arrested. At this moment, nearly every family has one or more of its members in prison.”

Download the PDF of “Ansar III”

View the booklet:

https://samidoun.net/site/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/AnsarIII.pdf

Posters of the Great Palestinian Intifada

The posters below convey only a portion of the creativity, vision and collective power of the continuing intifada, inside Palestine, among Palestinians in the camps, in exile and diaspora and among Arabs and internationalists. Most below are republished from the Palestine Poster Project: