Word: intifadas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Yasser Arafat and his urbane negotiators are not the Palestinians who waged the last intifada - and that fact may be a key to understanding the inner workings of the current uprising. While it's widely recognized that Arafat may not be able to stop the current rebellion even if he chose to, what's less commonly recognized is that this is not simply because the next generation of intifada-ists who have taken up the stones of their older siblings will be disinclined to accept the old man's leadership. Every popular uprising, after all, has a leadership...
...Many of those who led the last intifada believe it was their efforts that saved Arafat and the PLO and made the peace process possible, and yet there's widespread resentment in their ranks at being sidelined politically once the exiled leaders arrived home...
...sure, it's unlikely that Chairman Arafat's headquarters would have moved from Tunis to the West Bank without the intifada. The PLO's efforts to launch guerrilla warfare against Israel from neighboring Arab states had been singularly unsuccessful. Arafat's headquarters had been in Jordan in the late '60s and Lebanon in the '70s and early '80s, but by 1987 he was billeted in far-off Tunisia with few instruments to pursue his nationalist struggle. Then came the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza. The young men of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 may have suffered...
...leadership corps from exile and setting up the Palestinian Authority as envisaged by the accord. But the top positions in Arafat's administration all went to returning exiles and Arafat cronies, while the local leaders who'd earned their stripes and scars in the heat of the intifada, and often did time in jail for it, were mostly overlooked or incorporated in subordinate roles in the Palestinian Authority. In many cases, it is those same shunned local leaders who are today once again running things on the seething streets of the West Bank and Gaza...
...deemed political suicide. But its continuation precludes a return to the negotiating table, and therefore makes the attainment of his cherished dream of a Palestinian state increasingly unlikely in his lifetime. Even then, the Palestinian leader may have little option but to act as a spokesman for the intifada, for fear of simply sidelining himself...