1987: The First Intifada: Another Brick in the Wall

In 1967 the Israeli government took over the administration of the West Bank with its million Palestinian inhabitants from Jordan. In December 1987 the Palestinians began the first Intifada, a series of violent attacks and suicide bombings against Israelis. You would guess they must have been living in the most terrible poverty, racked by diseases and starving to be so angry to commence such futile killing.

In fact, life in the West Bank, which historically had been an area of terrible poverty, racked by diseases with the majority population barely surviving, paying crushing rentals and interest on debt to their Palestinian overlords, had never been better. In those 20 years the West Bank population experienced significant improvements in public health and a surge in material living standards, driven by integration with the Israeli economy. The era was defined by rising wages and better infrastructure. Public health outcomes saw marked, measurable progress during this two-decade span, largely due to public health initiatives, better sanitation, and vaccination campaigns. Life expectancy increased by approximately a decade, growing from roughly 48–50 years in the late 1960s to nearly 60 years by the late 1980s. Infant mortality dropped significantly as public health clinics expanded and infectious diseases were brought under better control. Infant mortality in the West Bank improved drastically dropping from approximately 150 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1967 to roughly 30 to 35 deaths per 1,000 live births by the late 1980s. So there were more living Palestinian children so you would guess they must have been in terrible poverty and malnourished to make their parents so angry by December 1987.

Not so. In twenty years living conditions and household infrastructure improved substantially with access to municipal water and electricity connections rising double-digit annual percentage increases, and the possession of consumer durables (refrigerators, televisions, etc) increased multiple times over. The economy experienced a boom in employment and personal income. The number of Palestinians from the West Bank working inside Israel surged from nearly zero in 1967 to roughly 110,000 by 1987, accounting for about 35% of the West Bank's employed population. These jobs provided relatively high wages that fueled a rise in the standard of living. The local economy depended on income earned by these cross-border workers, resulting in a large trade deficit that was sustained almost entirely by outside labor income.

The First Intifada destroyed the fragile West Bank economy based as it was on labour in Israel which quickly ceased. Labour which was cheap to the Israelis provided a good life in the West Bank. The Palestinians were soon replaced by workers from other countries eager to enjoy wages much greater than they could earn at home. Remittances from the 180,000 overseas Palestinian workers not only sustained hundreds of thousands of families but also served as a primary financial pillar funding social infrastructure, education, and basic survival in the Palestinian territories. These remittances became even more important with the closing of work in Israel. The oil rich states also provided significant institutional foreign aid and direct financial grants to the West Bank population and the PLO. This ended when Yasser Arafat and the PLO supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Palestinian workers and their families (nearly 500,000 people) were expelled from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States back to Jordan.

From the very first Palestinian Arab attack on a Zionist settlement in December 1886 when armed Arab villagers from Yahudiyeh attacked the newly established Zionist settlement of Petah Tikva the Arab response to Zionist immigration has been violence, looting and murder. By 1987 there had been a century of this and the Arab situation had been one of unrelenting failure and their position vis-a-vis the Zionist Jews had worsened. Thanks to their leaders any Palestinian who dared to suggest trying a different approach could expect to be murdered. In 1936 the Palestinians began a revolt against a far more powerful force, the British, and Palestinian society (such as it was) suffered so much damage that they were unable to defeat the new nation of Israel in 1948. In December 1987 they again began grass-roots attacks on an even more comparatively powerful force, the Israeli Army, and, in my humble opinion, this was the end of the dream of an independent Palestine. Forty years later … my humble opinion remains the same.

The powerful Palestinian Propaganda Industrial complex ensures that it is extremely difficult to find any information about life in the West Bank except repetition of works liek resistance, oppression, settler violence, da da da da. However, Youtube and Tik-tok contain many vlogs about wandering through the West Bank by intrepid travellers. The message invariably repeats the propaganda but careful observation of the street scenes, clogged roads, shops, malls, mosques, restaurants and markets reveals a surprisingly prosperous and vibrant society. By Western standards there appears to be a public gender apartheid with men and women seperate (and hopefully equal) with pockets of opulence and a surprising number of new cars.