The BBC has given in to pressure from pro-Israel groups and “corrected” a news article that said that the first Palestinian intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, was “largely unarmed and popular”.
The right-leaning UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported that the BBC had changed the wording after “complaints from Jewish readers”.
The BBC has even been accused of inciting “antisemitic violence” over the wording of the article.
The article was about the arrest of two activists in London for “racially aggravated” chants “involving calls for intifada”.
Following the complaints, the BBC changed the wording of the article, removing the phrase “unarmed and popular” and saying that “some” people had described the term as a “call for violence against Jewish people”.
However, the Arabic word intifada literally translates as “shaking off” or “rising up” and has been used in contexts outside the Israel-Palestine conflict.
For example, the word was often used during the Arab Spring uprisings against authoritarian leaders in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya and also to describe protests against Moroccan rule in the disputed Western Sahara region.
The Daily Telegraph quoted Danny Cohen, a pro-Israel commentator and former BBC TV director, as as saying that the BBC’s original description was “appalling” and “deeply offensive to the families of those murdered in the intifada”.
However, the BBC’s original description of the 1987-93 first intifada was largely accurate.
What happened during the first intifada?
The intifada began with a series of strikes, protests, and other acts of civil disobedience in response to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which involved sustained persecution of Palestinians and had then been going on for nearly twenty years.
The trigger incident was an Israeli truck crashing into Palestinians at the Erez (or Beit Hanoun) crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, killing three people and wounding seven.
Israeli forces responded to the protests which broke out with brute force, viciously beating Palestinians. Unarmed Palestinian youths began to throw stones at Israeli forces who often retaliated by deliberately breaking their arms.
Israel’s then-Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was later celebrated for signing the now-defunct Oslo Accords, instituted an official policy of beating Palestinian protesters, often referred to as the “break-their-bones” policy.
In total around 1,200 Palestinians were killed and over 60,000 were injured. An estimated 100 Israeli civilians and 60 Israeli soldiers were killed between 1987 and 1993, with around 1,400 Israeli soldiers and 1,700 civilians injured.
However, most of the Israeli casualties were killed by Palestinian militant groups operating separately from the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), the intifada’s main coordination body.
The signing of the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel in September 1993 is usually considered as the end point of the first intifada.
However a second intifada broke out in 2000 after negotiations broke down when Israel refused to withdraw from the West Bank or East Jerusalem and allow the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.
This intifada, which ended in 2005, caused many more casualties than the first and involved the use of extreme violence, once again targeting unarmed protesters, by the Israeli military, as well as suicide bombings in Israel by Palestinian groups such as Hamas.
There has been a growing crackdown in the UK and other Western countries on solidarity with the Palestinians, with hundreds of people arrested for expressing support for the now-banned group Palestine Action and the government announcing that it would arrest protesters who use the phrase “Globalise the Intifada”.
Four people have been arrested for using these words so far.
*New arab*