Silenced Palestinian Voices III: Voices among the Stones, 1987 to 2000

Part 8 of the “Quiet Abandonment” series on the world’s retreat from the Palestinian cause. Part 3 of “Silenced Palestinian Voices.”

Between 1987 and 2000, Palestinian life was transformed by two great waves: the First Intifada and the collapse of the promise of Oslo, with the First Gulf War between them. Through this period, Palestinian voices seemed to me to consist of the whoosh of stones through the air, boycotts and demonstrations, and later bullets and bombs.

Yet there were other voices. This article seeks out these other voices in published accounts and shared through personal networks.

1987-1990: The First Intifada and Silenced Dissent

The First Intifada began in 1987 as a grassroots protest against Israeli occupation and the restrictions of military rule. The protests ranged from peaceful demonstrations to boycotts to stone throwing and finally bombings and kidnappings when the PLO and the newly formed Hamas got involved. Israel responded with administrative detention, shop closures, curfews, travel restrictions, arrests and deportations, and monitoring of mosque sermons and classrooms.

The uprising was met with solidarity speeches and promises of financial support from abroad, but the money often did not materialize. Egypt and Jordan wanted to prevent the uprising from spreading to their own populations.

Even during this period of mass mobilization, dissenting voices existed. When I shared my work last week with a new friend who, for professional reasons, prefers to remain anonymous, she told me a story:

In 1989, we were renovating our apartment and hired someone from over the Green Line to do the work. In casual conversation, my husband, leftist as we were at the time, expressed his empathy with the man's situation, exclaiming how wonderful it would be when the Palestinians have a state. The man responded:

'The worst thing that can happen is for us to have a state.'

We were both shocked, and I don't remember what explanation he gave, but that sentence stuck with me.

If one man openly declared his opposition to a Palestinian state in 1989 when he felt safe to do so, one can assume that many more felt that way.

Mubarak Awad, a Christian Jerusalem-born psychologist, founded the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in 1983. Influenced by Gandhi and King, he promoted boycotts, tax refusal, and tree-planting on confiscated land as alternatives to armed resistance. He translated Gandhi into Arabic and trained activists in nonviolent methods.

In May 1988, during the First Intifada, Israeli authorities arrested and deported him for "incitement," despite his Jerusalem residency and rejection of violence. The deportation drew international criticism. From exile in Washington, Awad continued promoting nonviolence, but his voice was removed from the territories during a critical period of the uprising.

Women's Voices: Rising and Falling

Perhaps one of the more interesting phenomena of this time period was the emergence of female voices and activism, and then their quashing.

Suddenly, during the first Intifada, women were visible in unprecedented ways. Girls discovered they could leave their homes and stay out late if they participated in stone-throwing and other activities, “the respectable political tasks” released them from domestic constraints. As activist Zahira Kamal recalled, "For the first time we weren't waiting for instructions."

Yet this liberation proved temporary. After the Intifada, girls returned to kitchens and childcare, deeply upset by this relegation. As Dr. Yara Hawari wrote, "Palestinian women have always played a fundamental role in the struggle ... as fighters, organizers, and leaders with agency not defined by their relationship to men. Yet they have faced consistent political marginalization."

History would later destroy the gains that had been made, sidelining the women who had briefly found their voices. This pattern of temporary liberation followed by renewed constraints would soon play out on a larger scale as the Gulf War brought both new opportunities and devastating consequences for Palestinian voices.

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The experiences and testimonies of Palestinian women during this period and their subsequent political marginalization is explored in detail in Part IV of the series.

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1991: Scuds and Safe Rooms

I kept a diary throughout the Gulf War. In it, I wrote:

Friday, January 18. At 2 a.m. I am awakened by the rising and falling sounds of a siren — on and on it shrieks — and I don’t know if it’s for real or if I’m dreaming [that was my first war experience]. Even when I get up and begin pacing back and forth across the room, I cannot quite take it in — real? not real? real? not real? — until I hear a loud boom that jars me into full consciousness and I go into action… wake up the girls, and scurry them off into the prepared room.

That night, like many after, we shut ourselves inside a sealed room. Plastic sheeting covered the door and windows. Gas masks on our faces. That night, five missiles fell near where we lived.

Meanwhile, just miles away, we learned that Palestinians poured into the streets, cheering Saddam Hussein. Their voices were raw and often conflicted. Nidal, a resident of Bayt Sahur, explained: "It wasn't that we wanted the Scuds to kill Israelis. We just wanted them to feel scared enough that they would finally make peace..." A six-year-old girl expressed her feelings bluntly: “I’m happy Saddam sent missiles to Israel because Israel killed many of us, sent Baba to prison, and beat us.” Others dissented. Nidal clarified, “I did not go to the rooftop and clap”.

In reality, only a few villages and parts of Shehem publicly cheered when the Scuds were launched. I was told by an Arab friend, who asked not to be named, that in many private homes, Palestinians were happy that Israel was being attacked. This was the result of years of incitement and delegitimization, he said; when people are told constantly that Israel is criminal and must be destroyed, they rejoice at anything that weakens it.

At the same time, moderates Sari Nusseibeh and Faisal Husseini are said to have warned against the celebrations. And a Washington Post article at the time quoted regular Palestinians opposed to support for Saddam:

I have to say, one should expect better from someone who is supposed to be the Palestinian president. What a fool Yasser Arafat has been," said a merchant in Jerusalem's Old City in an outburst startling for its passion and candor.

Always Arab leaders have promised to defend the Palestinians, and always they have betrayed us," the merchant said. "Surely Arafat could have anticipated this, and kept some distance from Saddam. Now the whole world will blame us for crimes for which we are not responsible.

The Price of Euphoria

Cheering Saddam came at an extraordinary cost. Kuwait expelled about 300,000 Palestinians. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates severed financial ties with the PLO. The PLO lost the overwhelming majority of its budget within months. The journal Al-Majdal notes that part of the Palestinian community in Kuwait openly stood by their host country against the Iraqi invaders, but this voice has been lost to history, with “Palestinians becoming the scapegoats for a war they were caught in the middle of.” Families who had lived in Kuwait for decades were suddenly erased from the political and economic life to which they had contributed.

1991-1993: From Madrid to Oslo

The Madrid Conference: Born of Desperation

After the Gulf War, the Palestinian leadership entered Madrid under severe constraints. In an interview, Nabil Shaath admitted that the PLO joined Madrid from a place of enormous weakness, shut out from the Arab world and isolated in the West. Palestinians were forced to sit under the Jordanian flag, not their own; “… we felt the PLO was weakened, but not the Palestine cause,” he said.

On the ground, reactions were mixed. In Ramallah and Gaza, Fatah supporters handed IDF soldiers olive branches in symbolic gestures of peace, while there were violent clashes with Hamas supporters who were against it. Internal pressures chilled moderate voices, and the killing of suspected collaborators was a growing problem.

Oslo: Desperation and Disillusion

By 1992, post-war isolation and a funding collapse had deepened the PLO’s crisis, pushing leaders to seek a way out through a secret back channel. The Oslo Accords of 1993 salvaged a dying organization.

For some, Oslo was betrayal. Mohammed Massad, a former terrorist from Jenin, recalled in an interview: "I did not give anyone power of attorney to sign a deal with Arafat on my behalf... It was a psychological shock for me." He was then arrested and tortured, this time by the new Palestinian Authority (PA):

Each day of interrogations in the PA was harder than all 45 days of interrogation in Israel... I expected the Israeli enemy to curse my family. But the ones I brought into the land over the dead bodies of my friends, I did not expect them to humiliate me.

Massad's story was not unique. Other former terrorists and Islamists were jailed, beaten, or silenced by the PA when they criticized Oslo.

Professor Mordechai Kedar told me a story:

In 1993, while building a synagogue, a group of us Jews joined the group of workers from Tulkarem. The head of the Tulkarem group was older than the rest, a Sheikh. The others often deferred to him in conversation. One day, while sitting together to eat, one of the Jews asked how it is to be free in Tulkarem now that it is part of the Palestinian Authority. There was silence as they looked at the sheikh; he responded: “When the Israeli soldier beats me, that's just how it is, but when a Palestinian beats me, I cannot accept that. My uneducated neighbour joined the police and now, this uncivilized man who knows nothing, gets a salary and beats us.”

From its inception in 1989, Bassem Eid worked for the new human rights NGO, B’Tselem, reporting on Israeli human rights violations against Palestinians. After Oslo, when he wanted to document PA rights violations, B’Tselem refused. Eid said that B’Tselem was unwilling “… to interfere in the violations committed by the Palestinian Authority against Palestinians.”

Refusing to be silenced, Eid left B’Tselem in 1996 and founded the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group to document both Israeli and PA abuses. For this, he was denounced as a collaborator and apprehended by the PA until international pressure compelled his release. He continued his reporting.

Oslo also sidelined local leadership. With jobs and salaries in the new Palestinian Authority, independent voices that were not silenced by threats of violence were silenced by giving them something to lose.

1993-2000: After the Hope

By the late 1990s, hopes had withered. Settlements expanded. The Palestinian Authority grew more corrupt and authoritarian. Ordinary people lost faith. For Israelis, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and waves of suicide bombings hardened skepticism. The decade ended in quiet frustration. In September 2000, the silence was shattered again with the Second Intifada.

Conclusion: The Echo of Silenced Voices

The Palestinians who cheered Saddam's scuds lost their Arab patrons and credibility in the eyes of the Arab world. The moderates who warned against this, the women who sustained neighbourhoods, the workers expelled from Kuwait, and the Palestinians disillusioned with Oslo all risked being drowned out.

After the Gulf War, I wrote:

What was our sealed room has become, once again, my office... I remember the nightly terror and can describe in minute detail my body's reactions, but I cannot recall the actual feeling of the fear. . . . Now it seems as if the war took place in another dimension of time, a parallel world, or twilight zone.

That fading of fear mirrors what happened to those Palestinian voices, so vivid in the moment, yet later pushed into another dimension, scarcely remembered in the story that history later told.

These silenced voices, whether suppressed by Israeli authorities, Palestinian factions, or social pressures, represent just some of the paths not taken. Each deserves fuller exploration, but even these glimpses remind us that, even in periods of intense conflict, multiple perspectives existed within Palestinian society, and that understanding this complexity is essential to grasping both the past and the possibilities for the future.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to journalist Khaled Abu Toameh and Dr. Mordechai Kedar, Israeli scholar of Arab and Islamic culture, whose conversations and insights helped illuminate aspects of this complex period that might otherwise have remained hidden.

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