December 9, 2025
The First intifada: 38th anniversary
Thirty-eight years ago, the First Intifada erupted in Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza, marking a turning point in our people’s struggle.
The word intifada comes from the Arabic word nafada (نفض) — to shake off — capturing the spirit of a people rising against an unbearable status quo of colonial oppression.
The First Intifada was sparked on December 8, 1987, when a Zionist military truck ran over a line of Palestinian cars at the entrance of Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza, killing four Palestinian workers — three of them from the camp. The killings sparked mass protests and, within a day, the uprisings spread from Gaza to the West Bank, reaching every corner of Palestine.
The First Intifada was defined by its powerful dual character: erupting spontaneously while developing a deeply organized momentum. Tens of thousands took to the streets as popular committees coordinated neighborhood defense, collective action, and daily life under siege.
Every sector of Palestinian society participated, from women’s committees to unions and organized labor, youth and students, refugees, mosques, and prisoners, transforming the fabric of evryday life into a unified front of struggle against occupation.
Over the next six years, Palestinians expanded this infrastructure: sustaining education when schools were shut down, organizing general strikes, leading economic boycotts of Zionist products, and mounting widespread tax refusal.
This emerging grassroots infrastructure, poised to grow into independent Palestinian institutions, posed a direct existential threat to the Zionist settler-colonial project.
The international response, from the Madrid Conference (1991) to the Oslo Accords (1993), sought to contain the power Palestinians had built and prevent their popular organization from developing into institutions capable of challenging the occupation.
Yet neither Zionist repression nor the U.S.-engineered Oslo process could erase the Intifada’s lessons or its enduring legacy. The revolutionary spirit of Palestinian resistance carried into the eruption of the Second Intifada in 2000, and it endures today amid relentless siege, expanding settlement colonization, mass displacement, and a U.S.-armed Zionist regime intent on extinguishing Palestinian life and sovereignty.
The First Intifada teaches us that liberation is built through collective action, sustained organized popular power, and the refusal to accept the structures of colonial domination. It is a legacy carried generation after generation, until the dust is shaken off completely.
Until total liberation.