Who Rules the World? (American Empire Project)

by Noam Chomsky

Of course, it was the United States and Israel that had rejected diplomacy and the PLO that had been offering compromise for years, but Lewis’s reversal of the facts was quite normal and unchallenged in the mainstream. There were other crucial developments in the immediate pre-Madrid/pre-Oslo years. In December 1987, the Intifada erupted in Gaza and quickly spread throughout the Occupied Territories.9 This broad-based and remarkably restrained uprising was as much of a surprise to the PLO in Tunis as it was to the occupying Israeli forces with their extensive system of military and paramilitary forces, surveillance, and collaborators. The Intifada was not limited to opposing the occupation. It was also a social revolution within Palestinian society, breaking patterns of subordination of women, authority by notables, and other forms of hierarchy and domination. Though the timing of the Intifada was a surprise, the uprising itself was not, at least to those who paid any attention to Israel’s U.S.-backed operations within the territories. Something was bound to happen; there is only so much that people can endure. For the preceding twenty years, Palestinians under military occupation