Occupation and the Intifada
In June 1967, in six days of fighting against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For Palestinians, the most consequential of these were the last three: territory that, together, constituted the whole of what had been Mandate Palestine outside Israel's 1949 borders, and that was now, for the first time since 1948, under a single ruling authority again: Israeli military occupation.
UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed later that year, called for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict in exchange for peace and secure borders, a formula ("land for peace") that would frame diplomacy for decades without ever quite being realised. East Jerusalem was effectively annexed by Israel within weeks, in a move not recognised by the UN or most of the international community. The West Bank and Gaza remained under direct military administration, with Palestinian residents holding no citizenship in the state that governed nearly every aspect of their movement, land use, water access and legal status.
Settlement
Almost immediately, Israeli governments (across the political spectrum, though accelerating sharply under Likud-led governments from 1977) began establishing civilian settlements in the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza, populated by Israeli citizens living under Israeli civil law on land governed, for its Palestinian residents, by military law. This dual legal system is one of the most criticised features of the occupation: two populations living on the same land under two different sets of rules. The UN and the International Court of Justice have both held that this settlement activity violates the Fourth Geneva Convention's prohibition on an occupying power transferring its own civilian population into occupied territory; successive Israeli governments have disputed the applicability of that law to the West Bank, arguing the territory's status is legally unresolved. By the early 1990s, well over 100,000 settlers lived in the West Bank alone, a number that would keep growing for decades to come.
For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the occupation meant checkpoints, curfews, house demolitions used as a disciplinary tool, administrative detention without charge or trial, and land increasingly requisitioned for settlements, military zones and the roads connecting them. Gaza and the West Bank's economies became deeply, and by design, dependent on Israel's: a large share of the workforce commuted daily into Israel for low-wage labour, while local industry and agriculture were constrained by Israeli permit and export controls.
The First Intifada
By December 1987, two decades of occupation, land loss and daily humiliation at checkpoints had built a pressure that a car accident in Gaza (in which an Israeli truck killed four Palestinian labourers, amid rumours it was deliberate) finally broke open. What followed, the First Intifada (انتفاضة, "shaking off"), was a mass, largely grassroots uprising: strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, refusal to pay taxes, and, most visibly to the outside world, young Palestinians throwing stones at heavily armed Israeli soldiers. It was substantially organised at the neighbourhood level through local committees rather than directed from the PLO's exiled leadership in Tunis, and it drew in a wider cross-section of Palestinian society, including women's committees and labour unions, than earlier armed factional struggles had.
Israel's response involved mass arrests (more than 100,000 Palestinians were detained over the course of the uprising) and the killing of over 1,000 Palestinians, including many minors, by Israeli forces, alongside a much smaller number of Israeli deaths. It was also during this uprising, in 1987, that Hamas was founded in Gaza as an Islamist alternative to the secular-nationalist PLO, a rivalry that would matter two decades later.
The First Intifada ran until roughly 1993 and succeeded, more than any prior phase of Palestinian resistance, in putting the occupation back at the centre of international attention and Israeli domestic politics. It also helped push both the PLO and Israel toward a diplomatic process that many hoped, briefly, would end the occupation altogether.