Two underground organizations emerged to give direction to the Intifada. In the West Bank, the local branches of the PLO factions, including Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, the Popular and the Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Communists, combined to create an underground leadership that called itself the United National Command (UNC). In Gaza, Islamists associated with the Muslim Brotherhood created the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. The strength of Israeli repression made it impossible for these underground leaderships to meet or exercise their authority in open. Instead, they each published periodic leaflets—one series of leaflets by Hamas, and a totally independent series of communiquйs by the UNC—to set out their objectives and to guide public action. The leaflets of the United National Command and Hamas were calls to action and news sheets. They also captured the increasingly bitter struggle between the secular nationalist forces of the PLO and the rising Islamist movement for control of the Palestinian national movement within the Occupied Territories. The Muslim Brotherhood was the best-organized political movement in the Gaza Strip and was the first to respond to the popular uprising. Its leader was a paraplegic activist in his mid-fifties named Shaykh Ahmad Yassin. Like so many of its residents, Yassin had come to Gaza as a refugee in 1948. Paralyzed in a work accident as a teenager, he had continued his education to become a school teacher and religious leader. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s, becoming a great admirer of Sayyid Qutb, whose works he reprinted and circulated to reach the widest possible readership in Gaza. In the mid-1970s he established a charitable organization named the Islamic Center, through which he funded new mosques, schools, and clinics across Gaza that provided a network for the spread of Islamist values. On December 9, 1987, the night the troubles broke out, Yassin convened a meeting of the leaders of the Brotherhood to coordinate action. They decided to transform the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza into a resistance movement, and Hamas was launched with their first leaflet on December 14. The novelty of Hamas was to articulate Palestinian aspirations in strictly Islamist terms. From its first communiquй, Hamas set out an intransigent message that combined confrontation with the Jewish state and a rejection of secular Arab nationalism. “Only Islam can break the Jews and destroy their dream,” Hamas insisted. Following the arguments of Abdullah ’Azzam, who made the case for jihad in both Afghanistan and Palestine, the Palestinian Islamists declared their resistance against the foreign occupier on Islamic land rather than against authoritarian Arab leaders, as Sayyid Qutb advocated. “When an enemy occupies some of the Muslim lands,” Hamas asserted in its 1988 charter, “Jihad becomes obligatory for every Muslim. In the struggle against the Jewish occupation of Palestine, the banner of Jihad must be raised.”⁴⁹ Though they were secular nationalists as had dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s, there was something new about the Unified National Command as well. For the first time, local activists in the West Bank were putting forward their own views without consulting Arafat and the leadership in exile. In the West Bank, the UNC issued its first communiquй shortly after the Hamas leaflet was released. Sari Nusseibeh recalled that the first UNC leaflet was authored by “two local PLO activists” who “were already in jail by the time their flyers hit the streets,” arrested by the Israeli authorities in a massive clampdown. The leaflet called for a three-day general strike—a total economic close-down of the Occupied Territories—and warned against attempts to break the strike or cooperate with the Israelis. The UNC continued to issue newsletters every couple of weeks (it issued thirty-one in the first year of the Intifada alone) in which the group began to articulate a series of demands: an end to land expropriation and to the creation of Israeli settlements on occupied land, the release of Palestinians from Israeli prisons, and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Palestinian towns and villages. The leaflets encouraged people to fly the Palestinian flag, which the Israelis had long forbidden, and to chant “Down with the occupation!” and “Long live free Arab Palestine!” The UNC’s ultimate objective was an independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem.⁵⁰ The Intifada was quickly turning into an independence movement. The outbreak of the Intifada caught the PLO leadership in Tunis completely by surprise. Recognized by all Palestinians as their “sole legitimate representative,” the PLO had long monopolized the Palestinian national movement. Now the initiative had passed from the “outside” leadership in Tunis to “inside” PLO activists working in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The distinction between “insiders” and “outsiders” put the PLO leadership at a distinct disadvantage. Suddenly, Arafat and his lieutenants looked redundant as the residents of Gaza and the West Bank launched their own bid for an independent Palestinian state. In January 1988 Arafat moved to bring the Intifada under the PLO’s authority. He dispatched one of Fatah’s highest-ranking commanders, Khalil al-Wazir (better known by his nom de guerre Abu Jihad), to coordinate action between Tunis and the West Bank. The UNC?s third leaflet of January 18, 1988, was the first to be authorized by the Fatah leadership in Tunis. Within a matter of hours, over 100,000 copies of the leaflet were distributed across Gaza and the West Bank. The residents of the Occupied Territories responded to the authoritative voice of Arafat?s political machine with alacrity. As Sari Nusseibeh observed, ?it was like watching musicians take cues from a conductor.?⁵¹ Henceforth the Intifada would be managed by Arafat and his officials. The Israeli government was determined to prevent the PLO from taking advantage of the Intifada to make political gains at Israel’s expense. Abu Jihad’s mission was cut short by Israeli assassins, who gunned down the PLO official at his home in Tunisia on April 16, 1988. Yet once the link between the UNC and PLO had been forged, Tunis was able to preserve its control over the secular forces of the Intifada. The cycle of strikes and demonstrations, called in response to leaflets issued by the UNC and Hamas, continued unabated. The Israeli authorities had expected the movement to run out of steam. Instead, it seemed to be gaining in strength and posed a genuine challenge to Israeli control in the Occupied Territories. As the Intifada entered its third month, the Israeli authorities turned to extra-legal means to quell the uprising. Drawing on the Emergency Regulations drafted by British mandate officials long before the Geneva Conventions established international legal standards for the treatment of civilians under occupation, the Israeli army resorted to collective punishments such as mass arrests, detention without charge, and house demolitions. International public opinion was appalled by the image of heavily armed soldiers responding to stone-throwing demonstrators with live fire, prompting Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s defense minister, to order the use of “might, force and beatings” instead of lethal fire. The brutality of this seemingly benign policy was exposed when the CBS television network in the United States broadcast images of Israeli soldiers meting out horrific beatings to Palestinian youths near Nablus in February 1988. In one particularly graphic segment, a soldier was seen to extend a prisoner’s arm and pound it repeatedly from above with a large rock to break the bone.⁵² Israel’s attorney general admonished Rabin to warn his soldiers of the illegality of such acts, but the Israeli army continued to subject Palestinian demonstrators to violent beatings. Over thirty Palestinians were beaten to death in the first year of the Intifada.⁵³ Against this background of Israeli violence, it is remarkable that the Palestinians preserved the tactics of nonviolent resistance. Palestinian claims to nonviolence were challenged by Israeli authorities, who noted that protestors threw iron bars and Molotov cocktails as well as stones—missiles capable of inflicting serious injury or death. Yet the Palestinians never resorted to firearms in their confrontations with the Israelis, which did much to reverse decades of Western public opinion that had portrayed the Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as a beleaguered David figure. Israel found itself in the unaccustomed position of dispelling a distinct Goliath image in the international press. Nonviolence made the Intifada the most inclusive of Palestinian movements. Rather than privileging young men with military training, the demonstrations and civil disobedience of the Intifada mobilized the whole of the population of the Occupied Territories—men and women, young and old—in a common liberation struggle. The underground leaflets of Hamas and the UNC provided a wide range of resistance strategies—strikes, boycotts of Israeli products, home teaching to subvert school closures, garden plots to increase food self-reliance—that empowered Palestinians under occupation and instilled a deep sense of common purpose that kept the Intifada going in spite of heavy Israeli repression.