Intifada

Intifada (pronounced in-tuh-fah-duh)

(1) A historic Arabic word for a (usually violent) political uprising against the ruling or occupying power.

(2) Either of two revolts by Palestinian Arabs to protest Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (sometimes with initial capital letter).

1985: From the Arabic verb intifāḍa (translated variously as “a shaking off”; “a jumping up (in reaction to something)”; “tremor”; “shivering” or “shuddering”) and technically a derivative of fāḍa (to shake off) but is most rendered into English as “uprising”, “resistance” or “rebellion”.  Because of recent history, the best understood translation is now probably "Palestinian revolt".

East of the Jordan, west of the Rock of Gibraltar

Although the concept dates back centuries, historians consider the 1952 left-wing revolt against the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq as the first modern instance even though it was preceded by Colonel Nassar’s revolution in Egypt.  The post-war wind of change which blew through the colonial world affected Africa and the Middle East with revolts in Sudan (1964), Bahrain (1965) and the Spanish Sahara (1970) but it’s the first (1987-1996) and second (2000-2005) intifadas in the occupied Palestinian territories which have defined use of the word.

Although the spasmodic incidents of unrest in the territories in 2014-2015 are sometimes referred to as intifadas none has been of sufficient intensity or duration to be labelled a third intifada.  Nor are other events in the region such as the 1990 Bahrain uprising, the 1991 Iraqi revolt, the 1999-2005 protests in Morocco or the 2005 revolution in the Lebanon remembered as intifadas because, in the West, the word is now almost exclusively associated with the two uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza.  It is only another action in the model of the earlier actions that will become known as the third intifada.

Indeed, the revolutionary wave which began on 18 December 2010 in Tunisia attracted the label Arab Spring and although the odd journalist or academic historian wrote of an intifada (with a couple of British specialists preferring “…a series of intifadas”) the more romantic Arab Spring prevailed.