Anti-colonialist Phenomenologies of the First Intifada (1987). The path that illuminated the uprising, converging circumstances and subsequent development of the conflict

Abstract

The final moments of the year 2023 bring with them from the Middle East a mournful melody, already sadly assimilated in the ever-languid Western consciousness. This same melody, with familiar echoes in the lands from which it arises, is, in pragmatic terms, a formula devised in the last decades of the 20th century, specifically in 1987. Throughout this article, an attempt will be made to provide empirical-theoretical significance to a premise: that the past, per se, is not always regressive, and that, consequently, from it flow behavioral models that, if not directly emanating in the present, project onto it a kind of formulative guidance; patterns that allow, at the very least, constructing a historical framework aiming to give meaning, knowledge, foundation, or–more rarely–truth to a specific fact that, once it has occurred, is embedded in the course of history like the swarm of events that overlapped for its materialization. In an exercise of subtle pursuit of these events, the following lines will propose a series of beginnings; awakenings that represented significant changes and were born under the lights or shadows of formidable historical processes. Thus, astride the outlined theoretical lines, an attempt will be made to paint a historical vestige that today appears reformulated in its inherent specificities; a path that, flanked by a series of particular processes, led the Palestinian people to the first uprising: the First Intifada of 1987; as well as the birth of phenomenologies that, thoughtfully, would shape the historical course in the same way they continue doing today. Only by tracing the causal imprint of such a profound social awakening can we better understand the idiosyncratic root of contemporary barbarism.