# Unified National Leadership of the Uprising

The Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU; Arabic: القيادة الوطنية الموحدة, romanized: al-Qiyada al-Muwhhada) was a coalition of local Palestinian leadership during the First Intifada.
By the late 1980s, the central Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leadership had largely been exiled, imprisoned, or killed by Israeli forces. As a result, when the First Intifada broke out as spontaneous mass demonstrations in 1987, the PLO leadership was caught by surprise, and could only indirectly influence the events. In its place, the UNLU emerged as a new local leadership, mobilising many grassroots Palestinian groups as well as local PLO organisations, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip branches of Fatah, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front and the Palestine Communist Party. The UNLU would subsequently play the leading role in organising the uprising, and was the focus of the social cohesion that sustained the persistent disturbances.
After King Hussein of Jordan proclaimed the administrative and legal separation of the West Bank from Jordan in 1988, the UNLU organised to fill the political vacuum.

## History
### Origins

Until the late 1970s, the Palestinian nationalist movement was dominated by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), a coalition of armed Palestinian nationalist groups. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, however, a shift in the Palestinian nationalist movement occurred. During this period, the Israeli government enacted increasingly harsh anti-PLO tactics, leading to much of the PLO's central leadership being exiled, imprisoned, or killed. At the same time, grassroots Palestinian civil society organisations significantly increased in number and influence, including student unions, labour unions, women's committees, and volunteer groups. Although many of these organisations were affiliated with and supportive of the PLO, they represented a more decentralised leadership with new tactics. According to historian Wendy Pearlman, "tens of thousands of men, women, and youth became linked in political networks. This grassroots organising represented a radical alternative to traditional, top-down patterns of politics. It schooled a new generation that was raised under occupation, was not afraid to challenge it, and viewed community-based political participation as a way of life."
As Palestinian nationalist organising shifted, and the Israeli occupation continued, so too did Palestinian militant actions. In mid-1987, Glenn Frankel of The Washington Post noted that there was "a shift in the nature of the struggle here," moving away from a conflict between the Israeli military and "professional terrorists imported from outside the West Bank" towards a conflict that centred around incidents that were "initiated locally, most of them by Palestinian youths."

### Formation

Sari Nusseibeh recorded the birth of the UNLU in a 1989 article:
   For two weeks the fire [of the revolt] in almost unfathomable proportions. Even the local grassroots committees, activists and leaders were caught off guard. ... The first underground leaflets of the intifada made a shy appearance. ... The Communiqués No. 2 of the Intifada appeared. Rumours have it that it was at this stage, through consultations with, and with the aid and blessing of Abu Jihad [Fatah second in command Khalil Wazir], that the Unified Command was conceived and created. ... Communiqués No. 3 enshrining the birth of the Unified Command appeared. The uprising leaflets suddenly took on a special format, which continues to exist till this day."

## Organisation

The PLO's rivals in this activity were the Islamic organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The PLO viewed other organisations as a threat to its premier political position as well as local leadership in cities such as Beit Sahour and Bethlehem. However, the uprising was predominantly led by community councils led by Hanan Ashrawi, Faisal Husseini and Haidar Abdel-Shafi, that promoted independent networks for education (underground schools as the regular schools were closed by the military as reprisals for the uprising), medical care, and food aid. The UNLU gained credibility where the Palestinian society complied with the issued communiqués.

### Relationship to the central PLO leadership

PLO leaders in Tunisia issued Communiqués for the UNLU, through al-Quds Palestinian Arab Radio operating with Syrian aid.

## A ctivities and political positions

The UNLU and Ghassan Andoni in Beit Sahour, urged people to stop paying taxes to Israel, which inherited and modified the previous Jordanian tax-collection regime in the West Bank. "No taxation without representation," said a statement from the organizers. "The military authorities do not represent us, and we did not invite them to come to our land. Must we pay for the bullets that kill our children or for the expenses of the occupying army?" The people of Beit Sahour responded to this call with an organized citywide tax strike that included refusal to pay and file tax returns.
Unlike Hamas, the UNLU have rejected a hijab policy for women. They have also targeted those who seek to impose the hijab.

## Reactions

In the first few months of the uprising meetings of Popular committee were legal but as the UNLU leaders were subjected to arrests the movement went underground.
Israeli defence minister Yitzhak Rabin responded: "We will teach them there is a price for refusing the laws of Israel."

## Analysis
### New generation of Palestinian leadership

The older prominent personalities that had previously dominated Palestinian politics were supplanted by new more youthful politicians rising from the cadres of the UNLU.

### Rivalry with Islamist factions

While the First Intifada was largely led by the UNLU, the uprising also saw the emergence of new Palestinian nationalist groups entirely unaffiliated with the PLO, most notably the conservative Islamist Hamas. According to Khalid Farraj, a prominent Birzeit University student organiser during the Intifada, divisions grew significantly between Palestinian nationalist factions during the later stages of the Intifada, and "primary among the factors that deepened the rift was the meteoric rise of local Islamist movements, and particularly Hamas, which was staunchly opposed to the political process and committed to the armed struggle. The movement made huge inroads among the population during the intifada, and Hamas activists followed the directives of their own leadership — which were issued monthly — rather than abiding by UNLU directives."

## Footnotes

* ↑ Yasser Arafat obituary Archived 2017-01-11 at the Wayback Machine, socialistworld.net (Committee for a Worker's International).
* 1 2 Zachary Lockman, Joel Beinin (1989) Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation South End Press, ISBN 0-89608-363-2 and 9780896083639 p 39
* ↑ Joel Beinin, Joe Stork, Middle East Report (1997) Political Islam: essays from Middle East Report I.B.Tauris, ISBN 1-86064-098-2 p 194
* ↑ King Hussein, Address to the Nation, Amman, Jordan, July 31, 1988. The Royal Hashemit Court's tribute to King Hussein
* ↑ Suha Sabbagh (1998) Palestinian women of Gaza and the West Bank Indiana University Press, ISBN 0-253-33377-6 p 48
* ↑ Brynen, Rex (1 April 1995). "The Dynamics of Palestinian Elite Formation". Journal of Palestine Studies. 24 (3): 31–43. doi:10.2307/2537878. JSTOR 2537878. Retrieved 29 December 2024.
* ↑ Pearlman, W. (2011). Violence, nonviolence, and the Palestinian national movement (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. Page 100.
* ↑ Frankel, Glenn (1 June 1987). "SOULS ON FIRE ON THE WEST BANK". Washington Post. Retrieved 10 January 2025.
* 1 2 Robert Owen Freedman (1991) The Intifada: Its Impact on Israel, the Arab World, and the Superpowers, University Press of Florida, ISBN 0-8130-1040-3 pp. 71–73
* ↑ Gilles Kepel, Anthony F. Roberts (2006) Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Translated by Anthony F. Roberts I.B. Tauris, ISBN 1-84511-257-1 p. 155
* ↑ MERIP Archived 2013-11-04 at the Wayback Machine Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, A Primer
* ↑ Local Government in the West Bank and Gaza (says parenthetically that the property tax "rate and base" were "unchanged since 1963") Baxendale, Sidney J. "Taxation of Income in Israel and the West Bank: A Comparative Study" Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Spring, 1989), pp. 134–141 "it retained the Jordanian tax law"
* ↑ Gradstein, Linda "Palestinians Claim Tax is Unjust, Many Don't Pay", [Ft. Lauderdale] Sun-Sentinel, 8 October 1989, p. 12A
* 1 2 "Women, the Hijab and the Intifada". 4 May 1990.
* ↑ New York Times Israelis Call 4 Arrests Blow to Arab Uprising 13 April 1989
* ↑ Glenn E. Robinson (1997) Building a Palestinian state: the incomplete revolution Indiana University Press, ISBN 0-253-21082-8 p 96
* ↑ Sosebee, Stephen J. "The Passing of Yitzhak Rabin, Whose 'Iron Fist' Fueled the Intifada", The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. 31 October 1990. Vol. IX #5, pg. 9
* ↑ Akhil Gupta, James Ferguson (1997) Culture, power, place: explorations in critical anthropology Duke University Press, ISBN 0-8223-1940-3 pp 221-222
* ↑ Filiu, Jean-Pierre (21 December 2020). "The Origins of Hamas: Militant Legacy or Israeli Tool?". Journal of Palestine Studies. 41 (3): 54–70. doi:10.1525/jps.2012.XLI.3.54. Retrieved 15 January 2025.
* ↑ Farraj, Khalid (21 December 2020). "The First Intifada (Part II): The Road to Oslo". Journal of Palestine Studies. 49: 93–100. doi:10.1525/jps.2019.49.1.93. Retrieved 15 January 2025.