It was a broad-based, largely peaceful popular movement against the brutal violence of Israeli occupation. Despite the fact that Palestinians, like all people living under military occupation, have an absolute right to use force to resist foreign military occupation, the vast mass of Palestinians deliberately did not choose to take up guns against the Israeli army during the Intifada, even though the army had no compunction about using guns with deadly effect against them. Rabin kept his promise and then some. Palestinians faced the world's second most powerful army with rocks, or with their bare hands. Just this week, a long suppressed report was published in Israel revealing the extent to which the occupation forces employed torture against the Palestinians between 1988-92.
Occupation is about organized, deliberately planned violence by the occupier against the occupied.
But the Intifada was about largely non-violent resistence to the violence of occupation, although more than one thousand five hundred Palestinians were killed by the occupation forces and tens of thousands injured. The Intifada was about Palestinians organizing Palestinian society to resist the efforts of Israel to destroy it, and to crush any possibility of independent existence. When the occupation authorities closed all Palestinian schools and universities for three years, Palestinians organized clandestine education on a mass scale. When Israel shut down the Palestinian media, Palestinians organized clandestine information systems. When Israel interned thousands of Palestinian men and women in concentration camps in the Negev desert, Palestinians organized support and solidarity for their children and families.