In Edward Said’s account, the First Palestinian Intifada is one point in a protracted history of conflict between Palestinians and Israel, not an isolated event that can be understood through a fixed opposition between East and West. Its significance lies partly in the way Said situates it: alongside the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, within the longer history of imperial intervention and Orientalist knowledge, and against a demand for Palestinian national self-determination. He argues that understanding this struggle requires attending both to Palestinian dispossession and to Jewish persecution, with equality and coexistence—not further suppression or denial—as the humane goal.

Place in a Longer Conflict

Said describes the battle between Israel and the Palestinians as taking increasingly savage and protracted forms, from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the onset of the Intifada in late 1987. The sequence links the uprising to an ongoing conflict rather than treating it as a self-contained episode. In this framing, the Intifada belongs to a political history whose later developments complicate any claim that the end of the Cold War ended the apparent confrontation between East and West.

That confrontation was repeatedly represented as a division between Arabs and Islam on one side and the Christian West on the other. Said stresses that such a binary does not explain the historical dynamics; it hardens identity and encourages reductive accounts of the people caught within the conflict. The Intifada is thus situated within both a struggle over Palestine and a contest over the terms through which that struggle is understood.

Empire, Representation, and Historical Memory

Said places the Palestinian experience in a much longer history of imperial intrusion. He traces a line from Napoleon’s entry into Egypt through the rise of Oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa, and onward through later interventions and strategic contests involving Palestine and the region. Across generations, he argues, empire continues to shape the lives of peoples such as Palestinians, while each phase of conflict produces its own reductive images and polemics.

This account challenges the dismissal of attention to imperial depredations as mere evasion of present responsibility. Said argues that such a dismissal overlooks the immense and enduring distortion empire has introduced into the lives of subordinated peoples. The Intifada’s historical setting therefore includes not only immediate political confrontation but also the continuing effects of imperial power and the representations through which those effects are minimized or misunderstood.

Palestinian Rights and Coexistence

Said connects his discussion of the Palestinian struggle to his long-standing advocacy of the Palestinian people’s right to national self-determination. He insists that this advocacy must give full attention to the history of Jewish persecution and genocide as well as to Palestinian claims. For him, recognizing one history does not require denying the other; the central political question is whether the struggle for equality in Palestine and Israel will lead toward coexistence or toward renewed suppression and denial.

This insistence also informs Said’s account of Orientalism. He identifies common roots between Orientalism and modern antisemitism, making it inadequate to recast the conflict as a simple story of an innocent, unified East opposed to a hostile West. He calls instead for independent intellectuals to offer alternatives to models built on mutual hostility, and for discussion of injustice to remain grounded in history, culture, and socioeconomic reality.

The Intifada in a Hardening Political Climate

Said places the uprising amid a wider series of developments that sharpened the political division. These included the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, challenges to the status quo by Islamic groups in Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Occupied Territories, and American and European responses such as the creation of Islamic brigades to fight the Russians from bases in Pakistan. The Gulf War, continuing support for Israel, and journalism and scholarship increasingly preoccupied with Islam further intensified the atmosphere.

In Said’s analysis, people were pressed repeatedly to declare themselves either Westerners or Easterners. The resulting opposition between us and them reinforced and hardened identities, leaving few outside its reach. The Intifada therefore appears in his account both as a development in the Palestinian struggle and as part of a climate in which political events were continually interpreted through antagonistic collective categories.

Narrative and Political Significance

Said does not supply a scene-by-scene account of the Intifada in these passages. Instead, he names its onset in late 1987 and makes its significance legible through historical placement: its relation to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the broader conflict over Palestine, and the recurring tendency to reduce complex histories to a conflict of civilizations. That framing redirects attention from a simple East–West story toward the political histories and human consequences such a story obscures.

The event’s place in Said’s argument is therefore inseparable from his demand for a more capacious account of history. He opposes short bursts of polemical fury and identities organized around hostility, proposing sustained interpretation and intellectual exchange instead. The Intifada is presented within that unresolved struggle: Palestinian self-determination and equality remain at stake, while coexistence depends on refusing both historical erasure and further denial.