Second Intifada

The Second Intifada is identified by Edward Said as one episode in the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He places it after the failure of the Oslo peace process and alongside the suffering of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, making it part of a broader argument against treating political violence as proof of an unbridgeable civilizational divide. Its significance in his account lies not in a detailed chronology of the uprising, which he does not provide, but in the way it exposes the human consequences of political narratives that reduce complex histories to fixed oppositions.

Context and Course

Said links the outbreak of the Second Intifada to the failure of the Oslo peace process. He presents the uprising within a continuing sequence of conflict rather than as an isolated incident, turning attention to the political conditions and unresolved realities surrounding it. The passage gives no account of specific participants, actions, or dates beyond identifying the outbreak; its emphasis is on the place of the event in the wider crisis.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza

The uprising is discussed alongside what Said calls the awful suffering of Palestinians in the reinvaded West Bank and Gaza. He notes the routine use of Israeli F-16s and Apache helicopters against civilians and describes the violence as collective punishment. This framing connects the Second Intifada to the consequences borne by Palestinian civilians, rather than treating it solely as an abstract political dispute.

Significance in Said’s Argument

Said situates the Second Intifada within a contemporary landscape of violence that also includes suicide bombings, the September 11 attacks, and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. He rejects the claim that these conflicts amount to an unending, implacable clash of civilizations. In his broader argument, neither the Orient nor the West is an unchanging entity: such identities are constructed through human effort and can be mobilized to intensify fear, hatred, and collective self-assertion. The uprising therefore appears as part of a politically specific and historically entangled conflict, not as confirmation of an eternal division between peoples.