Author’s note: Parts of this text were adapted from “Manasheer of the First Palestinian Intifada: Bayan no. 1 (UNLI),” with permission from Revolutionary Papers, an international, transdisciplinary research and teaching initiative on anticolonial, anti-imperial and related left periodicals of the Global South. (revolutionarypapers.org)

Surprising to those of us students and scholars of the Arab world, intifada, Arabic for “shaking off” especially referring to shaking off regimes of oppressive rule, has become a dog whistle for the Right in the United States in the context of repressing pro-Palestinian speech. “Globalize the Intifada,” an English slogan common to protests in support of Palestinian liberation, is a complex invocation. In the Palestinian context, there have been two rebellions sanctified as intifadas, the first in the late 1980s to early 1990s and the second in the early 2000s. While the First Intifada is crucial to the emergence of this phrase and the topic of this essay, it should be noted at the outset that “Globalize the Intifada” can be interpreted through a much more expansive genealogy of Palestinian struggle and rebellion against colonialism and imperialism: from the Great Revolt against the British of the late 1930s to the resistance against Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip since 2007 and most prominently since October 2023.

The First Intifada anchors these references. Between 1987 and ending in 1993, in most historiographies, this mass popular rebellion overtook Palestine and confronted repressive Israeli military rule. The First Intifada began as a broadly participatory, anticolonial uprising that included more than half a million Palestinians who took part in civil disobedience as well as direct confrontations, determined to end Israeli military occupation, then 21 years old, as well as to end Israeli oppression more broadly, including in the territories that Israel militarily occupied in 1948. The Intifada was part of a broader national liberation movement that in this instance recentered Palestinians in Palestine as the mobilizers of political action and vision.

The bayanat were serialized paper periodicals or leaflets of the First Intifada. Printed by mimeograph and aided by the technology of the fax machine and radio, various party cadre printed and distributed bayanat, wrote graffiti, and protested. The means of reproduction had to be both portable and concealable—essential in an environment where Israeli forces regularly raided Palestinians’ homes and print shops to confiscate subversive materials.

The bayanat were used to organize the everyday life of a mass popular uprising of Palestinians. Their distribution spanned multiple years, cities, and locales, from Jerusalem to Nablus to Gaza City. These guerilla communiqués announced general strikes, described when and where protests would take place, mobilized sectors of Palestinian society, and coordinated many daily features of the mass uprising. While the form of a bayan (singular) has a long and broad history in Arabic textual culture and political thought, the Intifada bayanat (plural) were particular to the moment and hence are known in Palestinian discourse as the ‘Intifada leaflets’ or manasheer al-Intifada.

About one month transpired from the beginning of the Intifada on December 9th, 1987 and January 8th, 1988 when the first bayan appeared. Authored by the local, underground, and anonymous Palestinian leadership of the Intifada—the United National Leadership of the Intifada (UNLI)—and illicitly distributed on doorsteps and bus stops, or strewn in grocery aisles and plastered to walls, the bayanat became a central feature of life during the Intifada. The bayanat enabled the collective organizing of the popular anticolonial revolt while masking the identity of their authors.

The First Intifada was one of the most heavily documented social movements of the twentieth century. Yet, the bayanat, a key material and textual feature, are largely unknown outside of Palestinian contexts. Particularly during the first two years when the uprising was at its height, the leaflets were crucial to linking mass public participation to an underground leadership. The content of the bayanat centered on issuing practical directives targeted to specific sectors. They contained a list of the days designated for collective actions, such as popular strikes, and their rationale. The leaflets set achievable goals and practical steps for reaching them, giving coherence to the broader upheavals of the rebellion. In doing so, the bayanat attained an established currency in their widespread recognition and then representation of the Intifada. The participatory role necessary for the bayanat’s successful distribution is an indication that everyday Palestinians felt a degree of representation by and became stakeholders in the messages conveyed through these texts. Together, the content and form of the bayanat can be read as a key political text for the Intifada period.

While the bayanat relied on a familiar form resembling the press release, reaching a broad Palestinian population was contingent on successful distribution and evasion of Israeli surveillance and counterinsurgency. Being caught in possession of even one leaflet could lead to imprisonment. Military Order 101 stated: “It is forbidden to print or publicize in the region any publication of notice, poster, photo, pamphlet or other document containing material having a political significance…” For this reason, most bayanat were destroyed shortly after they were read.

The censure of Palestinian political expression took place in a broader context. Palestinian national symbols even including the flag were banned by the Israeli parliament in 1967 with criminal consequences. The criminalization of the Palestinian flag and its colors lasted until 1993. Hence, Palestinians innovated stand-ins for the flag such as red-white-black-green laundry hung on clotheslines during the Intifada or the watermelon, as has been revived in the contemporary context of repression of solidarity with Palestinians.

Because of their illicit status, bayanat became extra-ephemeral: not only were they perishable paper but they were also incriminating documents that should be concealed or destroyed. On the other hand, the bayanat were enlivened by Israeli prohibition of this form of political speech. The bayanat held so much sway and popular legitimacy that historian Rashid Khalidi evaluated the documents as expressions of the popular political will and a foundation for the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Declaration of Independence issued on November 15th, 1988 in the Intifada’s first year.

The bayanat aimed below the censor of the Israeli military to reach the broad Palestinian populace—a figurative and often literal slipping of the note underneath the door. In this way, the bayan constituted an illicit textual form that leveraged the highly segregated lived space of apartheid Israel and militarily occupied Palestine to evade Israeli detection while maintaining communication among the Palestinian public. The result was a criminalized document with carceral repercussions.

In addition to being printed and distributed in Palestine, the bayanat were broadcast by radio stations in Damascus (al-Quds Palestinian Arab Radio) and Baghdad (Voice of the PLO). The meeting space for the underground leadership and printing production of the bayanat was secret and shifted over the course of the Intifada, although centered in East Jerusalem.

To communicate with the public, the UNLI cadres distributing the bayanat had to evade Israeli surveillance and repression on a regular basis. For the first month of the Intifada, for example, Abd-al-Rahim al-Baghdadi who was then 32 years old and a member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) produced bayanat at a printing press in the Issawiya neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Printing risked discovery and raids on the locations. Distribution carried its own risks. On February 3rd, 1988, Israeli forces caught and detained a distributor who was carrying 35,000 copies of UNLI’s bayan no. 6 in his van. The whole UNLI command was tracked and arrested from this one interception. However, the members of that command were soon replaced from the ranks of its organizational structure. By 1991 Israel had imprisoned several layers of the UNLI. Aside from the leadership, average Palestinians also risked imprisonment or worse for being caught with bayanat in their possession.

Following waves of arrests, the radio became a more significant and reliable medium for distributing bayanat. The bayanat were read aloud on radio stations throughout the region from Amman, Jordan to Damascus, Syria. Doing so transformed these hyperlocal texts into transnational documents that required solidarity across borders to function.

The radio also provided an avenue for reaching political prisoners. Political prisoners in Israeli captivity kept Intifada-era duties of transcribing the radio-read bayanat and then distributing hand-transcribed paper copies throughout their cells. Prisoners recorded the bayanat that were read aloud over the radio at dictation pace into prison notebooks. The Abu Jihad Museum contains an archive where I found many bayanat from the Intifada era recorded in notebooks.

The Abu Jihad Museum is an important archive for political prisoners and the prisoners’ movement. Their records provide insight into how political texts took shape and circulated within the prisons. In addition to the notebooks, capsules of writing smuggled through ingestion, were and continue to be a common method for political communication within the Israeli prisons. Letters, dictums, and political texts like bayanat could be smuggled in and out prisons by swallowing tightly crumpled paper wrapped in plastic.

The need to frequently and quickly distribute bayanat on a large scale combined with their illicit quality resulted in an extra-ephemeral paper document. The fragility of the materials—ink smudges, fading print, and, above all, intentional destruction after reading—reflect their hurried creation and the political conditions under which they were circulated. The bayanat emerged on thin paper, which could be produced cheaply and easily destroyed, but over time their production shifted towards the radio as a form of mass media that would not incriminate Palestinians who consumed the bayanat and also one that could evade the military censors of the prisons. The bayanat’s form, which shuttled between a paper document and a broadcast message, is a result of the dangers of collective organizing under Israeli rule.

A historical view of the bayanat through the differences of their production and circulation on the street and in the prisons, via paper or radio, smuggled through capsules, or captured by tight writing in notebooks, aids an understanding of paper’s materiality in the context of historical Palestinian struggle, but also within the present political trajectory in Palestine. The destruction not just of paper but of whole archives and libraries is part of Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza. The Israeli military’s longstanding practice of raiding print shops, confiscating tools and computers, and destroying posters, such as those of martyrs, is a more mundane version of the extraordinary violence on display since 2023.

Methods for understanding the bayanat documents must contend with not only their ephemeral but also illicit qualities. One remedy is the creation of different kinds of archives, practices which institutions like the Abu Jihad Museum have pioneered. These methods and modes of relating to sources that have been destroyed, at least in part, are familiar to Palestinian archivists and researchers who have long contended with the looting and targeted destruction of Palestinian heritage.

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NOTES

1. Daoud Kuttab, “I Covered the Intifada. It’s Wrong to Say It Means Violence Against Jews,” July 7, 2025, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting https://fair
.org/home/i-covered-the-intifada-its-wrong-to-say-it-means-violence-against-jews/ (accessed July 8, 2025).

2. At the start of the Intifada, over one million Palestinians lived in the territories that became Israel in 1948. Today, that population has grown to around two million.

3. Iris Jean-Klein, “Into Committees out of the House?: Familiar Forms in the Organization of Palestinian Committee Activism during the First Intifada,” American Ethnologist 30, no. 4 (2003): 564. On the disciplinary violence of the strike forces, see Alex Winder, “Anticolonial Uprising and Communal Justice in Twentieth-Century Palestine,” Radical History Review 137 (2020): 75–95. I owe Rema Hammami thanks for insisting on the role of fax technology.

4. For more, see Thayer Hastings. “Manasheer of the First Palestinian Intifada: Bayan no.1 (UNLI)”, Revolutionary Papers, 8 January 2025, https://
revolutionarypapers.org/teaching-tool/manasheer-al-intifada-bayan-no-1-unli/.

5. Human Rights Watch, “Born Without Civil Rights: Israel’s Use of Draconian Military Orders to Repress Palestinians in the West Bank,” December 17, 2019, https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/12/17/born-without-civil-rights/israels-use-draconian-military-orders-repress (accessed July 8, 2025).

6. Sarah Dickshinski, Abby Massell, Zoe Reinstein, and Mirvat Salameh, “‘Forbidden Colors’ Coming to Light,” June 13, 2016, The Jerusalem Fund. https://thejerusalemfund.org/2016/06/forbidden-colors-coming-light/ (accessed July 8, 2025).

7. Rashid Khalidi, “The Resolutions of the 19th Palestine National Council,” Journal of Palestine Studies 19, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 40.

8. International Court of Justice, “Advisory Opinion: Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” July 19, 2024, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf (accessed July 8, 2025).

9. Appendix II in Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin (eds.), Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 327.

10. Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising – Israel’s Third Front, translated by Ina Friedman (New York: Touchstone, 1989), 194.

11. Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, “Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024,” February 1, 2024, https://librarianswithpalestine.org/gaza-report-2024/ (accessed July 8, 2025).

12. B’Tselem, “Israeli military raids two print shops in Tulkarem, confiscates equipment and papers, and causes much damage,” May 4, 2017,  https://www.btselem.org/video/20170503_raids_on_tulkarm_printing_houses#full; Nour Abu Eisha, “13 Palestinian print shops attacked by Israel in 2021: NGO,” December 22, 2021, Anadolu Ajansi, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/13-palestinian-print-shops-attacked-by-israel-in-2021-ngo/2454751; Wafa News Agency, “Israel forces detain 10 Palestinians, ransack printing shop in West Bank raids,” August 27, 2018, https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/95311 (accessed July 8, 2025).

13. For more on the destruction and archival preservation of Palestinian cultural and intellectual heritage, see the compiled list of books and essays on the subject hosted by Columbia University Libraries online at https://blogs.library.columbia.edu/global-studies/destruction-and-pillage-of-palestinian-cultural-heritage-archives-and-libraries-since-1948/ (accessed July 8, 2025).

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