Palestinian stone-throwing
[21] Stone-throwers also employ catapults, slings and slingshots[22] armed with readily available materials at hand: stones, bricks, bottles, pebbles or ball bearings, and sometimes rats[10][23][24] or cement blocks.
[28] Nonetheless, the international press and media focused on the aspect of Palestinian stone-throwing, which garnered more headline attention than other violent conflicts in the world,[29][30] so that it became iconic for characterizing the uprising.
[31] According to Edward Said, a total cultural and social form of anti-colonial resistance by the Palestinian people is commodified for outside consumption simply as delinquent stone throwing or mindless terroristic bombings.
The practice of stone-throwing has deep religious, cultural and historical resonance, and is grounded in the age-old use of slinging stones among young rural herders whose task it was both to keep watch on livestock, and ward off predators of family flocks, and to hunt birds.
[44] Meron Benvenisti likened the very way Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities use their traditions to stone-throwing: 'The chronicles of Jerusalem are a gigantic quarry from which each side has mined stones for the construction of its myths-and for throwing at each other.
'[45]Gaza, where the First Intifada broke out, has had a long history of stone-throwing, which, according to Oliver and Steinberg, goes back at least to an incident where Alexander the Great, while laying siege to the city, was hit by a stone, and almost lost his life.
Their media draw an analogy between their situation and that of the people in Mecca, when the Christian Ethiopian king of Yemen, Abraha al-Ashram, launched an attack on the city and the Kaa'ba in 571 C.E.
[54] According to one hadith or saying ascribed to Muhammad by Abdullah b. Mughaffal al-Muzani, the prophet of Islam proscribed stone-throwing, saying: "It neither stops a game nor inflicts injury on an enemy, but rather puts out the eye and breaks the teeth.
"[55] Many Palestinians take the tradition as harking back more directly to the Peasant Revolt that broke out in the wake of the Egyptian–Ottoman War (1831–33) when Ibrahim Pasha invaded Palestine and imposed harsh taxation and conscription policies on the local fellahin.
The Palestine Police Force (PPF) opened fire on a protesting Arab crowd which threw stones at a Barclays bank in Nablus, wounding several.
[61] After the Six-Day War left Israel in belligerent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, stone throwing occasionally emerged as a form of social protest.
By contrast the first Intifada was, in his view, characterized by an opposition between a Palestinian emphasis on preaching restraint, if not invariably nonviolence (al-la `unf), and an explicit Israeli policy of using "the iron fist" (ha-yad hazaqah, barzel Yisrael), which, in the latter instance, marked to first time since Israel's independence that the former consensus of 'the utility and morality' of recourse to violence was broken.
[75] Those who participated, among the best-educated in the Middle East, took to brandishing their banned national flag and throwing rocks and molotov-bombs at IDF forces, to express their frustrations at limited opportunities after decades of growing up under Israeli occupation.
[69] Resisting temptations to resort to small-arms warfare in the face of the vast military resources of the Israeli armed forces, Palestinians took to throwing stones, an improvised weapon which had deep symbolic resonances of a cultural, historical and religious kind.
[38] Though Palestinian Christians tended to be somewhat less prone to stone throwing during the intifada, preferring other forms of protest like resistance to paying taxes to Israel,[91] the Catholic priest, Fr.
[112][113] Israel's standard strategy for responding to Palestinian stone throwing protest had been to fire live ammunition at a relatively long distance from the site of the disturbance,[114] and shoot canisters of tear gas into crowds.
[115] In September 1988 the Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir proposed reclassifying rocks as lethal weapons to enable both settlers and soldiers to shoot immediately, without prior warning.
[122] 'Consequently,' it has been argued, 'the traditional view, which had so helped Israel maintain its self-image as a righteous nation that used force only in self-defense, against much greater and virulent Arab aggression, had dissolved in a matter of weeks.
[133] In 1991 an Israeli journalist, Doron Meiri, discovered that a police interrogation unit had been operative for some time whose function was to torture suspected stone-throwers (and youths who waved a Palestinian flag) to extract confessions by using electric shock treatment.
[140] In May 2018, Duvdevan Unit soldier Ronen Lubarsky was killed inside the al-Am'ari Refugee Camp near Ramallah, during an operational raid to capture people suspected of engaging in recent attacks, after a marble slab hit his head after being hurled from a rooftop.
[144] When the first revolt against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories broke out, according to Mira Sucharov, the myth reappeared in a subverted version, in both a kibbutz song, Dudi, you always wanted to be like David Red headed and nice eyes, And always with a smile In an alley in Nablus you forgot everything and turned into Goliath.
[148] Astute Palestinian planning to see that media representatives were present, despite Israeli efforts to hinder coverage, were demoralizing not only for Israel's foreign image, but to the parents of IDF soldiers watching the news.
The IDF website brands all Palestinian stone-throwing as 'unprovoked', and as 'threats to the stability of the region', and yet Beinart thinks it absurd to characterize behaviour by 'people who have lived for almost a half-century under military law and without free movement, citizenship or the right to vote,' unprovoked.
[117][169] Settler militias began to initiate retaliations in the form of violent rampages against Arab 'terror', disrupting village routines, shooting at water tanks, setting cars on fire and burning agricultural fields.
[174] During the large-scale 2018 Gaza border protests, some Gazan women made collections of stones for youths whose eyes were blurry from the effects of tear-gas, in order to save them time.
[7] In response to the killing of Sergeant Almog Shiloni and the 2014 Alon Shvut stabbing attack, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened a Security Cabinet meeting in which he announced that fines would be imposed on the parents of minors caught throwing stones.
[177] In November 2014, the Cabinet approved a preliminary draft of a bill that would, if passed, increase the legal penalties for stone-throwing to up to 20 years imprisonment where there is intent to cause bodily harm.
[186] The Israeli Cabinet unanimously passed a proposal on 24 September to create a 4 year mandatory minimum sentence for adults throwing stones and Molotov cocktails.
[18] Many popular songs and poems, some written in admiration by other Arabs, such as the Syrian Nizar Qabbani,[96] dwell on the function of stones in expressing the identity of Palestinians and their land.
One which arose during the First Intifada runs: yā ḥijārah yā ḥijārah Uw'ī trūḥī min al-ḥārah anā wiyāk trabbaynā mithl al-baḥr wa biḥārah (Oh stones, oh stones Do not leave our cramped quarters You and I were raised together Like the sea and the sailor)[38] In Palestinian theatre, a play staged at the beginning time of the First Intifada (1987) bore the title Alf Layla wa-Layla min Layāli Rāmi al-Ḥijāra, (A Thousand and One Nights of the Nights of a Stone Thrower) and portrayed an encounter between an Israeli military governor and a Palestinian youth who is represented as a Palestinian David facing down an Israeli Goliath and his well-equipped warriors.
