An intifada (انتفاضة) is a rebellion or uprising, or a resistance movement. It is a key concept in contemporary Arabic usage referring to a legitimate uprising against oppression. In the Palestinian context, the word refers to attempts to "shake off" the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the First and Second Intifadas, where it was originally chosen to connote "aggressive nonviolent resistance", a meaning it bore among Palestinian students in struggles in the 1980s and which they adopted as less confrontational than terms in earlier militant rhetoric since it bore no nuance of violence The First Palestinian Intifada was a sustained series of Palestinian
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A black bloc is a tactic used by anti-capitalist protesters who wear black clothing, ski masks, scarves, sunglasses, motorcycle helmets with padding, or other face-concealing and face-protecting items. The clothing is used to conceal wearers' identities and hinder criminal prosecution by making it difficult to distinguish between participants. It is also used to protect their faces and eyes from pepper spray, which is used by police during protests or civil unrest. The tactic allows the group to appear as one large unified mass. Black bloc participants are often associated with anarchism, anarcho-communism, communism, libertarian socialism, antifascism, or the anti-globalization movement.
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The tactic was developed in the 1980s in the European autonomist movement's protests against squatter evictions, nuclear power, and restrictions on abortion, as well as other influences. Black blocs gained broader media attention outside Europe during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests when a black bloc damaged property of various multinationals. Diversity of tactics is a phenomenon wherein a social movement makes periodic use of force for disruptive or defensive purposes, stepping beyond the limits of nonviolence, but also stopping short of total militarization. It also refers to the theory which asserts this to be the most effective strategy of civil disobedience for social change. Diversity of tactics may promote nonviolent tactics, or armed resistance, or a range of methods in between, depending on the level of repression the political movement is facing.
'Free Palestine' means an end to the violent displacement, exclusion, and discrimination that Palestinians have faced, in various ways, since the ethnic cleansing of 1948. It means the implementation of the Palestinian people's rights and replacing an apartheid system with genuine democracy. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s longest-running and most controversial conflicts. At its heart, it is a conflict between two self-determination movements — the Jewish Zionist project and the Palestinian nationalist project — that lay claim to the same territory. But it is so, so much more complicated than that, with seemingly every fact and historical detail small and
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Despite a long-term peace process, Israelis and Palestinians have failed to reach a final peace agreement. Progress was made towards a two-state solution with the 1993–1995 Oslo Accords, but today the Palestinians remain subject to Israeli military occupation in the Gaza Strip and in 165 "islands" across the West Bank. Key issues that have stalled further progress are security, borders, water rights, control of Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, Palestinian freedom of movement, and the Palestinian right of return. The violence of the conflict, in a region rich in sites of historic, cultural, and religious interest worldwide, has been the subject of numerous international conferences dealing with historic rights, security issues, and human rights, and has been a factor hampering tourism in and general access to areas that are hotly contested. Many attempts have been made to broker a two-state solution, involving the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel (after Israel's establishment in 1948). In 2007, the majority of both Israelis and Palestinians, according to a number of polls, preferred the two-state solution over any other solution as a means of resolving the conflict.