I last traveled to Gaza in September 2016, two years after the horrific assault on the territory known as Operation Protective Edge. The destruction of Gaza's infrastructure was still evident in some places but much of it had already been cleared away. The mountains of rubble—formerly homes, schools and hospitals—were gone but what remained was an ineliminable emptiness that echoed the destruction it had replaced. Many things struck me on that trip but one, perhaps more than all the others, was particularly distressing. In many conversations, I had with young and well-educated adults, I learned that they knew little if anything about the first Palestinian uprising or Intifada, which was a formative and watershed event in Palestinian history. Their lack of knowledge was profoundly disturbing, a form of privation both tragic and self-defeating. As I observed in 2016, “I was … struck by how little the young but well-educated adults I met knew of the first Intifada and the Oslo years, absorbed as they were by the present day. In other words, not only do they feel disconnected from a possible future, they are also cut off from their very recent past—and the many important lessons contained in it.” Of course, many young adults in Gaza today were toddlers or not yet born during the first Intifada. Perhaps they never learned about the Intifada because it did not end the occupation or achieve an independent Palestinian state. Yet embedded in these defeats were certain remarkable achievements that forever changed Gaza.

This piece draws on nearly 300 pages of field notes I kept while living and working in Gaza during the second year of the Intifada (1988–1989). It took me some time to read through my field notes, which were comprised of interviews, observations, commentary, statistics, relevant newspaper articles and excerpts from books and journals, and what I found astounded me. I discovered in those notes a meticulously recorded history of a truly remarkable yet deeply painful and brutal period—long since erased—that I was fortunate to experience.