Intifada

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Intifada (also Intefadah or Intifadah; from انتفاضة‎ intifāḍah "shaking off") is an Arabic term for "uprising" or more commonly "shaking off of filth".

• It came into common usage in English as the popularized name for two recent Palestinian campaigns directed at Israel. These two uprisings have been significant aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent years:
  • The First Intifada began in 1987. Violence declined in 1991 and came to an end with the signing of the Oslo accords (August 1993) and the creation of the Palestinian National Authority.
  • The al-Aqsa Intifada (also known as the Second Palestinian Intifada or the Second Intifada) was the violent Palestinian-Israeli conflict that began in September of 2000.

• A wave of demonstrations and riots that broke out in May 2005 in the Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara that has been styled the "Independence Intifada" or the "El-Aaiun Intifada" by pro-independence Sahrawi demonstrators, a usage also applied by activists to earlier incidents in the territory in 1999 (the Smara Intifada), and 1970 (the Zemla Intifada, against Spanish occupation), although the usage was not widely adopted outside separatist activist circles.

• In 1952, citizens of Baghdad engaged in a series of large-scale protests against the Iraqi government, widely referred to as "the Intifada". Following the United States–led invasion of Iraq in 2003 Muqtada al-Sadr, a militant Shia cleric, launched an uprising which he also referred to as the "Iraqi Intifada" [1] aimed at ending the US-led foreign military presence in Iraq.

• The 1990s Intifada was a popular uprising in Bahrain demanding a return to democratic rule.

• The 1991 Shiite uprising in Iraq against Saddam Hussain.

• "Intifada of Independence" is also the term used by the Lebanese media to refer to the events that occurred after Rafiq Hariri's assassination. It is also known as the "Cedar Revolution".

• The French Intifada is an ongoing conflict between various French civil servants and Muslim youths in the suburbs of Paris and France in general.