The Dialectic of Opportunities and Threats and Temporality of Contention: Evidence from the Occupied Territories

Abstract

Analysis of Palestinian contention in the years leading to the first Intifada illustrates how state action aimed at demobilizing challengers can have the opposite effect. The Palestinian construction of a shared perception of opportunities and threats (a process best thought of as a meaning-laden dialectic of opportunities and threats) can explain this inverse relation between repression and contention. Content analysis of the Palestinian print media suggests that the newspapers' coverage of events in Israel, reflecting deepening domestic Israeli divisions about the continuation of the occupation, framed perceptions of opportunities and threats in a way that called Palestinians to action. This analysis supports the idea that opportunities and threats are not objective features of a political environment, but are, instead, constructed by movement activists.