This speech was given to the United Nations in 1988, after one year of the first intifada.

I bring you greetings from those heroic people, from our men and our women, from the masses of our blessed intifadah, which now enters its second year with great momentum and painstaking organization, using a civilized, democratic approach to weather and confront occupation, coercion, tyranny, and the barbaric crimes committed daily by the Israeli occupiers. Greetings to you from our young men and women in the occupation forces' prisons and collective detention centers. Greetings from the children of stones who are challenging occupation forces armed with warplanes, tanks, and weapons—an unarmed Palestinian David facing a heavily armed Israeli Goliath.

I said in concluding my address in our first encounter that as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and leader of the Palestine revolution, I reaffirm that we do not wish to see a drop of Jewish or Arab bloodshed, that we do not want the continuation of the fighting for one extra minute. I appealed to you then to spare us all these ordeals and sufferings and to speed up work on the foundations of a just peace based on securing the rights, hopes, and aspirations of our people and the equal rights of all peoples.

–“Speech before the forty-third session of the United Nations General Assembly,”
Yasir Arafat

What reason does Arafat give for the Palestinian uprising against Israel?

to stop crimes committed daily by Israel
to stop any Jewish or Arab bloodshed
to negotiate new borders for Palestine
to call attention to Palestinian poverty