This was when the term "French intifada" was first widely used by the media and by the rioters themselves.
Successive conflicts in the Middle East he said, have served up "a crush of trigger events" that has prevented tempers from cooling: the second intifada in 2000, the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006, and the three Israel–Hamas conflicts in 2009, 2012 and 2014 have "left no time for the situation to return to normal".
The so-called "French intifada", the guerrilla war with police at the edges and in the heart of French cities, is only the latest and most dramatic form of engagement with the enemy.
In France, for example, anti-Semitic attacks, often perpetrated by Muslims, rose steeply after the second intifada began in 2000.
Today they are home to the "foot-soldiers in the French intifada".
During the Palestinian intifada (uprising) that fizzled out in 2004, Hamas sent scores of suicide-bombers to blow up Israelis.
Daily rioting in Hebron and Bethlehem brought back memories of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising that began in 1987 and in which hundreds, nearly all Palestinians, were killed.
And at the outset of the second intifada in 2000, Palestinian militants torched Joseph's tomb in the West Bank town of Nablus and painted its dome green, for Islam.
In a battle lasting a week, 23 soldiers were killed, including the ambushed reservists the heaviest military death-toll Israel has suffered during the intifada.
But after 1982 the struggle-from-exile faded in importance, to be replaced first by the internal intifada (uprising) and then by the acceptance of a negotiated compromise, the terms of which, Mr Sayigh argues, ran counter to the PLO's principles and aims.At the heart of the armed struggle was the determination of its leaders to create the institutional framework and bureaucracy of a state.
But no sooner had he crushed the second intifada than he turned on his own constituents, whom he had decided were an impediment to getting the world off Israel's back.
