What "Globalize the Intifada" Actually Means

The solution to hysteria is history

It still appalls and amazes me how otherwise perfectly smart and informed progressive people swing 20 IQ points to the right when it comes to Israel. And now they are inflamed over the phrase: “Globalize the intifada!” They somehow imagine that the intifada had no legitimate cause, that perfectly well-treated and prosperous Palestinians living contentedly under an enlightened occupation must have gotten bored with their wonderful lives and decided that they just needed to lash out at Jews for no other reason than they were Jews.

Both intifadas came about because the Israeli occupation of the West Bank was and has always been brutal. Thousands of Palestinians, no matter how minor their offenses, (like showing a Palestinian flag, or arguing with a soldier) could find themselves arrested, tortured and incarcerated under dreadful conditions, often for years. The system of checkpoints is so onerous that it makes life miserable, dividing village from village and family from family, increasing transportation times by many multiples, as Israelis zip by on protected roads to their superior schools and hospitals. On top of that, for over 50 years now, settlers have been occupying more and more of the West Bank, appropriating the best land and water, and year after year, have increasingly terrorized West Bank villages, committing pogroms—yes, pogroms—as they are protected by the Israeli military. They are no more punished that southern lynchers were in the American South in the last century.

In the face of these conditions, guess what? Really angry teenagers, whose lives were constrained and futures bleak, whose brothers and fathers were arrested and tortured and killed by Israeli bullets, began to throw rocks. And day after day they took to the streets, and over many months, killed or injured a small fraction of the well-armed Israeli soldiers compared to the hundreds of them shot and killed for protesting. Rocks against bullets. That was the intifada.

And many years later, not only are conditions no better in the West Bank, but Israel has responded to the admittedly atrocious Hamas attacks of October 7 by killing 50 times the number of Gazans as Israelis who perished on that day. They’ve reduced 80% of Gaza to rubble, and are now not only trying to starve to death the remaining 2 million, but shooting scores of desperate people every single day just trying to get food from the completely inadequate number of aid trucks allowed in. This is what “the moral army” does.

Now a certain tranche of outraged anti-Mamdani New Yorkers can only hear “Globalize the Intifada!” to mean, “Kill all Jews everywhere!” No, that is not what it means. It means that Israel has very successfully sold its narrative of righteousness and victimhood to the world, to Europe and most importantly to the United States, so that Israel receives billions of military aid each year while refusing any political settlement with the Palestinians that may actually grant them true sovereignty. Our American tax dollars fund the messianic settlers slowly annexing Palestinian land and displacing its residents. “Globalizing the intifada” means the entirely legitimate resistance to Israeli ethno-nationalism and militarism cannot be confined to the Middle East. Israel has globalized its repression, and so, in response, so must be globalized the struggle against occupation and war, because until Americans understand the utter inhumanity of the regime our taxpayer dollars are supporting, the scourge of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians will never come to end.

What really gets me is the complete inability and unwillingness of so many of the pro-Israel diaspora to even attempt to empathize with Palestinians. They never take a moment to imagine what they would do if they were, for example, a resident of the West Bank living under occupation. Do they really think they would say, “You know what, we only lived here for the last 10 centuries or so, and you were here 2000 years ago, so really, what’s a little Nakbah between friends? Why don’t you take ALL of the West Bank – I mean Judea and Samaria--and Gaza, and just find a nice corner of Egypt and Jordan to dump us all. Because 2000 is bigger than 1000, after all.”

Of course they wouldn’t do that. They would hate the occupiers who make their lives so difficult. They would also throw rocks, be overwhelmed with rage. And because Israel is constantly repeating that to be a Jew and Israeli is the same thing, why would they make a distinction between the two? What non-Israeli Jews have Palestinians ever had the opportunity to meet? Peter Beinart was transformed by his visits to the West Bank, but he cannot carry the burden of representing the millions of diaspora Jews who are horrified by the Netanyahu regime and what it has done. Or claim to be, until a Muslim mayor is elected and they decide they’re in mortal danger.

Mamdani is not an anti-Semite. But he does have a little bit of trouble with – oh well, can’t say genocide, can we—how about the term “mass murder?” Is 57,000 “mass” enough to qualify? The question you ask is, “How can he call it genocide? That’s ‘our’ word.’” The question I ask you is, “Whatever it’s called, why aren’t you denouncing it?”

Stop weaponizing the specter of antisemitism to blind you to the wholly legitimate objections any thinking and feeling human being should have to what modern Zionism has become. Israel is your abusive Dad, and even though you hate the way he beats your Mom and you, in front of the judge you cry “No, no, he’s a great Dad, he never hits us!” How long are you gonna continue apologizing for Israel, just because you’re nominally related?

That’s not love, it’s pathology.

MCO 2025