In Australia, the Parliament of New South Wales (NSW) is considering whether to ban the slogan “globalize the intifada.” This follows moves in the UK to criminalize the slogan, and the NSW government has similarly justified the push by arguing that the slogan “is hate speech and encouraging of violence in our community.” Their argument implies a causal link between calls to “globalize the intifada” and acts of anti-Jewish violence such as the atrocity committed at Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025.
The alarmist public discourse essentially asks Australians to believe that in calling to globalize the intifada, pro-Palestine demonstrators are inciting violence against Jewish people. Certainly this is how many Zionist organizations interpret the phrase. As David Ossip from the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies puts it, “Globalizing the Intifada means killing a Jew wherever you find one.”
For commentators like the Sydney Morning Herald’s David Crowe, the historic fact of Palestinian suicide bombings is enough to deem any use of intifada as a call for violence. “It is true that many interpret the term more broadly,” he acknowledges, “but the link to those attacks is indisputable.”
Political language, particularly language of resistance and rebellion, is always a site of contestation. “Intifada” refers to periodic flare-ups of mass Palestinian resistance, within which different tactics have come to the fore at different times. It cannot be reduced to any of those tactics. Arabic, like English, has its own words for those. But it is not enough to simply look up “intifada” in an Arabic dictionary to settle today’s dispute surrounding the term. Slogans have a life of their own and must be interpreted historically and contextually. Some consideration of how this language actually entered Western political discourse is therefore helpful.
The late 1990s saw a series of mass mobilizations targeting the World Trade Organization and other…
Auteur: David Brophy
