Activists Can’t Give In to Bad-Faith Smears on Pro-Palestine Speech and Slogans

As New York City’s November mayoral election approaches, front-runner Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy continues to face familiar attacks and Islamophobic smears. While Mamdani has attempted to focus his campaign on making New York City more affordable, establishment figures have largely focused on his relationship to the Palestine solidarity movement as a means to attack him. This was evident during the mayoral debate on October 16, when Mamdani’s opponent Andrew Cuomo repeated his accusation that Mamdani refuses to denounce the phrase “globalize the Intifada,” insisting, obviously falsely and in bad faith, that the phrase means “kill all Jews.”

Mamdani’s history as part of the Palestine solidarity movement is simultaneously responsible for his upset primary victory, and a magnet for attacks and criticism from establishment politicians. Against the backdrop of two years of Israel’s mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and engineered starvation in Gaza, backed first by Joe Biden and now Donald Trump, Mamdani’s breakthrough candidacy reflects a popular rejection of genocide and of the Democratic Party’s inability to break with its longstanding support for Israel.

Throughout the course of his campaign, Democratic and Republican politicians alike have attacked Mamdani, focusing in particular on his statements on Palestine, and especially his commentary on the phrase “globalize the Intifada.” The phrase has been met by particularly intense backlash, as it demonstrates the mainstreaming of Palestine solidarity, the strength and radicalization of the movement, and an alternative path to achieving Palestinian liberation. But instead of defending the phrase, Mamdani has increasingly distanced himself from it, thereby ceding ground to the attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement. Movement activists, on the other hand, should defend the phrase and what it stands for.

The Making of a Smear Campaign

The national media took up its obsession with Mamdani’s commentary on “globalize the Intifada” in June, shortly after he won the Democratic primary. On an episode of The Bulwark podcast that month, Mamdani was asked to comment on the phrase, which the interviewer suggested was a representation of antisemitism from protesters. Mamdani responded that his focus as mayor would be on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe, and not on policing language, and that words in Arabic are often demonized due to Islamophobia — pointing out that the Holocaust Museum itself uses the word “Intifada” when translating the “Warsaw ghetto uprising” into Arabic.

Ever since then, Mamdani has come under intense pressure to distance himself from the phrase, and faced smears and attacks, many of them from within the Democratic Party itself: Mamdani’s opponent, Andrew Cuomo, claimed that the phrase “fuel[s] hate;” Kirsten Gillibrand refused to endorse Mamdani and falsely suggested he had made “references to global jihad.” Even Bernie Sanders reprimanded Mamdani to “more carefully address” issues related to Israel. Unsurprisingly, many Republicans have launched wildly racist attacks against Mamdani, with Trump insinuating that he is not a citizen, and other Republicans associating him with the attacks of 9/11 (which took place when Mamdani was nine years old), and calling him a “jihadist.” On July 17, the House of Representatives put forward a bipartisan resolution condemning the use of the slogan “globalize the Intifada” and urging national, state, and local leaders to also condemn it, potentially greenlighting more repression of activists and student protestors.

Though racist smears and attacks did not prevent Mamdani’s primary victory, and he is expected to win the general election with a wide margin — demonstrating the strength of the Palestine solidarity movement and its effect on broad layers of public consciousness — the candidate has nonetheless distanced himself from “globalize the Intifada,” saying on multiple occasions that he will “discourage” its use. In Thursday’s debate, Mamdani reiterated that he now understands that the phrase evokes fear for many Jews, and therefore he will “discourage this language.” But this is a dangerous error: it risks giving into racist demonization of the phrase, of Palestinian history, and of the Palestine solidarity movement as a whole.

As the pressure mounts in the context of the wider crackdown against the Palestine solidarity movement, activists should defend the phrase. Fundamentally, “globalize the Intifada” is a call for solidarity and struggle from below, and looks to popular movements, revolts, and mass struggle — rather than relying on states and imperial powers — as inspiration and as the way forward. In particular, it looks to the examples of the First and Second Palestinian Intifadas, which showed a grassroots alternative as key to Palestine’s liberation. And it is the wider movement, not politicians or the media, that must decide what slogans and demands it uses — and must refuse mainstream pressure to dilute its messaging or demonize its history.

The Movement Has Changed Consciousness, and Its Slogans Reflect This

Over the past two years, a growing solidarity movement has succeeded in changing popular consciousness around Palestine in the U.S. Beginning in the weeks after October 7, the movement defied intensified Islamophobia and mobilized in spite of weaponized allegations of antisemitism that threatened to curtail any efforts to cohere protest in solidarity with Gaza. Since then, the Palestine solidarity movement has made millions of Americans aware of the U.S. government’s bipartisan complicity in the oppression and suffering of the Palestinian people — awakening millions to the realities of U.S.-supported war abroad that had become normalized over the last 20 years and stirring popular anger that the government has allotted resources for death abroad rather than life — health care, education, infrastructure — at home. Largely for the first time, the movement has pushed beyond a narrow, human rights-based framework for understanding Palestine that focuses on excessive violations of international law to instead popularize an analysis that understands systems of power, one that names imperialism, settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The prominence of the slogan “globalize the Intifada” is part of this change in consciousness: it valorizes popular struggle from below and understands the need for solidarity and mass global uprising to tackle and effectively shift the balance of power against these systems.

Looking to the First and Second Palestinian Intifadas

The Arabic word “intifada” comes from the verb “shaking off” — like shaking off dust, or oppression — and can also mean a shudder or a tremor. In the mid-20^th century, it came to be used to mean “uprising.” While the word “intifada” in Arabic can denote any uprising from below and has been used to name dozens of popular uprisings across the Middle East, mentions of “the Intifada” are most often in reference to the First and Second Palestinian uprisings against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which began in 1987 and 2000, respectively. Both were movements from below that propelled the Palestinian struggle forward and offered an alternative to the reactionary agendas of state powers and a window into how Palestinian liberation might be achieved. Both should be defended against their demonization in mainstream U.S. media and studied as examples of anti-colonial revolts that challenged Israeli settler-colonialism and its imperial backers.

The First Intifada had an especially popular, mass character that threatened to upend Israel’s occupation and, for several years, thoroughly challenged the balance of forces on the ground across occupied Palestine. It emerged from the refugee camps of Gaza in December 1987, 20 years after Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Frustration with the unending occupation, Israel’s colonial control over Palestinians’ lives and livelihoods, and Israeli violence against Palestinians erupted in spontaneous mass protests of tens of thousands of Palestinians, first in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza before spreading to refugee camps across Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli violence stoked the flames of the uprising. The refugee camps remained the focal point of the uprising throughout its early weeks, highlighting its working class character, until Israel imposed curfews on each of Gaza’s eight refugee camps, impeding residents’ access to food and employment and hampering their ability to lead the revolt.

The early stages of the Intifada were characterized by its popular, working-class character as well as by Palestinians’ self-organization from below. Grassroots organization began, largely from the refugee camps, with popular committees including defense, food, women’s, medical, and educational committees to protect the residents of the camps and communicate across them. These committees spread outward to create the grassroots character that the First Intifada is known for. In the uprising’s second stage, the underground Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU) emerged and institutionalized the revolt beyond the refugee camps, while continuing to establish popular committees. These popular committees, along with widespread efforts at economic self-sufficiency (including tax boycotts and general strikes), and the underground leadership, combined to create a dual power dynamic that challenged Israel’s occupation and made Palestinian grassroots self-rule and an end to the occupation seem all but inevitable.

Several factors led to the end of the First Intifada: most crucially, it was massive violence by the Israeli state that eventually crushed the uprising, with Israel killing over 1,000 Palestinians, imprisoning 120,000 throughout the uprising, and torturing and beating thousands of others in Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s infamous “break-their-bones” policy. But Palestinian elites, largely those in exile, also maneuvered to outflank the grassroots elements of the First Intifada. The early months of the uprising saw masses of Palestinians unaffiliated with the traditional political parties leading the uprising through grassroots organizing, but as time went on, external, elite leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and in particular its Fatah faction, increasingly began to take over and dictate the course of the uprising. These were the leadership forces that eventually capitulated to Israel and its demands in the Oslo Accords of 1993, leading to an agreement that further atomized Palestinians under occupation while proclaiming a process of state-building. But it is the original popular and grassroots character of the First Intifada that the slogan “globalize the Intifada” refers to, with increasing awareness of the role of the traditional political parties in bringing the uprising to its end. And despite accusations that the slogan is associated with Hamas, the Islamist political party only formed after the start of the uprising. While it attempted to catch the uprising’s political movement, Hamas was unable to play the role of other established political parties like Fatah. Similarly, Hamas was not part of the underground leadership, the UNLU, which was more radical and grassroots than the leadership-in-exile of Fatah and the PLO.

The Second Intifada, which emerged in September of 2000, was also an expression of popular frustration — this time not only at the still-ongoing Israeli occupation but also in rejection of the farcical “peace process” led by Israel and the U.S. that continued to strip Palestinians of their land and worsen conditions on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza. But this time, Israel unleashed massive levels of violence against the uprising from its start. Though the Second Intifada also began with mass protests, the intensified level of Israeli state violence and repression led to the militarization of the uprising, which came to include armed factions and bombings and threatened to take away from its popular and grassroots character. Israel used the start of the U.S.-led so-called War on Terror to continue to ramp up its violence against Palestinians, beginning a large-scale invasion and siege of cities in the West Bank. Nonetheless, U.S. and Israeli media coverage focused on the violence of Palestinians throughout the uprising rather than on the — much greater — violence of the settler colony that worked to provoke it and that kept Palestinians subjugated and without recourse.

Still, the Second Intifada had crucial popular elements that shaped not only Palestinian politics but also regional politics. Unlike during the First Intifada, which occurred almost solely within the West Bank and Gaza, during the Second Intifada Palestinian citizens of Israel began to organize their own demonstrations and express unity with Palestinians between the river and the sea. This unity was a refusal of imposed fragmentation, and spoke to the fact that Israeli settler colonialism was the problem, not simply the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This point was reiterated in the (brief, but still meaningful) 2021 Unity Intifada that sprang up and was led by Palestinian youth in East Jerusalem and within Israel proper.

The Second Intifada also caused a regional earthquake, with mass protests against the regional regimes’ complicity with Israel and the U.S. spreading across the region — including in Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, and even in the Gulf states. In 2000 and then in 2002, mass demonstrations — in many cases led by university students — erupted in each of these countries in solidarity with the Second Intifada, exposing the region’s regimes for their inaction and complicity and comparing their own oppression and exploitation at the hands of their own regimes with the plight of the Palestinians. Mass protests and grassroots organizing in solidarity with Palestine emerged in Jordan in the fall of 2000 — with hundreds of protests and protest meetings each week — and faced the Jordanian regime and security services’ crackdown and ban on marches and demonstrations. Similar dynamics occurred in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Morocco, with security forces suppressing mass demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine. Egypt may have witnessed the largest solidarity movement: for weeks on end, tens of thousands of university students from across the majority of the country’s universities faced security forces and their brutal repression and denounced Egypt’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak, for his complicity with Israel. The movement radicalized to a level of struggle that would set the stage for the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Calls to “globalize the Intifada” thus also point to this history of Palestinian uprising leading to — and requiring — regional and global uprisings to shake off the complicity of global leaders and push to break the imperial backing propping up Israel’s settler-colonial state.

On Maintaining the Slogans and Demands of the Movement

There is no question that the Palestine solidarity movement has changed public consciousness in the U.S. over the past two years, despite the challenges and repression it has faced, and the continued support of the U.S. for Israel and its genocide. But as time passes, and with continued and mounting repression, there is a danger of pushback even on these ideological gains. Over the past decade, the U.S. has seen several movements that have transformed mass consciousness, including the #MeToo movement and the Movement for Black Lives, which changed widespread perceptions of sexism, sexual assault, racism, and the role of the police. But both of these movements also faced serious backlash from the Biden administration and the Trump administration alike. Feminist ideas and consciousness that entered the mainstream in 2017 have given way to romanticization of traditional gender roles in popular discourse over the past few years. And at the height of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020, when the strength of the movement meant that its ideas were becoming widespread, the call to abolish the police gained massive popularity and credence. But since then, even the demand to defund the police has become “too radical,” with Biden instead providing millions more in funding for police departments around the country. Over the course of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, he has continued to shift on the issue of the police as well, insisting that he will work with the police, not defund them, and apologizing for calling the police racist and sexist during the George Floyd rebellion in 2020. Without sustained mobilization and a refusal to water down slogans, demands, and messaging, progressive movements risk the erosion of their ideas in popular consciousness.

In the case of the Palestine solidarity movement, attacks on pro-Palestine slogans and ideas also mean intensified attacks on Palestine solidarity and on the movement as a whole. In a period in which Palestine solidarity activism can lead to arrest, detention, and threats of deportation, ceding ground at the level of ideas and slogans can have increasingly dangerous consequences.

The pressure on Mamdani to distance himself from the slogan “globalize the Intifada” also represents a fundamental conundrum within the Democratic Party: Popular support for the party is at a historic low, and Democratic politicians can only attract excitement if they support progressive movements, especially solidarity with Palestine. Despite poll after poll showing growing opposition from its base, the party retains its unwavering support for Israel. Deviation from this party line, while popular with increasingly broad segments of the U.S. population, is seen as a threat by establishment politicians. Mamdani’s quickness to distance himself from the slogan is also worrisome, raising the question of whether he will be able to push for an alternative while embedded in a party bent on maintaining a rigid status quo.

Fundamentally, it is the role of the students, activists, and organizers who make up the movement to decide on its slogans and demands, and to refuse to bend to pressure even if progressive politicians feel the need to do so. The protest slogan “globalize the Intifada” represents a genuine need for popular revolt from below to challenge the dominance of Israel and all the regimes that support it. It must be defended unequivocally.