Globalise the intifada just means uprising. Intifada is Arabic for shaking off, and reading murder into it is prejudice

The fuller answer

Start with the verb. Almost every exchange about this slogan gets spent on the Arabic, and the Arabic is the part to give away inside ten seconds. Intifada means a shaking off. Say so before anybody makes you, and you have removed the only correction the other side was confident of landing.

The word carrying the argument is globalise.

An intifada is an uprising against the power that governs you. Nobody in Manchester, Melbourne or Chicago is governed by Israel. So a globalised one either means nothing at all where it is being shouted, or its object has moved, and outside Israel the only object available is the Jews who live there.

That is a question, and it has to stay one. Asked, it waits for an answer and the room waits with it. Asserted, it is an accusation, and the person you are talking to stops listening at the word antisemitic.

Two uprisings, one word

Ask which one is meant. The question is not rhetorical and most people cannot answer it.

The first, and concede it in full. It began on 9 December 1987 and ran to the Oslo declaration in September 1993. In large part it was what it is remembered as: general strikes, tax refusal, boycotts, neighbourhood committees, stones. Somebody who calls that a civil uprising is describing something that happened. An advocate who denies it will be corrected in public and will have earned it.

It was not only that, and the other half is the half you get asked about. On 6 July 1989 a passenger seized the wheel of the 405 bus on the Tel Aviv to Jerusalem road and drove it into a ravine, killing sixteen. It also turned inward. Between December 1987 and November 1993, Palestinians killed 942 other Palestinians as suspected collaborators on the Israeli army’s count, and 771 on the Associated Press count.

Volunteer both halves. The one you leave out is the one that gets used on you.

What the second one actually consisted of

Here the argument is made with dates rather than adjectives.

It began on 28 September 2000 and ran to 2005. Across those years there were 146 suicide attacks, with a further 389 foiled. Roughly a thousand Israelis were killed, the majority of them civilians, and between three and five thousand Palestinians.

Then the specifics, because almost nobody chanting the word has been told a single one of them.

• Dolphinarium, Tel Aviv, 1 June 2001. A bomber walked into the queue outside a seafront nightclub on a Friday night. Twenty one dead, sixteen of them teenagers, most of those girls from families who had arrived from the former Soviet Union.
• Sbarro pizzeria, Jerusalem, 9 August 2001. Lunchtime, a family restaurant on a corner. Fifteen killed that day, seven of them children, about 130 wounded. A sixteenth, Chana Nachenberg, died in 2023 after twenty two years in a coma.
• Café Moment, Jerusalem, 9 March 2002. Eleven dead, sixty five wounded.
• The Park Hotel, Netanya, 27 March 2002. A bomber walked into the Passover seder. Thirty dead, 140 wounded.
• Bus 32A, Patt junction, Jerusalem, 18 June 2002. Morning rush hour, metal balls packed around the charge. Nineteen dead.
• Bus 37, Haifa, 5 March 2003. Seventeen dead, many of them students.
• Bus 2, Shmuel HaNavi, Jerusalem, 19 August 2003. Twenty three dead, many of them children.
• Two buses in Beersheba, minutes apart, 31 August 2004. Sixteen dead.

That is what the word names to the people it was done to. Not a metaphor for refusal. Five years in which getting on a bus, or taking the children out for pizza, was a decision about risk.

The date that ends the dictionary argument

The translation defence has a problem, and it comes from the other side’s own reporting rather than from ours.

Middle East Eye, setting out the history of the phrase for its own readers, puts the earliest recorded outing of globalise the intifada at an antiwar rally in Washington in April 2002.

April 2002. Three weeks after the Park Hotel. The month after Café Moment. The slogan was not coined a generation later by people reaching for a half remembered metaphor. It was coined while the buses were still going up, by people reading the same newspapers as everybody else.

What the same method is called here

Handle this carefully, because done badly it sounds like a bid for sympathy and gets refused on the spot.

On 11 September 2001, 2,977 people were killed in New York, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania. On 7 July 2005, 52 people were killed on three Underground trains and a bus in Tavistock Square.

Britain does not call 7 July an uprising. There is no march to globalise it. And the method is not in dispute in either direction: civilians going about an ordinary morning, killed deliberately, chosen as the point of the operation rather than accepted as its cost.

So make it a question about naming, and then stop talking. When the café is in Jerusalem and the bus is in Haifa, the same act acquires a different noun. Ask why that is. Do not ask anybody to rank the dead, because that is the version that loses the room and should.

Who is actually in front of you

Most people using this phrase have read none of the above.

They mean resistance in the abstract. They mean that something should be done and not only in Gaza. They have never been told what happened between 2000 and 2005 because nobody has ever sat down and told them. Treat them as though they meant the Park Hotel and you will lose them, and you will deserve to.

So the order is fixed. Concede the Arabic. Ask which uprising. Only then supply the dates, and only as many as the conversation can hold. If they did not know, you have given them something they did not have. If they did know, the room now knows that too.

Send them the page written for that person rather than about them: protesting for Palestine without antisemitism.

The lines

Say these, or your own version of them.

“Intifada means a shaking off. I’m not arguing with the dictionary. I’m asking about the word globalise.”

“An uprising is against the government that rules you. Nobody in Manchester is ruled by Israel. So what does a globalised one act on here, and who?”

“Which intifada? The first was strikes and stones. The second was a hundred and forty six suicide bombings in five years.”

“The twenty seventh of March 2002, the Park Hotel in Netanya, thirty people killed at a Passover dinner. That’s inside the thing you want the world to copy.”

“The earliest use anyone can find of that phrase is April 2002, three weeks after Netanya. Middle East Eye reported that, not me.”

Where this backfires. Reciting eight attacks at somebody who asked one sincere question turns a conversation into a lecture, and you will watch them leave in the middle of it. Choose one and keep the rest in your pocket. Telling anybody that intifada means terrorism ends your standing immediately, because it does not, and they will check inside a minute. And the comparison with 7 July works only while it stays a question about what the act is called. Let it become a competition about whose dead count, and you have given the argument away.