It’s the Intifada, Stupid

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what, exactly, we are seeing throughout the world today, from pro-Palestinian protestors tearing down American flags in New York City on Veteran’s Day and replacing them with Palestinian flags, to rage-filled demonstrators smashing glasses and violently pounding on the locked doors of Grand Central Terminal in the same city, with police officers barricaded behind those doors. 

Most of us know there’s something going on, but how are we to understand it?

And then, after watching a video of a pro-Palestinian man climbing a statue of Benjamin Franklin during a demonstration in Washington, D.C. and wrapping the statue’s head in a keffiyeh, I had an epiphany: It’s the intifada, stupid. 

Readers of a certain age may remember one of the slogans from Bill Clinton’s first successful presidential campaign in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid,” made famous by his strategist, James Carville, in a television quip. The message was also plastered at Clinton campaign headquarters in Little Rock as part of three repetitive campaign slogans: “Change vs. more of the same,” “The economy, stupid” and “Don’t forget health care.”

I don’t know about you, but I never thought I would live to see the day when a statue of Benjamin Franklin would be wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, or people would climb flagpoles in New York City to replace American flags with Palestinian ones. I also thought I’d never see the day when a sitting member of Congress, namely Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), would lose it on the House floor and begin screaming into a microphone because her dear friend, Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), another sitting member of Congress, had been censured for repeatedly chanting a genocidal slogan against Jews (“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”). Incidentally, more young men have been recruited into terrorist organizations from Omar’s district than anywhere else in the U.S., according to the FBI, especially to Somali terror groups abroad. But that’s for another column.

Sometimes, I wonder if, until now, we didn’t truly take the anti-Western, antisemitic, misogynistic fanatics who are out in the streets and on campus today seriously.

Sometimes I wonder if, until now, we didn’t truly take the anti-Western, antisemitic, misogynistic fanatics who are out in the streets and on campus today seriously. 

The thing about these hateful people is that they’re now saying the quiet part loud and the loud part even louder. Case in point: Outside the Sydney Opera House in Australia, protestors chanted, “Gas the Jews!” At the University of Maryland, home to the fourth-largest Jewish student population in the country (roughly 6,000), students chanted, “There is only one solution—the intifada revolution,” and “Holocaust 2.0” was scrawled on campus. Last week in Quebec, two Jewish schools were struck with gunfire, a synagogue was firebombed, a keffiyeh-clad female student was filmed screaming, “kike!” and pointing to a Jewish student, an imam called for the extermination of Jews and a professor called a Jewish student a “whore” before telling her to go back to Poland.

Such unnerving honesty has awoken many. At the United Kingdom House of Lords, Lord David Wolfson delivered a powerful speech in which he admitted that he worries more about his teenage daughter riding “the tube” in London while wearing a Star of David necklace than his son, who is currently serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Shockingly, he also said, “University Jewish societies no longer publicize where they are meeting [in the U.K.]. The address is handed out samizdat fashion shortly before the meeting. This isn’t some underground group in Soviet Russia. It is a Jewish [student] society in this country, in 2023.”

Imagine that. It’s almost as disturbing as the video from UCLA last week that showed angry pro-Palestinian students, most of them hiding their faces behind wrapped keffiyahs, holding a long stick and beating a piñata with Benjamin Netanyahu’s face on it. Most of them were female students, with the exception of an angry male, who, instead of using a stick, began punching the piñata. Unsatisfied, he pulled it down, punched it again and began stamping on it. Everyone cheered. It’s fair to ask what these students would do to a Jewish or Israeli student if he or she was walking alone, in the dark, off campus? At Harvard, a mob quickly descended upon a male Jewish student and overwhelmed him with shouts. One of the hateful participants was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. 

But anyone who cherishes Western values, including women’s rights, should look past these young men and women, to their future children. What will be their values about democracy, women’s rights and plurality? I realize we need to focus on the urgency of today, but we also need to look at least one generation ahead and imagine what it will look like to be Jewish on the street or on campus in 20 years. And who will have stood with Israel-bashers for so long that we won’t even bother to reach out to them for support and allyship two decades from now? 

Perhaps Israel will eradicate Hamas. Perhaps there will be peace with the Saudis. But what about all the anti-Western fanatics who now have been empowered? At this moment, I believe that a Jew would be safer at Shabbat services in Riyadh than in London.  

Would there ever be fewer Jew-haters in the Middle East than in Europe and the West? It’s a question worth asking. And it reminds me of an old Persian adage: “The bowl is hotter than the soup that’s in it,” a phrase frustrated people back in Iran often use about the regime’s obsession with supporting Palestinians, rather than its own people.  

Maybe that explains why Representative Omar recently screamed and beat her chest on the House floor over Palestinian causes, instead of condemning the mass killing of 1,300 people at a displaced persons’ camp in Darfur by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) a few days ago, with over 2,000 injured and 310 missing. There were “corpses in the streets,” survivors told the media about this horrifying humanitarian crisis. 

Sometimes, it helps to call something by its name. It also helps that pro-Palestinian demonstrators themselves are chanting slogans such as “Globalize the intifada.” 

Do all those who are protesting against Israel today want an intifada, and do they all support Hamas? The real question we should be asking is if even some, not all, of these protestors have openly praised Hamas or called for a global intifada, why have so many others joined protests knowing these kinds of people would also be there?

I received clarity about this question a few days ago, when I watched a video of one lone man (who actually looked Iranian), standing among pro-Palestinian protestors and holding up a simple sign: “Hamas = terrorists.” It didn’t take long for those around him to notice his sign. I’ll leave it to you to guess what happened next.

Tabby Refael is an award-winning writer, speaker and weekly columnist for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Follow her on X/Twitter and Instagram @TabbyRefael