This Is What "Globalize the Intifada" Always Meant

It did not begin with bullets. It began with banners.

The murder of two Israeli diplomats outside the Lillian & Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, was not the work of a lone madman, unmoored from society, swept up in personal delusion. It was the bloody, pitiless consequence of a campaign that has spanned campuses, cities, and institutions since October 7, 2023. The phrase that binds the slogans to the slaughter is the same: "Globalize the Intifada."

What did you think it meant?

Let us be unflinchingly clear. The term "intifada" is not a gentle metaphor. It is not a poetic plea for justice. It refers to two violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel, both characterized by suicide bombings, stabbings, shootings, and the systematic targeting of civilians. To call for the globalization of the intifada is to demand the exportation of this carnage, its transformation into a roaming doctrine of hate and murder.

Since the Palestinian's October 7 attack on Israel, American college campuses have hosted over 3,700 protest days across 525 universities and schools in 317 US cities and towns. Encampments arose on more than 130 campuses. By May 6, 2024, over 3,600 arrests had been made. The Columbia University encampment alone inspired 2,200 protest days after April 17. These were not spontaneous student uprisings. They were part of a choreographed, well-financed campaign. Organizing manuals and protest kits appeared with curious simultaneity across institutions. The fingerprints of Soros-backed NGOs, radical Palestinian groups, and European anti-Zionist outfits are ubiquitous.

The slogan that adorned placards and protest chants, "Globalize the Intifada," was not treated as a warning by the administration, the media, or most universities. It was treated as speech, as fashion, as the rage of youth. That was a fatal miscalculation.

The victims, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, were not combatants. They were diplomats, emissaries of peace and engagement. Lischinsky, a Christian Israeli, and Milgrim, a Jewish American, had just attended an American Jewish Committee reception aimed at fostering dialogue and humanitarian solutions in the Middle East. Lischinsky had purchased a ring and planned to propose to Milgrim in Jerusalem. Instead, both were gunned down in cold blood on a Washington street by Elias Rodriguez, a man who wore a keffiyeh, shouted "Free, free Palestine," and paced for over an hour before calmly walking up to a group of Jewish attendees and executing two of them.

This did not happen in a vacuum. This is not a moment of individual madness. It is the metastasis of a movement whose core doctrine is antisemitic violence, sugarcoated in activist jargon and laundered through academic respectability. When mobs chant, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," they are not discussing borders. They are demanding the eradication of a nation. And increasingly, they are acting on it.

Consider the suspect. Rodriguez is not an anonymous drifter. He marched with BLM. He attended events organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the People’s Congress of Resistance. These are not peaceful organizations. They are revolutionary cells that openly call for the dismantling of Western institutions, the overthrow of capitalism, and the destruction of Israel. He is the perfect foot soldier for a decentralized war against Jews that cloaks itself in justice, but traffics in terror.

There is a grotesque irony here. The institutions most responsible for fostering civil discourse, critical thinking, and liberal education have become the breeding grounds for premodern tribal hatred. This is not mere hypocrisy. It is institutional complicity. Universities that refused to expel students who assaulted Jewish peers, that excused open calls for intifada as cultural expression, that permitted foreign-funded activist networks to occupy campuses with impunity, now pretend to be surprised.

They should not be. Nor should we. Every chant, every encampment, every administrative shrug has contributed to the moral normalization of Jew-hatred. The consequences are not abstract. They are measured in blood.

The same week Lischinsky and Milgrim were murdered, activists at UCLA beat Jewish students with sticks. Professors at Princeton and NYU lauded Hamas as "resistance fighters." And in the House of Representatives, members of the progressive caucus still refuse to condemn Hamas' October 7 atrocities without appending a condemnation of Israel. This is not the fringe anymore. It is the mainstream of a particular ideological current that has become so obsessed with power structures and colonial narratives that it can no longer distinguish between criticism and complicity.

This is what it means to globalize the intifada. It means teaching students that Jews are colonizers, Israelis are Nazis, and resistance is righteous by any means. It means allowing masked activists to parade through Ivy League campuses with mock AK-47s, while campus police look on. It means believing that violence is speech when the target is Jewish. It means enabling, through cowardice or ideology, the very atrocities that these institutions claim to abhor.

The call to action now is not rhetorical. It is practical, moral, and immediate. Congress must investigate the foreign and domestic funding sources of the campus protest movement. The Department of Homeland Security must classify "globalize the intifada" as incitement to violence and treat it as such. University administrators who aided and abetted these campaigns should be held to account. And donors, alumni, philanthropists, boards, must cease funding institutions that have chosen hatred over scholarship.

The murder of Lischinsky and Milgrim must be understood for what it is: not a tragedy, but a consequence. A result. A logical endpoint. For over a year, American elites allowed the rhetoric of terrorism to go mainstream, mistaking it for free expression or youthful exuberance. The bodies in Washington are the cost of that mistake.

No society can survive if it becomes indifferent to the organized dehumanization of a people. "Globalize the intifada" was never a slogan of peace. It was always a promise. And now, it has been fulfilled.

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