Wht Is the Intifada?

By now everyone knows that Democratic New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refused, on three occasions, to reject the phrase-- globalize the intifada. 

When asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker to denounce the phrase, Mamdani hemmed and hawed, mumbling something about free speech, and ended up refusing to eat his own words.

But then, how many of us really know what the intifada was? How many of us understand that it was a campaign of systematic terrorism against Israeli civilians, beginning in 2002. And, of course, it was globalized in terroristic attacks against Israelis and Jews in other parts of the Western world.

Yesterday morning New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recalled what it was like living and working in Israel during the intifada.

The notion that a politician in New York City cannot denounce this is beyond belief.

I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing. 

… Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit….

Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured. 

This is straight-up terrorism, directed at civilians, to redress a grievance that was not really a grievance.

Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day.

And then, in 2004:

The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.

As for what it means to globalize the intifada, Stephens offers some examples:

But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.”

Stephens finds the Mamdani attitude unacceptable. I find him to be a bit wishy-washy here:

But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.

The obsession with the Palestinian cause involves making the weak feel strong, making the impotent feel powerless, and making the cowardly feel courageous. Worse yet, it makes a free people feel oppressed. Keep in mind, there have been no Israelis in Gaza for nearly two decades now.

And yet, the Palestinians, rather than build a nation, never stop whining and complaining… and blaming someone else.

The Palestinian cause is the ultimate in lost causes. Its adherents will never forgive Israel for succeeding where the Palestinians have failed. And, given their moral degeneracy, promoters of the Palestinian cause are always blaming someone else for their failings and their failures.

As a coda, I will add a point that Times columnist Tommy Friedman made recently. The Palestinian Gazas are monumentally stupid people. So, their cause is to make idiots feel smart:

Among Palestinians in Gaza, the question will be asked of their defeated Hamas leaders: “What in the world were you thinking on Oct. 7, 2023? You started a war with Israel, a vastly superior military foe, with no end game other than destruction, which only got the Jews to retaliate with no end game other than destruction. You sacrificed tens of thousands of homes and lives to win the sympathies of the next generation of global youth on TikTok, but now there is no Gaza.”