“Globalize the Intifada” doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s even worse

When I hear people chant “Globalize the Intifada,” I don’t think Tiffany’s will be bombed or McSorley’s will crumble.

The violence won’t arrive with masked gunmen in the streets. It will be quieter, more insidious.

Maybe Zabar’s will have a swastika scrawled on its windows one morning, or a deli in Brooklyn will find its mezuzah ripped off the doorframe. Maybe Jewish kids will be told to tuck their stars inside their shirts, to wear baseball caps over their yarmulkes on the subway. The old, familiar precautions of diaspora life.

But that’s not what frightens me most.

The real danger isn’t just what happens TO us — it’s what happens WITHIN us.

Because this slogan, this call to “globalize the intifada,” isn’t only about Israel. It’s about dividing the Jewish people, atomizing us — setting one group of Jews against another until we forget that we are, in fact, one people.

We’re already seeing it happen.

There are Jews who believe Judaism is a religion — a set of rituals, ethical precepts, and cultural expressions.

There are Jews who find their identity in art, in justice, in food, in music — all valid and beautiful.

And then there are Jews, like me, who believe that our sacred tie to history — to Jerusalem, to the Land of Israel — is not just cultural or sentimental. It is covenantal. It is the beating heart of who we are.

To us, Israel is not a “project” or an “idea.” It’s not a political experiment or a bargaining chip in the moral economy of the West.

Israel is the thread that binds us to our ancestors who walked barefoot through deserts, who whispered “Next year in Jerusalem” through the smoke of pogroms and crematoria. It is the dream that never died, the miracle that still endures, the ember that refused to go out even in the darkest night.

So when people chant “globalize the intifada,” they aren’t just calling for violence against Jews in Israel. They are calling for a spiritual and psychological uprising against the very core of Jewish continuity — against the idea that our connection to this land is sacred, ancient, and non-negotiable.

And that is how the next intifada will unfold: not in the streets of Tel Aviv or Nablus, but in the comment sections, the classrooms, the dinner tables, and within Jewish hearts.

It will whisper: Maybe you don’t belong here. Maybe Israel is just another colonial power. Maybe you should distance yourself, disavow, apologize.

It will demand that we amputate part of ourselves to be accepted in polite company.

But here’s what they don’t understand: Judaism isn’t built for disconnection. Our story has always been one of return — to our land, to each other, to the holy, messy, human pulse of belonging.

And yes, we will argue. God knows, we’ve always argued. Two Jews, three opinions — that’s like our birthright.

But let’s not let those who hate us define our arguments for us. Let’s not allow them to redraw the map of our peoplehood along the fault lines they prefer.

Because if the goal of “globalizing the intifada” is to isolate us, to make us question our right to exist — as a nation, as a people, as a story still unfolding — then the most radical thing we can do in response is to stay connected. To remember who we are. To hold fast to one another, even when it’s hard.

I don’t believe Time Square will be bombed.

But I do believe our sense of shared destiny could be — unless we choose differently.