There is a difference between being hated and being hunted. Most people understand that instinctively.

A slur is hatred made verbal. The N-word for Blacks, like “k*ke,” for Jews, carries generations of contempt. It degrades and dehumanizes. When someone says it, there is no confusion about what is being communicated. The message is brutally simple: you are despised.

Ugly as that is, it is at least honest.

But history teaches that some language goes beyond contempt. Some language carries the memory of violence and the method of violence.

For Black Americans, the image of a noose is not abstract. It is inseparable from lynching, terror, and public spectacle. A crowd marching with nooses would never be defended as harmless symbolism or political expression. Black Americans would hear it exactly as history taught them to hear it: as a threat.

That is where Jews place the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

The First Intifada was marked by riots, Molotov cocktails, stabbings, and attacks directed at Israeli Jews. The Second Intifada escalated into systematic suicide bombings: buses blown apart, cafés destroyed, restaurants turned into funeral scenes. Jewish civilians were the battlefield.

Then came what Israelis grimly called the “car intifada” of 2014–2016: vehicles driven into crowds at bus stops and train stations. After that, the “stabbing intifada”: knives pulled in streets, supermarkets, and neighborhoods, ordinary objects turned into weapons for killing Jews.

These were not abstractions. These were methods.

That matters because when someone chants “globalize the intifada,” Jews do not hear a vague political slogan. They hear the globalization of those methods.

Globalize the bus bombing. Globalize the car ramming. Globalize the stabbing. Globalize the killing of Jews.

That is why the phrase lands differently than a slur. A slur says: I hate you. “Globalize the intifada” says: the violence used against your people in Israel should be used against your people everywhere.

And this is no longer merely a Jewish interpretation. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said this week that those chanting “globalise the intifada” should face prosecution, explicitly describing it as rhetoric calling for terrorism against Jews. That recognition matters because it affirms what Jews have been saying for years: history gives words their meaning, and violent history gives them their menace.  

“If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews – and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted. It is racism, extreme racism and it has left a minority community in this country scared, intimidated, wondering if they belong.” – Sir Kier Starmer

Society already understands this principle elsewhere. A noose is not “just rope.” A burning cross is not “just wood.” History made them symbols of violence.

History made “intifada” one too.

And asking Jews to pretend otherwise is no different than asking Black Americans to pretend a noose is just a piece of rope.