Protest is not Terrorism

Extended version of an open letter opposing criminalisation of the slogan Globalise the Intifada

11 May 2026

We are profoundly alarmed by the growing attempts of politicians and public authorities to mischaracterise the phrase “globalise the intifada” as a call for violence against Jewish people, and to advocate for its criminalisation. This characterisation is unfounded and dangerous.

As the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) has recently made clear, the Arabic word intifada simply means “uprising”, “shaking off” or “rising up.” It has been used historically to describe a wide range of popular struggles against injustice, most especially mass movements against colonial domination, military occupation, and authoritarian rule. A very partial list of examples might include the Iraqi Intifada of 1952, the 1990s Intifada in Bahrain, the Sahrawi Intifada that started in 1999, and of course the great series of uprisings or intifadas which began in Tunisia and Egypt that came to be known collectively as the 2011 Arab Spring. Arabic-speaking scholars also use the word intifada to refer to events like the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland or the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Thanks to its peculiar staying power, as Edward Said observed in 1989, “intifada is the only Arabic word to enter the vocabulary of twentieth-century world politics.” 

According to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, “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.” To claim that the slogan “globalise the intifada” is inherently violent let alone terrorist, however, is a deliberate and demonstrably racist distortion that misrepresents Arabic language and Palestinian political expression. It erases the way intifada refers to a complex strategy of popular refusal at several decisive junctures of Palestinian history (most notably, 1936, 1987, 2000, and 2021) – a strategy that has regularly included the enthusiastic participation of segments of the Israeli peace movement. It also fails to capture the rather tentative connotations of the word itself. To call for intifada isn’t to prescribe a particular form of organisation or action, let alone recommend recourse to violence. Rather; it evokes a shift from passivity to action, a collective stirring that seeks to animate change, that takes a first step and then rises to confront the situation. 

As anyone familiar with the history of Palestinian resistance knows very well, these connotations are especially obvious with respect to the First and most epoch-defining intifada in Palestine (1987-1993), which began in late 1987 as a grassroots campaign of non-violent civil disobedience and non-compliance. This remarkably courageous and persistent campaign was comparable in many ways with the prolonged popular mobilisations organised in apartheid South Africa, that same decade, by the United Democratic Front (UDF) (themselves an extension, among other things, of the Soweto Uprising a.k.a. Soweto intifada of 1976). In a manner reminiscent of the UDF’s rent boycotts and Gandhi’s strategies of non-violence, one of the First Intifada’s inaugural and most popular acts was to suspend tax payments – in Christian towns such as Beit Sahour the tax-strike rate was around 90%. As a response to an earlier phase of the ongoing scholasticide, intifada has also involved the collective reclaiming of education as a supremely valued right and as an embattled but indomitable affirmation of communal life. 

(For anyone living in Britain who is subject to our current government, a government that is so clearly determined to follow in Arthur Balfour’s imperial footsteps, it’s also worth remembering that the only serious contender for the title of Palestine’s first intifada is the great revolt against British colonial rule and Zionist encroachment that began with a long-overdue general strike in April 1936—a story brilliantly told in Annemarie Jacir’s recent film Palestine 36).

For the great majority of Arabic-speakers, calls to globalise the intifada have always meant, first and foremost, calls to generalise the sorts of mass resistance to domination, repression and occupation that remain most directly associated with Palestine’s First Intifada of 1987-93. Any settler-colonial state is sure to feel threatened by such resistance, but “globalise the intifada” is no more inherently violent or terrorist a slogan than was the once-demonised formulation “one-person one-vote” in apartheid South Africa, to say nothing of insurgent and thoroughly global demands to free that once-outlawed “terrorist” Nelson Mandela.

Of course the history of any prolonged national liberation struggle is complicated, and profoundly marked by the imperial forces arrayed against it. The embattled struggle to free Palestine is no exception to this more general rule.

In the early 1990s Palestine’s First Intifada was wound down as its distant leadership in exile was lured into futile negotiations with Israel in exchange for false promises of an independent state. The decade was instead defined by a rapid and irreversible expansion of illegal Israeli expropriations and settlements in the occupied territories, complemented by the consolidation of a draconian apartheid-style régime of checkpoints, closures, and restrictions on movement. 

Inevitably, a Second Intifada (2000-2005) eventually began with a further wave of mass demonstrations and civil disobedience, prompted most immediately by Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the al-Aqsa Mosque on 28 September 2000. The Israeli military responded to these huge protests with savage and calculated force, killing 47 Palestinians and wounding almost two thousand in the first several days alone. By the end of October, 141 Palestinians had been killed and six thousand wounded, alongside 12 Israelis killed and 65 wounded. Israel’s punitive assault was clearly intended to transform the occupied territories into battlefields and to convert the new mass uprising into something more like open war.

Israel’s violent response to non-violent protests had predictable consequences. After seeing their parents and siblings beaten, murdered and humiliated day after day, from 2001 through to early 2005 the most militant wing of the Palestinian movement did indeed include acts of counter-violence in their repertoire of resistance. Although casualty rates can tell only a tiny part of this complex story (approximately 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians were killed in this period), such numbers did mark a deviation from the more familiar ratios of five or ten—if not now a hundred—Palestinian deaths for every Israeli one. What justifies description of these years of struggle as intifada, however, is precisely the persistence of non-violent civil disobedience at their core.

Needless to say no one should be killed for political reasons, in any place or at any time. If however as scholars and activists we are meaningfully to condemn political violence then we need to assess and condemn all the factors that give rise to it, starting here with Israel’s illegal settler-colonial project itself. Any accounting of these factors needs to take full stock, furthermore, of Israel’s massive and wide-ranging efforts—its enormous investments in military equipment, surveillance technology, invasive policing, lawfare, lobbying, disinformation…—to criminalise all forms of resistance to occupation, including quintessentially non-violent strategies of boycott and divestment.

For these reasons we emphatically reject Keir Starmer’s attempts to conflate calls to “internationalise the intifada”—or the Palestine solidarity movement more broadly—with antisemitism or violence against Jewish people. Such claims are made wholly without evidence. Contrary to politically-motivated insinuations, there is no demonstrable link between this slogan and attacks on Jewish communities, be they in London, Manchester,  Sydney or anywhere else. To assert otherwise is to dishonestly instrumentalise and weaponise concerns about antisemitism in order to silence Palestinian solidarity.

This mischaracterisation must also be understood in its broader political context. It forms part of an escalating effort by the UK government and its allies to suppress opposition to Israel’s destruction of Gaza and to Israel’s ongoing campaign of demolition, forced eviction and annexation in the West Bank, in Palestine ‘48 and in Lebanon. It has recently become an important component of Starmer’s increasingly vehement attempts to shield his own government’s complicity from scrutiny. The targeting of slogans and “cumulative” forms of protests is not about public safety—it is about restricting democratic opposition to a grossly unlawful and widely condemned campaign of mass violence and destruction. It is about obstructing both academic critique and popular protest against genocide. It is about silencing anti-colonial scholarship and depriving Palestinians of that “permission to narrate” which is so essential to the history and the future of any oppressed people. 

The consequences are very serious. Treating “globalise the intifada” as inherently criminal sets a precedent for the policing of language, culture, and political identity—particularly for Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them. It assumes that we as educators and scholars consent to an undermining of fundamental rights to freedom of expression and peaceful protest, and fosters a climate in which legitimate political speech is surveilled, stigmatised, and punished. It reinforces and deepens those long-standing forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim repression that are already deployed via the pernicious Prevent programme and routine police harassment. 

As teachers and scholars concerned with the politics and history of Palestine and of West Asia, and with broader questions of justice and ethics, we know what “globalise the intifada” actually means. We also recognise that, given the conditions Palestinians face, their liberation will indeed require popular resistance and mobilisation on a global scale. We recognise the slogan’s unique and timely pertinence in today’s conjuncture. We affirm the unequivocal right of all those who support this slogan to foreground it in their research, to discuss it in their classrooms and to chant it on the streets.

An abbreviated version of this statement is posted as an open letter, together with a sign-on form for anyone working in higher education who would like to add their names directly at https://forms.gle/oPrjtdMWTAF6y3W89.

The statement is also published on the University and College Workers for Palestine website