Those who hate Israel often call for intifada, an Arabic word meaning “uprising.” Pro-Hamas demonstrators carry signs with slogans like “Intifada Until Victory,” “There Is Only One Solution: Intifada Revolution,” and “Globalize the Intifada.”
Members of the media and higher education assure us these messages are calls for peaceful protests and boycotts, not war. But reality tells a different story.
From 1987 to 1993 and 2000 to 2005, Palestinian terrorists launched two intifadas against Israel. The campaigns involved the bloody slaughter of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians and soldiers. Today, we’re seeing a globalized intifada on the streets of major North American and European cities.
In November 2024, a Hasidic Jewish man and his two small sons walking down a sidewalk in Brooklyn’s Jewish Crown Heights neighborhood endured a frightening encounter caught on video. A masked man, 28-year-old Stephan Stowe, emerged from behind a parked vehicle; grabbed one of the boys, a 6-year-old; and attempted to kidnap him. The father fought back, pulling his son out of Stowe’s arms.
Earlier that week, in the same neighborhood, a man slapped a Hasidic Jewish boy riding his bike to school.
“I’m fuming to the point I’ve got a migraine,” Yisrael Eliashiv, one of the boy’s teachers, told The Algemeiner. “You have kids who are 13 or 14 and have grown up with the attitude of ‘if you get assaulted in the street, just take it because nothing is gonna be done.’ Those are the symptoms not of a sick but of a dead and decaying society.”
On November 6, in Chicago, home to nearly 320,000 Jewish people, two Jewish students were attacked on the campus of DePaul University. Michael Kaminsky and his friend Max Long, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservist, stood outside the student union at the Lincoln Park campus with a sign that read, “I’m an IDF soldier, ask me anything.”
“The goal of these conversations was to de-escalate,” Long told Fox News. “It was never to enrage or add fuel to the fire.”
A masked man approached the duo and engaged in a tense but civil conversation with them. Soon, Long was struck from behind and knocked unconscious. The masked man then attacked Kaminsky, who tried to help Long up. According to witnesses, the two Jewish men received antisemitic remarks before their assailants ran away. Long suffered a concussion and Kaminsky a broken wrist.
That same evening, four miles south of the university, Arab-Israeli journalist Yoseph Haddad was scheduled to speak at the Chicago Loop Synagogue as the guest of the Chicago Jewish Alliance. About 30 minutes before Haddad was to begin, two anti-Israel activists who registered for the event under false names began yelling inside the synagogue.
“We heard a horrible commotion and noise, and we went to the front of our building to find [it] overwhelmed by a big crowd of protesters,” Chicago Loop Synagogue Administrator Mary Lynn Pross told CBS News Chicago. “They were banging on our windows, screaming. They had bullhorns blaring in our building.”
Also that night, more than 200 Arabic-speaking men converged outside Amsterdam’s Holland Casino, where hundreds of Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans had gathered, and waited to attack Israelis. In a pro-Palestinian WhatsApp group, a message was sent: “TOMMORROW [sic] AFTER THE GAME AT NIGHT PART 2 OF THE JEW HUNT.”
The next evening, following a Maccabi soccer game, groups of men assaulted hundreds of Jewish soccer fans in the streets. In one video, a man tells an attacker, “I’m not Jewish!” before being beaten.
This is what globalizing the intifada looks like. The Western world must wake up from its naive slumber. When anti-Israel bigots call for intifada, they mean exactly what we see today—assaults on Jewish people wherever they may be found.
Ty Perry is the Director of Field Ministries for The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, a Bible teacher, and the host of Gesher podcast.
Editor’s Note: How Will The Church Respond To A ‘Global Intifada’?
Antisemitism expert, Olivier Melnick, recently detailed that while many young people gleefully jump on board with the “resistance and social justice” perception of an “intifada,” they willfully ignore its calls for violence against Jews.
“Since October 8, 2023, we have heard the chants ‘globalize the Intifada.’ To be sure, that motto wasn’t born after Hamas invaded Israel and murdered 1,200 innocent Israelis, but it indeed became more popular,” Melnick highlighted. “College students all over America and other parts of the world are rallying under the banner of a global intifada. Ignoring the implications, many gather and brandish signs with “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall be Free!” Again, ignorance makes the actions very toxic. The motto being chanted is a call for the complete destruction of Israel, something that many youngsters have no clue about.”
The real question, Melnick stressed, is how the church will respond to the rise of antisemitism.
“There will undoubtedly be more attacks on Jews, and many will choose to become bystanders, and, in a sense, that makes them co-perpetrators,” he cautioned. “Will we be sheep, or will we be goats? (Matthew 25:31-46) In the words of Yeshua (Jesus): ‘And the King will answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine [the Jewish people], even the least of them, you did it to Me.’ (Matthew 31:40) This parable speaks of a future time during the Great Tribulation, but the principle needs to be applied today! I know the Shepherd, and I want to be seen as a sheep of His flock.”
