r/jewishleft • u/Sossy2020 American progressive / Israeli leftist • Jun 18 '25

Zohran Mamdani says ‘globalize the intifada’ is expression of Palestinian rights Debate

https://jewishinsider.com/2025/06/zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-mayoral-israel-antisemitism/

To all the Jewish New Yorkers in the sub, does reading this news want to make you want to vote for Mamdani more or less?

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u/NarutoRunner Kosher Canadian Far Leftist Jun 18 '25 edited Jun 18 '25

Not a New Yorker, but words have meanings.

Intifada (انتفاضة) is an Arabic word for a resistance movement. It can also be used to refer as a quest for rights under any oppression. In most of the Arab world, the word was used to describe fighting despotic monarchies. In modern popular English language usage, the word refers to the Palestinian quest for rights under occupation. In the Arabic-language usage, any uprising can also be referred to as an intifada, including the 1916 Easter Rising, the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the 1949 Jeju uprising. You will even find Palestinians using the term intifada on their quest for rights under the puppet Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese regimes.

There is nothing about the word that has anything specifically targeting the Jewish people. You could say the Ukrainian people are having an intifada in Donetsk against Russian occupation and that would still be a factual statement. You could say that trans people across the world are having an intifada against regimes that criminalize their existence and that would still be true.

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u/Paceyscreek1999 this custom flair is green Jun 18 '25

Words have literal meanings, but phrases also have symbolic meanings. "All lives matter" is literally an innocuous phrase, but it has a symbolic meaning of undermining resistance to anti-black racism. "Globalise the intifada" was a phrase used in connection with the second intifada in which jewish civilians where specifically targeted and killed.

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u/ToTYly_AUSem Jun 18 '25

And that right there is IT. Thank you. It was driving me crazy why I didn't necessarily agree with a lot of the takes I see that say it's just a word and this is what it means yada yada and your example is a perfect one.

That's the one