


Zohran Mamdani got three chances to repudiate the expression “globalize the intifada” in a weekend interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. It would have been easy, and politically smart, for the Democratic candidate for New York mayor to say that he’d been educated about the phrase’s violent connotation and that he regretted not rejecting it sooner. Instead, he ducked each time, saying that although he does not use those words himself, he would decline to “police” the language of others.
So give Mamdani credit for this: He has the courage of his convictions. Now he ought to bear the responsibility for them, too.
I was a journalist living and working in Jerusalem when I got a taste of what the word “intifada,” Arabic for “shaking off,” means in practice. I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing.
My wife, whom I hadn’t yet met, was due to be in the cafe when it blew up but had changed plans at the last minute. Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit.
Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured. Among the dead were Sarah Levy-Hoffman, Clara Rosenberger and Frieda Britvich, all of them Auschwitz survivors.
Two days after that there was an attack on a Jerusalem supermarket. Two were murdered: a security guard named Haim Smadar, a father of six, who stopped the bomber from coming into the store, and a high school senior named Rachel Levy. Rachel would have been about 40 now had she only not been at the wrong place at the wrong instant.
Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day.
On Jan. 29, 2004, at 8:48 a.m., I was fussing over my newborn daughter in her crib when I heard a loud boom and saw a plume of black smoke rise from Azza Street, behind my apartment. I was at the scene within three minutes and wrote down what I saw later that evening.
The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.
In the carnage, I failed to spot a reporter who worked for me, Erik Schechter. His injuries were described as “moderate,” meaning shrapnel wounds, vascular damage and a shattered kneecap. He spent months in recovery.
There were many more atrocities in Israel over following years, culminating in the orgy of murder, rape and kidnapping that was Oct. 7, 2023. But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado, by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.”
There are rich and legitimate debates to be had about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy toward it. None of us should look away at the devastating toll the war in the Gaza Strip exacts on Palestinian civilians. And nobody has a monopoly on truth or virtue: Those who want to condemn Israeli policy are fully within their rights.
But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.
There are liberals and progressives who’ll continue to make excuses for Mamdani. They will argue that his views on “globalize the intifada” are beside the point of his agenda for New York. They will observe that he has a predictable share of far-left Jewish supporters. They will play semantic games about the original meaning of “intifada.”
To those supporters, one can say only good luck. They’re making Donald Trump’s case about the radical direction of too much of the Democratic Party better than he ever could.
Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.