Time to end the lie: ‘Intifada’ is a hate cry, not a protest slogan - opinion

For two long years, Britain has indulged a lie: The word “intifada” is merely a “political slogan,” a gust of rhetoric that our polite island can absorb without consequence. We have watched it shouted outside synagogues and Jewish schools, paraded through neighborhoods chosen precisely for their vulnerability, and megaphoned into the faces of families, pensioners, and children. We have been told to put it down to “context.”

Brutal clarity begins with meaning. “Intifada” is not a misty metaphor for self-improvement. It is a term of art for violent uprising whose historical record is written in the blood of civilians: bus explosions, café massacres, stabbings at school gates, shootings on city pavements. Chanted in British streets, directed at British Jews, it is not participation in a national conversation; it is the rehearsal of menace. Every responsible adult knows this. Only institutions pretend otherwise.

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects robust, abrasive speech; it does not oblige the state to dignify threats against a minority. The problem is not the absence of instruments. It is the absence of nerve.

Classifying “intifada” under hate speech is not a leap into censorship; it is the dull business of naming a thing for what it is in this country, at this moment. In British streets, campuses, and proximate to Jewish institutions, “intifada” is reasonably understood as an endorsement of violence against Jews and Israelis. It is threatening and abusive. It is a chant with foreseeable impact. Label it accordingly. Record it accordingly. Enforce the law accordingly.

Those who oppose clarity reach for two crutches. The first is the bleat of “ambiguity.” Spare us. Ambiguity does not route a march past a synagogue at dismissal time. Ambiguity does not time a rally to coincide with a Jewish festival. Ambiguity does not manufacture banners and drums and social media assets around a single word whose romantic sheen relies on the amnesia of the comfortable.

The second crutch is a counterfeit liberalism that mistakes passivity for principle – “better to let it pass than risk inflaming tensions.” Look around. Two years of indulgence did not cool tempers; it taught the loudest that there was no line. Clarity de-escalates. It restores the boundary in practice, not in press releases.

What follows from classification is practical, not theatrical. Police treat the chant, in context, as a trigger for conditions or dispersal: no more “monitoring” while megaphones batter the doors of synagogues and schools. Prosecutors treat it as capable – again, in context – of meeting the thresholds for harassment, stirring up hatred, or inviting support for a proscribed group, and they charge swiftly to set precedent.

Universities remove recognition and funding from societies that mainstream it; staff who launder it under the guise of “activism” face discipline. Charities that platform it explain themselves to the regulator and learn, at last, the meaning of the words “public benefit.” Broadcasters stop piping it live under the euphemism of “balance” and keep their footage for evidence. None of this chills legitimate criticism of Israel. It does, at last, refuse the normalization of eliminationist rhetoric.

Equal protection is not a slogan; it is the test. The same standard that shields synagogues on Saturday shields mosques on Friday. The same refusal to indulge “intifada” protects Muslim communities from those who would answer one hateful cry with another. If your defense of “free speech” requires a carve-out for threats against Jews, you are not a defender of liberty; you are a collaborator in hierarchy. This country was not built on that bargain.

There is a moral dimension here that no respectable government should try to wish away. The public square is not a vacuum; it is inhabited by citizens who must be able to walk, worship, study, and trade without being told, explicitly or by insinuation, that their presence is an offense.

The “intifada” chant in our streets is a demand that Jews accept intimidation as the price of belonging. The answer is no. Not because Jews are fragile but because Britain is not a place where one group’s “expression” is purchased with another group’s fear.

That definition should sit in Home Office circulars, Crown Prosecution Service guidance, policing manuals, Office for Students and Prevent notes, Ofcom commentary, and Charity Commission alerts. It should trigger recording, risk assessment, and charging consideration – because that is how law is made visible to those who test it.

Then, enforce it: calmly, evenly, relentlessly. Change routes. Impose conditions. Bring the early, well-prepared prosecutions that reset incentives. Derecognize the campus societies that mistake swagger for scholarship. Pull the licenses and the grants when trustees forget their duties. Ask broadcasters to choose professional standards over voyeurism. Publish the numbers quarterly, by force and by sector, so that the country can see, in black and white, that the era of indulgence is over.

Be as compassionate as you like in private; we all should be. In public, be ruthless with the truth: “Intifada” in the British context is a hate cry. It is the soundtrack of intimidation. It is the needle that pricks the bubble of “it can’t happen here,” and it has been permitted to pierce too many times. Classify it. Call it what it is. And then, with the steady hand of a serious nation, end it.