This week the New South Wales government came out in favour of the Queensland government’s ban on slogans ‘From the river to the sea‘ and “Globalise the Intifada”, we wish to deal with the latter here. The first intifada began in December 1987 after an Israeli truck struck two vehicles in Gaza, killing four Palestinians. The event sparked unrest and brutal reprisals from Israeli forces. Over 1300 Palestinians were murdered by the IDF.
The Guardian produced an article claiming to answer the following questions: What does ‘globalise the intifada’ mean, and why does NSW want to ban the chant? published on 23 December 2025.
The essential historical point missing from The Guardian article, is “Globalise the Intifada” does not appear to originate as a Palestinian slogan.
Instead of beginning by asking where the particular expression “Globalise the Intifada” came from, the article begins its historical explanation with the Palestinian intifadas themselves. It moves from the Arabic meaning of intifada — a “shaking off” — to the First Intifada and then to the Second Intifada, where the article gives considerable attention is given to suicide bombings and attacks on Israelis and outrageous claims by the NSW premier that the phrase “globalise the intifada” is “hateful, violent rhetoric”.
That framing risks conflating different things: the history of Palestinian resistance; acts of violence committed during the First and the Second Intifada; whether they were justified given the extreme violence of the Israeli occupation; and the subsequent political slogan “Globalise the Intifada.” Establishing what somebody means twenty years later when saying “Globalise the Intifada” is an entirely different evidentiary question. The former does not by itself answer the latter.
The intifadas and the slogan are not the same thing
The First Intifada, beginning in 1987, was a mass Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. It involved demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, popular committees and stone-throwing, as well as violence. The Second Intifada was considerably more desperate and included suicide bombings, as well as large-scale Israeli military operations to suppress the resistance resulting in over 3,700 Palestinians being murdered by both the IDF and Israeli ‘civilians’.
The death toll was heavily Palestinian, and a very substantial proportion of those Palestinians were classified by B’Tselem as not participating in hostilities when they were killed. Nearly all these murders occurred in the ‘occupied territories‘. I disagree with this characterisation. That ‘occupation’ has been recognised in the UN for over 30 years. It is now incontrovertible that this is not an ‘occupation’ by Israel, this is an annexation which is a war crime. The IDF has long occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine has long been accepted and defended by governments and media in the West.
Any account of the Second Intifada that concentrates principally on Palestinian suicide bombings gives a seriously incomplete picture of the violence behind the annexation of Palestinian lands.
None of that tells us where the expression “Globalise the Intifada” originated or what those using that particular expression necessarily intended it to mean.
The historical record points somewhere else.
Where did “Globalise the Intifada” come from?
One of the earliest documented appearances of the expression was in Washington, D.C., in April 2002, in the milieu of the American anti-globalisation, global-justice and anti-war movements. A conference at American University was called “Global Intifada: Globalization, US Militarism, and the Struggle for Justice in Palestine.” Writer Esther Kaplan subsequently wrote an essay titled “Globalize the Intifada.” Esther Kaplan says: “More participants in the first significant antiwar march, in Washington, D.C., in April 2002, carried signs about Palestine than about Iraq. One speaker at the rally neatly expressed Palestine’s new centrality in the left imagination with a call to ‘Globalize the intifada!’”
The expression therefore appears not to have originated as a Palestinian slogan that was subsequently exported to Western demonstrations, but as an international solidarity slogan attempting to connect the Palestinian struggle with wider struggles against militarism, imperialism and global inequality.
That history matters.
My experience in Brisbane, Magan -djin
For the past three years I have provided the sound at virtually every major rally and event conducted under the leadership of Palestinians and their supporters in Brisbane. One of those rallies was attended by approximately 50,000 people. I have participated in nearly all the marches and listened to nearly all the speeches and chants.
I have never heard “Globalise the Intifada” chanted at those demonstrations.
I am not saying nobody has ever said it. It may have been used by an individual or a small grouping. I can speak only from my own experience. But it has not been a significant slogan of the Palestinian-led movement in Brisbane.
I was subsequently asked whether I would challenge the Queensland law by saying “Globalise the Intifada” publicly at a demonstration. I declined. After forty or fifty years of organising in solidarity with Palestine, I had never used the slogan. I saw no reason to begin using it simply because a government had decided to prohibit it.
There was a more fundamental reason as well. Palestinians have the moral authority to decide how they describe and frame their struggle. My role is solidarity. It is not to import a slogan from an American or international political movement and impose it upon Palestinians.
The wider problem in reporting Palestine
There is a wider problem here in the reporting of Palestine. Palestinian resistance is frequently discussed through the lens of its most violent episodes, just as reporting after 7 October 2023 often gave enormous prominence to allegations of atrocities by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. Some allegations of war crimes have substantial supporting evidence; other highly publicised early claims were unsubstantiated, disputed or subsequently corrected. Claims concerning sexual violence likewise need to be assessed according to the evidence for each particular allegation, rather than treated as established merely through repetition.
The same discipline should be applied to “Globalise the Intifada.”
One cannot establish what a political expression means simply by selecting the most violent events associated with one of its constituent words.
Indeed, The Guardian itself quotes UNSW academic Luke McNamara warning about precisely the problem involved in legislating a single meaning for disputed political language: governments should be extremely cautious about fixing one interpretation of a contested expression and making that interpretation the basis of criminal liability.
The historical questions therefore come first:
Where did the slogan “Globalise the Intifada” originate?
Who developed it?
What did they mean by it?
And, crucially in the Queensland context, who has actually been using it here?
Without answering those questions, moving from the words Globalise the Intifada to the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada risks doing precisely what a serious historical analysis should avoid: treating association as meaning and then turning that asserted meaning into the justification for criminalising political speech.
Ian Curr
4 October 2026
Reference
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:AP:73b739b6-8fa7-43e1-82d3-b830a8f8f8bd