A Lesson From Martin Luther King, Jr. About "Globalizing the Intifada"

Anyone experiencing déjà vu?

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A leader millions have put their hopes in is confronted with a slogan and chant from a radical faction of his movement. Although he doesn’t want endorse the slogan, he explains that many people who are using it mean something very different than opponents of the cause fear.

Does this describe 2025 and New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani?

Nope, it’s the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

Just days before his assassination in Tennessee, he appeared at the 68th annual convention of what’s called the Rabbinical Assembly, which is an association for Conservative Jews.

A man named Rabbi Everett Gendler who was sympathetic to civil rights and close to the movement was tapped to lead the conversation and translate the organization’s concerns to King. Some of his questions were about antisemitism that existed amongst some black Americans.

Some of the questions Gendler had included asking King about “how representative…the extremist element of the Negro community” is.

Another was about the slogan “Black Power,” which black nationalists began to popularize in the latter half of the 1960’s.

“What is your view of the thinking in some Negro circles which prefers segregation and separatism, improving the Negro’s lot within this condition? How do you see Black Power in this respect?” he said, summarizing some of the questions they had for King.

King’s view on Black Power was that the slogan wasn’t helpful for the civil rights movement because of how much it confused people:

I’ve said so often that I regret that the slogan Black Power came into being, because it has been so confusing. It gives the wrong connotation. It often connotes the quest for black domination rather than black equality. And it is just like telling a joke. If you tell a joke and nobody laughs at the joke and you have to spend the rest of the time trying to explain to people why they should laugh, it isn’t a good joke.

Whenever I see these internecine battles over language on the left, I think about King’s explanation. He was one of the best political communicators the country had ever produced, and he understood that the left-wing tendency to use language that is well-understood by the movement but misunderstood elsewhere was the equivalent of a bad comedy set.

I think that Mamdani has capably explained that the word intifada does not inherently mean violence. Arabic was my minor in college, and Arabic in particular is sensitive to cultural and dialectic context. But in a political context, it usually means something like uprising or shaking off. The word has been used for raucous protests and uprising — like the 1977 bread intifada or bread uprising in Egypt, which involved strikes, protests, and rioting over the price of basic commodities.

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In the context of the Palestinians, however, things are a bit different. The event that came to be known as the First Intifada, which kicked off in the late 1980s, involved a mostly nonviolent uprising against the occupation of the Palestinian territories. Most of the violence in that Intifada was on the Israeli side, including the notorious command given to Israeli soldiers to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. This intifada, or uprising, helped put the Palestinian issue on the map as American presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton pushed the Israelis into the Oslo process, seeking to give some kind of diplomatic recognition to the Palestinians with the hope of a future settlement of the conflict.

The Second Intifada, however, was not nearly as one-sided when it came to violence. Palestinian militant groups started using suicide bombing tactics, many of them aimed at Israeli civilians. For Israelis and those who are sympathetic to them abroad (like much of the American Jewish population), the word intifada came to be associated with brutal violence against innocent people.

I have been to a number of demonstrations in favor of the Palestinian cause over the years, and I rarely heard this phrase “globalize the Intifada,” but if you search around on the Internet it’s easy enough to find it being at a demonstration here or there. The popular website ElectronicIntifada serves as a resource for critics of Israeli policy worldwide.

It’s absolutely true that the phrase itself just means two different things to two groups of people. For supporters of the Palestinian cause, it means globalizing the resistance to the nearly 60-year-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands — through protests, boycotts, sanctions, and elections. For their ideological opposites, it’s seen as a call for violence against Israelis or against Jews more broadly.

From the perspective of a reporter, you have to be able to sit with those two truths and tell them honestly. In a conflict that’s been going on as long as the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, there are going to be endless battles over language and interpretations of reality itself.

But from the perspective of a political movement, there isn’t too much use in using language that’s unclear at best and hurtful at worst.

I often see people share MLK quotes about how the “white moderate” was an impediment to progress or how the riot can be a “language of the unheard.” But King was far from a purist. He spent a lot of time trying to suppress rioting because he correctly believed it to be self-destructive to the cause of civil rights and equality; he thought long and hard about what language he used, and eschewed the radical rhetoric from some corners of the black nationalist movement.

For Mamdani and others who are seeking the end of the campaign of atrocities against the Palestinian people, it’s worth thinking about more than just being factually correct. You also have to be strategically correct.

If you’re staging a protest in America, you should root your language in American values and American rhetoric. The Israeli government and its allies in the United States have been very clever about this. They don’t make hotheaded extremists like Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir the face of their movement; they want to reach Middle America and they do.

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

The good news is, fewer and fewer people are falling for this act. Despite the Israeli ban on Western journalists entering Gaza, more than enough information is filtering out of the strip to confirm that this is one of the most senseless military campaigns in the 21st century, if it can even be called that.

Yet the American political class lags far behind global public opinion. I’ve spent years around politicians, and they are among the most cowardly creatures that exist. The only way to move them is to make sure they think whatever they’re doing is safe for their careers — it will get them money or votes and not lose them a considerable amount of either.

And that means that the movement of people sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in the United States needs to make them movement much more palatable to everyday Americans. Sacrificing the use of divisive phrases is one way to do that.

I’m sure many on the left will see this as selling out. Heck, MLK was attacked as a sellout in his day. But he left this earth having heralded the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and a wide array of anti-poverty programs. It’s up to Mamdani whether he wants to be tripped up by academic debates about language or get things done.