Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 78: Do you still want to globalize the intifada?

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.Our current question: What was the First Intifada? What was the Second Intifada? What does it mean to “globalize the intifada?”If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Our next question, what was the first intifada? What was the second intifada? Why is it so wrong to say you should globalize the intifada or intifada revolution? The protesters are saying that it only means nonviolent protest. Excellent question, right from the front lines of the Western culture wars. I'll try and lay it out. What Israelis understand by the term intifada actually isn't any one thing. It's a couple of different things.

There's an arc. The term changed. meaning for Israelis. And what Israelis here isn't the only question, what Palestinians are saying matters, of course, deeply. What some Palestinian diaspora activists mean by the word is kind of detached from what ordinary Palestinians on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza in East Jerusalem and places like that mean. So let's get into it. The first intifada begins in December 1987. It's triggered by a car accident. The car accident isn't the cause. It's just the momentary trigger. an Israeli military vehicle hits a Palestinian car. Four people are killed.

Protests are sparked in Gaza that sweep across Gaza and into the Palestinian cities and towns of the West Bank. Over the next five years, the First Intifada will be many things. It was many things. It was terror attacks. Straight up terror attacks on the FBI definition of a terror attack. The Israeli suppression efforts often turn quite violent against civilians, often against terror groups that did step in to the breach. But there are things about the First Intifada structural things that you can't get away from. The First Intifada was genuinely grassroots. It began at the bottom. It was ordinary Palestinians responding to what, at the time December 1987, was 20 years of military rule. An Israeli soldier literally ran traffic in a Palestinian city because there was no Palestinian police.

The municipalities were very weak. The self-governance mechanisms were very weak. And so an ordinary Palestinian schoolchild walking home from school would pass Israeli soldiers running the city. The first intifada really was a popular uprising. Again, there were other elements. There were other elites

that tried to take over, that tried to lead it, but they came late to the game. It began with ordinary civilians. And over the next five years, with the images of what came to be called in Arabic and in Hebrew by Palestinians and Israelis, the great image of the first Intifada, Fada sort of burned into everybody's memory are what's called the children of the stones.

These kids who would come out of school at the end of the school day in a Palestinian city, and they would pick up stones and they would throw them at the Israeli soldiers. The Israeli army never deploys, you know, to Afghanistan, to the other side of the world. It deploys very close to home. And those soldiers went home on the weekend and literally just told their parents. What am I supposed to do? I'm standing there in front of an 11-year-old boy throwing a rock at me. What do I do with an M-16?

What do they think I'm going to do? do. The Israeli army has developed, and Israeli police have developed very significant non-lethal crowd control methods since. They didn't have them in 1987. And that experience of that power imbalance, that very serious question, what is our plan? What are we going to do with this place? We're going to rule over millions of people forever and ever. That's the game plan. The Israeli left half something like that of Israeli Jewish society, give or take, genuinely heard in the First Intifada, genuinely experienced the First Intifada as a Palestinian moral argument. Now again, it's important not to erase the violence. It's important

not to erase the brutality. It's important not to erase the actual terrorism and the dead. But there was at the core of the First Intifada a genuine Palestinian moral argument and it was being made to Israeli society. And it built a new Israeli left. In 1987, the Israeli left was very much the old socialist left, still teetering on the edge of oblivion politically because it had sent the Israeli economy into the tailspin of the 1980s inflations. The Israeli left had just lost because of this economic collapse. It's socialism. It's almost organizing civic religion.

It's great idea. And into that gap, the first intifada stepped in with a grand and redemptive narrative in the eyes of the Israeli left. suddenly you had a genuine social justice question that was big that was profound our country was doing something bad something wrong refusing to give answers to people over whom we ruled for a generation

and solving that making that peace we had basically learned that you can make peace with Arabs because of the Egyptian example Sadat came to Jerusalem Sadat showed that peace was possible to very suspicious Israelis And so you could have Israeli pop stars singing about the peace that was definitely possible with the Palestinians

because peace was suddenly possible. And so the Israelis looked at the First Intifada and they said half of Israelis, roughly, give or take. And they said, this is the cause of our time, making this peace, ending this occupation, ending this rule over another people. You could think that it's our ancient and eternal homeland. So maybe we're not occupying the territory as many Israelis felt because, really the entire Bible happens in the West Bank. But nevertheless, we rule in other people with our military.

We don't want them to become Israelis. They don't want to become Israelis. That's the only thing we both agree on. We can make a peace that will stand the test of time and that will deliver for us an end to this occupation, to us being the bad guys in this story. And that was what First Intifada came to mean to a brand-new Israeli left that by 1992, Rabin was elected,

as head of the Labor Party, and he started looking for a genuine end to an occupation. The Palestinians were in a place where they really were very weakened. The PLO tried the anti-colonial terrorist war for three decades. It had failed them miserably. They had collapsed. They went to Jordan, and Jordan kicked them out. They went to Lebanon, and then the Israeli War in Lebanon kicked them out.

They ended up in Tunis and had no friends in the world. They supported Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Kuwait. So Kuwait, after that war, kicked out. now 300,000 Palestinians who had been living in Kuwait. The Palestinian cause was collapsed. And that meant the Israelis believed that the Palestinians were now willing to actually come to the table. And so Rabin thought, look, they're at a point where that's when you sue for peace, right? That's when you're willing to sign on the dotted line. And he wanted to end the military rule over another people. And so he thought those interests converged. And in 1993, the first Oslo

agreements were signed, which were basically just a declaration of principles that we agree to now begin a process. By 1995, the Israelis and Palestinians actually sign a much more significant agreement that's basically a treaty, and the Knesset has to ratify it. It votes in 1995 to ratify it. It's generally called in the literature, Oslo II. People can look up its stipulations. It creates a five-year window for final status talks. The concept of Oslo, too, was that in five years, we'll have Palestinian statehood, we'll have an answer and solution to the holy places and Jerusalem and borders and refugees, and all the sticky points and complicated issues. And Robin in November of 1995 is, of course, assassinated.

And he's assassinated by an Israeli Jew who opposes the peace process. So if you're an Israeli left-wing voter, you think you're in the middle of this great redemptive peace process, left as a means in the world. the 90s supporting this peace. And who killed the man who was doing the peacemaking? An Israeli right winger, supporter of settlements, et cetera. So in your image of what's happening, the left wing is right, the peace process is moving forward, and who's standing in its way? Not Palestinian intransigence, not Palestinian violence, not Palestinian religious ideologies, which is what most Israelis believe today and we'll get to why in a second. But the Jewish version of those things, Jews are

standing in the way of the great peace. Israelis are the problem. After Robin's assassination, we have an election. Robin is replaced by Paris of the Labor Party. There's this brand new guy, young guy, handsome guy with American campaign styles and American campaign strategist. His name is Benjamin Netanyahu. He's leading Likud for the first time. He's running in this election. He is not favored to win in the polls. Hamas in 1987 is founded in Gaza as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement of Egypt and publishes a charter that doesn't just talk about being at war with Israel, it talks about being a war with all Jews everywhere,

in the name of Islam's great redemption. The 1987 charter still is in force in Hamas. They passed a new document in 2017 that was sort of a PR exercise because a lot of activists who want to help Hamas, launder Hamas' image in the West, were saying, look, it's really kind of a bad thing that your charter basically has Nazi talking points, borrowed from Iraqi Nazism of the 1940s into this charter. It's not helpful to the cause. Do you mind issuing a new charter?

When Khaled Mashal was asked if the new charter replaces the old charter, he said absolutely not. The right had made a case over the course of the Oslo process, beginning with the first intifada. Don't be confused by this moral discourse by the children of the stones. They only actually want to murder us all. These guys, the right argued, represent the Palestinian national movement and its ultimate fundamental desires. We're not saying you shouldn't go to this peace because, God forbid, we should pull out of part of the homeland. Some of the religious scientists were saying that. Security-minded right-wingers were saying, it's not going to work.

It's going to collapse in blood. Several suicide bombings in the run-up to the 1996 election tilted the election to the right because the right was warning of such things. by the narrowest margin. You know, Netanyahu won that election, I think, by 30,000 votes. It was the narrowest margin in the history of an Israeli election. But the right won. And Netanyahu, for the next three years, didn't really advance the peace process, although he did actually implement many of the commitments

where I being committed to. He pulled out of Jericho. He pulled out of Hebron. He pulled out of many of the cities and towns of Gaza, as per Oslo, too. He even signed an agreement with the Palestinians. The last agreement ever signed between Israelis and Palestinians. The White River Memorandum in 1998.

And then Netanyahu's government falls in 1999, and this new guy wins the election, a guy named Ehud Barak. He's also like Robin, a former chief of staff of the army. He's also like Robin the head of the Labour Party. And he is now promising not just to do what Robin did, which was figure out how to end the occupation, but it was never clear if Robin really supported Palestinian statehood. Robin himself was skeptical. He wasn't sure. He was very worried going into that process, that he was making a mistake, that actually Palestinian

politics could not reciprocate Israeli withdrawals with peace. Barak is much more gung-ho on the dovish thing. He says, look, if it fails, we will have tried honestly. But we're going for Palestinian statehood. We're going for a serious peace process. And we're going to get it done. He wins the election on that premise. He goes to Camp David with Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton. And according to everything Israelis read in their own newspapers, they're negotiating at Camp David. peace, sharing Jerusalem, sharing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the holiest place in Judaism, sharing everything and building those borders and having a fantastic Palestinian state, the major Israeli precondition is that it's disarmed.

To the Israelis, we're discussing Israeli perceptions here. To the Israelis, that's not such a big ask. What are they going to do if they're armed other than terrorized Israelis? But if they're disarmed, they're not a threat to us. they're a major economic partner for us. They have all the prosperity of being integrated into the Israeli economy. And you know, Iceland is disarmed. Costa Rica doesn't have an army.

There are countries that don't have armies in this world because it makes more sense for them. It'll make sense for the Palestinians. That's an Israeli perspective, obviously, but it is a real Israeli perspective, and it is part of the negotiations at Camp David. In the Israeli perception, the Palestinians are offered just about everything they want,

and there's real peace on the table. That is when the second Intifada begins. Friends, when you say Intifada, to an Israeli or a Jew anywhere in the world who understands Israeli experience, has Israeli friends, knows something about Israeli history, intifada means the second intifada. And it will only ever mean the second intifada. Sig Heil, in German, only means pale victory. You get shouted at a soccer match, but it really actually means what the worst person to use

it systemically and enormously and constantly and profoundly means. Intifada means to Israelis the vast years-long mass murder of Israeli children and civilians represented in the 140, give or take, suicide bombings of the three years of the Second Intifada. The Second Intifada begins in September of 2000. It begins in between rounds of peace process. it begins with a massive wave of attacks, of suicide bombings. The Palestinians argue that Ariel Sharon, opposition leader at the time,

head of the Likud Party, visited the Temple Mount in a very unconstructive way in a way that was meant to trigger Palestinian anger. And that led to a violent protest, which led to an Israeli crackdown, which led to even more violent protests, and everything spiraled out of control. And 140 suicide bombings later, there's no peace process. That's a terrible argument for Palestinians. Because what Ariel Sharon was doing when he was visiting the Temple Mount in September of 2000

was protesting the fact that the Israeli Prime Minister was negotiating, giving away part of the Temple Mount. Was that clear? He didn't blow up the Temple Mount. He didn't kill anybody on the Temple Mount. He literally visited the Temple Mount to show his displeasure at the fact that Israeli government was negotiating sharing the Temple Mount. The Second Intifada was, like the first, many things all at once. Israeli incursions into Palestinian cities that finally suppressed the second in defada, and some of it was downright major gun battles.

But if we're talking about the ordinary Israeli experience, then we're talking about the suicide bombings. And they're escalating all the time, their scale, their professionalism, and by 2002 they reach a peak. You have a single month where there could be 10, 15 in a month. And then they still are coming in 2003. and the Israeli army has invaded Palestinian cities and began to dismantle these terror groups. Many of the people who took part in the Second Intifada were part of the security services of Arafat's Palestinian Authority, part of Fatah, part of Tanzim inside Fatah. In other words, the very people we thought we were doing a peace process with.

They were the ones carrying out alongside Hamas, alongside Islamic Shihad, carrying out these suicide bombings. And the suicide bombings targeted pizzerias. They targeted buses. Sometimes they targeted morning buses. A morning bus in the city of Jerusalem is a school bus. It is full of kids going to school. They take city buses to school. These bombings, their effect on the Israeli psyche, I remember them viscerally to this day. The bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya in a ballroom, a Passover Seder, a public Passover Seder, with a great many elderly people, 30 dead, well over 100 wounded. But to this day, Israelis call it the Passover massacre. Folks, the second intifada, not a single society in the free world, would sustain 140

suicide bombings on any issue and still be capable of having a conversation about that issue. If American illegal immigrants launched a suicide bombing, targeting teenagers at a non-alcoholic pub like the Dolphinarium bombing in Tel Aviv in 2001. One such bombing would completely reshape the American conversation on immigration. And if a month later there were 15 more, and over the next three years there were 140, Democrats would be more keen on closing the border than Republicans. Every issue would be fundamentally reshaped by that scale of violence. The Second Intifada shattered the Israeli-Israeli.

left. The Israeli left used to say, yes, the Palestinians have engaged in violence against us. However, we rule them. They're not free. They don't elect the military governor who rules them. If we end that, this moral debt that we owe them, I'm not a nice guy for saying maybe I shouldn't rule in other people for all time. I owe them this. This is a debt of mine. If I give them this, they will reciprocate with the only thing I need from them, which is peace. That was the promise of the Israeli left. And it won elections, making that promise. Now, there are a thousand arguments. Palestinian scholars and writers and historians and polemicists and propagandists and propagandists who all make these arguments about, well, actually, no, it's secretly an Israeli fault.

Israel did not create Hamas. Israel didn't initiate Hamas. Israel's not the reason Hamas believes what it believes or does what it does. These are deep internal, serious Palestinian choices. Israelis are genuinely wondering to this day, 25 years later. Not why you. did they come for our kids? Why did they blow up pizzerias? But why did they do it then? Why did they do it at the height of the peace process? What was it about? If the second Intifada could happen then at the height of the peace process, it wasn't an actual peace process. The second Intifada was profoundly different from the first Intifada in one really important way. The Palestinians named them Intifada. To the Israelis, their opposite experiences. The second Intifada involved

many, many hundreds of suicide bombers. Just 140 make it power. East Israeli security services. So the hundreds would make it past the Israeli security services to carry out these attacks. The Israelis are constantly fighting against this phenomenon. So let's imagine that a thousand people were recruited to do it. Let's imagine. How do you recruit a thousand suicide bombers? Or 500. How do you recruit people willing to kill themselves on a mass scale? And there's research on this. We know a lot about it. To recruit suicide terrorists, you need infrastructure. You need social capital. You need people with authority to tell the person who's going to die while killing someone else's children. This is redemptive. You are

redeeming the world. Suicide bombers are far more normative than people believe. They are not desperate and poor. They are people who believe they are saving the world. And that's how you can convince them to do it. Imams recruited them. Mosques ran martyrdom classes. And every suicide bomber the second intifada has something named after them. A street or a sot in Palestinian society and in Palestinian public life. They are the heroes of the Palestinian story. And they're the mass murderers of Israeli children at the height of the peace process. The Israeli left never came back.

It never won an election since. I'm not telling you this is the objective historical truth. What I'm telling you is this is what Israelis believe, which is a much more useful thing to know. If you actually want to understand the conflict or even solve the conflict, somewhere down the line, Israelis look at the second Intifada and they say, intifada means the massacre of Jews at a mass scale

until they either fall down and die or agree as a people to wipe themselves out and disappear. That is what intifada means to Israelis. And a nation that for years can't put children on a bus because you don't know if the bus is going to blow up are what taught Israelis what that word means. So when you go out there and you say globalize the intifado and you pretend, or some Palestinian diaspora activist told you,

all it means is uprising against occupation. What the Israelis hearing is these protests in London or New York. What these protests are about is your ultimate destruction. And here's the thing. You can have an awfully hard time helping the Palestinians advance their cause if what you're actually saying to Israelis is that they have to ultimately die or disappear.