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.