By Howie Silbiger, Editor-in-Chief
Now that Israel and Hamas have agreed on the first phase of a ceasefire, the streets will fall quiet for a day or two. The slogans will fade from cardboard signs and the air will feel strangely calm. But it won’t last. The movement that presumably built itself around Hamas’s war will not simply fold up its banners and go home. It was never about this war, it was always about a revolution with no borders. “Globalize the Intifada” was not a slogan. It was a mission statement.
From the very start, the pro-Hamas protestors were not asking for peace or justice. They were calling for uprising. They were celebrating violence against Jews and dressing it up as resistance. The universities that gave them microphones called it “solidarity.” The politicians who feared them called it “free expression.” The rest of us watched mobs praise murderers and wondered how Western societies lost the ability to tell right from wrong.
Now, with Hamas coming to a deal with Israel, the protestors find themselves at a crossroads. Their heroes are talking ceasefire, releasing hostagess and dismantlement of their terror organization. With “resistance” fading and the agony of defeat settling in, the winds have fallen out of the sails of the movement built on rage. What happens to such a movement when the people you claim to represent are talking about peaceful compromise and resolution?
Quite simply, they adapt. They always do. “Globalize the Intifada” was never about Gaza alone. It was about importing the conflict into every Western city, every university, every workplace. It was about turning Jews into targets wherever they live. The protests were test runs. What comes next will be more sophisticated; Less shouting, more infiltration, less marching, more influence, less screaming, more attacking.
Expect the same people who called for the destruction of Israel and the unabashed physical attack on Jews everywhere to pivot toward culture, education and local politics. They will form committees, advocacy groups and think tanks. They will publish reports, run candidates, and work to normalize the language of the Intifada until it sounds like social justice. The goal will not be to bomb Israel but to bankrupt it, morally. To make the idea of Jewish self-defense sound like extremism and to make hatred of Jews sound like progress.
They will take their message global again, only this time it will be framed as “decolonization” and “anti-imperialism.” They will find allies in movements that have nothing to do with the Middle East. Climate groups, labor unions, racial justice organizations. They will weave their agenda into every conversation about oppression and power until the word “Israel” becomes shorthand for evil. That is what “globalizing the Intifada” truly means: transforming the hatred that began in Gaza into a worldwide ideology of blame.
The frightening part is not how loud they are, but how effective they have become. They have convinced ordinary people to chant for the destruction of a country most of them could not find on a map. They have convinced otherwise reasonable people to stand on the street and call for the physical attack on Jewish populations and they have made support for Hamas, after the October seventh genocidal attack, fashionable among the educated and the privileged. They have built a moral inversion so complete that students wearing kaffiyas at Ivy League schools feel braver than Israeli soldiers facing terror attacks, bullets, hostage takings, torture and rockets.
The war may pause, but their movement will not. They will continue to romanticize the violence, celebrate the martyrs, and reinvent their cause to fit whatever new narrative the moment demands. The only real question is whether the rest of the world is finally ready to see them for what they are.
Israel’s defenders cannot afford to be passive. This is not a protest movement; it is a campaign to rewrite history in real time. The answer is not silence, nor is it censorship. It is exposure. Shine a light on what they say when they think no one is recording. Quote them accurately. Show the world the videos they post, the slogans they chant, the hatred they justify. Truth is their enemy, it always has been.
The Hamas deal has been signed, there will be headlines about peace and relief and cautious optimism. They’ll be congratulatory articles and talks about Nobel Peace Prizes, but that’s the pointless political show. The real fight will not be over borders or ceasefires, it will be over memory. The pro-Hamas movement will try to bury October seventh under the rubble of language. Our job is to keep digging it out.
The war may end. The global Intifada will not. It will change its name, shift its tactics, and keep moving. But so will we. Because survival, for Israel and for Jews everywhere, has never depended on public approval. It has always depended on clarity, courage and the refusal to forget who we are.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on Truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on Israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Montreal Jewish News
