The global intifada has spread to the streets

Certain slogans begin as metaphors and end up as instructions for action: ‘Globalise the intifada’ falls into this category. We have heard it shouted furiously on American campuses, then at European universities, and in the squares of London, Paris, Milan and Turin. It has been repeated by students with rucksacks on their backs and lecturers at their desks, by activists and a few MPs. On talk shows, it was interpreted in reassuring terms: a cry of solidarity, the understandable anger of a generation wounded by the images from Gaza, a verbal excess to be taken with a pinch of salt. Few stopped to listen to the phrase for what it really means.

In fact, ‘intifada’ has a specific meaning: history has explained this to us twice. The first, beginning in 1987, refers to the Palestinian period of stones, Molotov cocktails, knives, and Israeli streets transformed into battlefields. The second, from 2000 onwards, refers to the period of blown-up buses, pizzerias and nightclubs, and of young men strapped with explosives and sent to die whilst killing others, despite the fact that an Israeli peace proposal was on the table: the best of the many rejected by the Palestinians.

Calling for the ‘intifada’ to be globalised therefore amounts to calling for that approach to transcend the boundaries of the Middle East and become a universal language: violence as a political choice, destruction as proof of sincerity, and the enemy as a category to be targeted wherever they may be found.

Those who have invoked it in recent years had a specific target in mind: the ‘Zionists’. A flexible, convenient term which, as the months went by, came to refer to the local synagogue, the kosher restaurant, the student wearing a kippah, the lecturer who refused to sign the petition, and the Israeli researcher who had to be disinvited from the conference. In short, the Jews – a term that allows one to strike at them without having to name them. The global intifada was meant to be selective, measured and targeted violence. A weapon to be wielded without harming oneself, because it was always aimed at someone else. It is the oldest of illusions. It has been said many times, and yet it is forgotten every time: what begins with the Jews rarely ends with the Jews. Anti-Semitism has always been a testing ground. There, techniques are tried out, justifications are put to the test, and public opinion is accustomed to the idea that certain people, certain places, certain lives are legitimate targets. Then the testing ground opens its doors and production moves to an industrial scale. Hannah Arendt observed that in violence, the means always tend to overwhelm the end, and that those who wield it for a purpose soon find themselves in the service of violence itself. Those who legitimised the uprising against the ‘Zionists’ legitimised the uprising. Full stop. The rest is decided by those who take to the streets.

Those taking to the streets have made up their minds. We are all familiar with the events of recent weeks. Just look at the targets: schools, bookshops, a nineteenth-century town hall, the historic centres of our cities. These are the places where a society conveys what it stands for: knowledge, memory, and the rules that make living together possible. The real intifada has never built anything. It has always and only destroyed. And it is only to be expected that its exported version should take aim at the very same symbols, here in our own country.

Then there’s the uniform. Palestinian flags and faces covered by keffiyehs or hoods, even in the demonstrations that claimed to be protesting against petrol prices, utility bills and overcrowded classrooms. Some were puzzled: what does Palestine have to do with the cost of living? Nothing, precisely. And it is precisely this that tells us the prophecy has come true. That flag has become the banner of the uprising itself, applicable to any cause. And the keffiyeh is the uniform of those who want to feel like fighters, come what may. This was evident on Saturday 24 October in Milan, where the convergence became explicit: the pro-Palestine rally organised ‘against war, genocide, imperialism and Zionism’ merged with the march against the cost of living, bringing together over ten thousand people in a single procession. This time there were no clashes, thanks in part to the presence of a substantial security operation. In Turin, however, the situation was different: flares and bottles were thrown at police officers.

The cause, as is now clear, changes from week to week, but the method remains the same. This amounts to globalising an intifada: separating the act from its context and making it accessible to anyone who fancies smashing something.

Now for the most uncomfortable question. Who are these so-called ‘fighters’? The figures on those arrested, in France as in Turin, speak for themselves: the vast majority are minors. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old. Sometimes younger.

For three years, we have been taught a specific vocabulary. Under the 1989 UN Convention, a child is defined as anyone under the age of eighteen. It is a sensible legal definition, designed to protect. In the narrative of the Gaza war, it has also become something else: a formidable rhetorical tool, to the extent that in the death toll, the seventeen-year-old with a rifle and the newborn baby end up in the same column, under the same term, carrying the same emotional weight. Anyone who tried to draw a distinction, anyone who pointed out that organisations such as Hamas train teenagers in summer camps and send them off to fight, was accused of inhumanity. The armed sixteen-year-old had to remain a child – that is, a victim by definition, devoid of free will, incapable of making choices.

Over the past few weeks, these ‘children’ have demonstrated their capabilities. They have set fire to secondary schools, doused a teacher in petrol, stormed bookshops, thrown stones and firecrackers at police officers, looted shops and started fires. These actions have been carried out methodically, in groups, coordinated via social media and targeted. To call them children would be an insult to their intelligence even before it is an insult to ours.

The law, which is more honest than rhetoric, has known this for some time. In Italy, criminal liability applies from the age of fourteen, provided the individual is capable of understanding and forming their own will. In France, the age of presumed discernment is set at thirteen. The legislator has acknowledged a reality that every teacher knows, or ought to know: a fifteen-year-old knows full well what it means to set fire to a school. They know it is a serious offence and, perhaps, that is precisely why they do it. Especially if they have decided not to attend that school.

Recognising that a teenager is responsible for their own actions in no way diminishes the pain felt for real children – the very young ones – who die in wars without ever having had a choice. On the contrary: it is the only way to take that pain seriously. When the word ‘child’ encompasses everything, from a newborn to a militiaman, it ceases to protect anyone. Denying teenagers the capacity to act is deeply contemptuous: it treats them as objects, as tools in the hands of others, incapable of moral choice. It is the same contempt with which terrorist organisations use them.

The problem of the adults remains. For whilst it is true that these young people are responsible, it is also true that someone brought them up. The imagery of the uprising has deep roots. From the first intifada onwards, the West has devoutly cultivated the image of the young boy with a stone standing before a tank. Award-winning photographs, magazine covers, posters hung in university lecture theatres. The young man throwing the stone was the hero, the soldier the oppressor, and the question of who had put that stone into a twelve-year-old’s hand was never asked. We have taught entire generations that that gesture was beautiful, right, even poetic. Today, we find the boy with the stone in Piazza Castello in Turin, and the tank is a police armoured vehicle. He has learnt his lesson.

Many have instilled this in them. School assemblies dedicated to ‘resistance’ without any opposing views. Occupied universities, with vice-chancellors ready to negotiate with those preventing others from speaking. Intellectuals explaining that anger must be understood, contextualised, never condemned without a ‘but’. Politicians marching alongside those shouting that the struggle is legitimate by any means necessary. Teachers on social media who justified everything, provided the violence was directed by the ‘right’ side. Everyone added a brick. No one felt responsible for the building as a whole.

According to investigators, someone appears to have done more than simply add a piece to the puzzle. Behind the Instagram page ‘Movimento 17 ottobre’ – created in the wake of the clashes and which, within a few hours, became the megaphone for the mobilisation – is reportedly a man in his thirties: Youssef Siher, a pro-Palestinian activist, a university graduate with a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Milan and a background in the study of political Islam. He is now under investigation: it will be up to the courts to determine his liability. But if confirmed, the picture speaks for itself: fifteen-year-olds wearing keffiyehs on the streets, whilst behind the screen sits an educated adult – a freelance journalist trained at our universities – who is well aware of the weight of words.

Then there is one final hypocrisy, perhaps the most serious of all. Many of those who today claim to be appalled by the devastation are the very same people who, for three years, looked on with indifference at the attacks on Jews in our towns and cities, the graffiti on the walls of synagogues, Jewish students forced to hide the Star of David, and communities asking for protection only to be accused of playing the victim. As long as the violence affected them, it was a mere detail, an understandable side effect. Now that it is affecting everyone’s bookshops, everyone’s schools, everyone’s town halls, it turns out that violence is a problem. European Jews have been saying this for a long time. They were the warning signal, the canary in the coal mine. They were allowed to be silenced, and now the gas has spread throughout all the tunnels.

The Israelis have learnt this lesson the hard way over forty years of intifadas. They know that political violence, once accepted as a form of communication, shapes young people above all else. And that rebuilding a culture of respect takes generations. They also know that anyone who teaches a young person to hate an enemy is teaching them to hate in general. Europe has preferred to believe that this was a distant story, set in the Middle East, far removed from its schools and public squares.

Now the story is here. Those who sought to globalise the intifada have achieved their objective. They had envisaged it as an arrow aimed at someone else, but it has turned out to be a fire. And now it is engulfing everyone.

Ever since the first intifada, the West has devoutly cultivated the image of the boy with a stone standing before a tank. Today, the boy with the stone is in Piazza Castello in Turin, and the tank is a police armoured vehicle.

Now that it is affecting everyone’s bookshops, everyone’s schools and everyone’s town halls, it turns out that violence is a problem. European Jews have been saying this for some time. They were the warning sign, the canary in the coal mine