Episode 78: Do you still want to globalize the intifada?
Ask Haviv Anything
Haviv Rettig Gur
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2026
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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?”
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Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Our next question, what was the first Intifada, what was the second Intifada? |
| 0:10.7 | Why is it so wrong to say you should globalize the Intifada or Intifada revolution? |
| 0:16.7 | The protesters are saying that it only means non-violent protest. |
| 0:21.8 | Excellent question, right from the front lines of the Western culture wars. |
| 0:26.1 | I'll try and lay it out. |
| 0:27.6 | What Israelis understand by the term intifada actually isn't any one thing. |
| 0:31.3 | It's a couple of different things. |
| 0:32.8 | There's an arc. |
| 0:33.7 | The term changed its meaning for Israelis. |
| 0:36.4 | And what Israelis here isn't the only question, |
| 0:39.4 | what Palestinians are saying matters, of course, deeply. What some Palestinian diaspora activists |
| 0:44.9 | mean by the word is kind of detached from what ordinary Palestinians on the ground in the West Bank |
| 0:50.2 | in Gaza, in East Jerusalem and places like that mean. So let's get into it. The first intifada |
| 0:55.3 | begins in December 1987. It's triggered by a car accident. The car accident isn't the cause. It's |
| 1:01.3 | just the momentary trigger. An Israeli military vehicle hits a Palestinian car. Four people are |
| 1:06.3 | killed. Protests are sparked in Gaza that sweep across Gaza and into the Palestinian cities and towns of |
| 1:13.2 | the West Bank. Over the next five years, the First Intifada will be many things. It was many things. |
| 1:18.7 | It was terror attacks, straight up terror attacks on the FBI definition of a terror attack. |
| 1:22.9 | The Israeli suppression efforts often turn quite violent against civilians, often against terror groups that |
| 1:29.3 | did step in to the breach. But there are things about the First Intifada structural things that you |
| 1:34.0 | can't get away from. The First Intifada was genuinely grassroots. It began at the bottom. It was |
| 1:40.0 | ordinary Palestinians responding to what, at the time, December 1987, was 20 years of military rule. |
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