Protesters chanting ‘globalise the intifada’ will now be arrested, according to the heads of Greater Manchester Police and the Metropolitan Police. The announcement has been framed as a response to a ‘changed context’. But what it actually represents is an admission, belated and heavy, that the authorities spent years refusing to see what was directly in front of them.

The chant was never opaque. The intifadas were not metaphors or moods

The chant was never opaque. The intifadas were not metaphors or moods. They were campaigns of organised violence: shootings, stabbings, bombings, lynchings, buses torn apart, cafés turned into graves. And each individual terror attack, each ‘isolated’ act of violence with half a dozen or a dozen dead leads to the next, until one day a full scale atrocity unfolds with hundreds of people murdered in their homes, raped at a music festival, and kidnapped by savages. Suddenly, nobody knows how the signs were ignored. Suddenly, they see a ‘changed context’ requiring action.

That entire history travelled intact inside the phrase ‘globalise the intifada’. For many of us with even a few years of memory, it does not need decoding. Jewish communities said this clearly, again and again, in public, in meetings, in writing, in fear. They explained what those words had meant in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, and why hearing them shouted through London, Manchester and Sydney carried consequence rather than symbolism. These are words written in blood, carried across decades, still wet with memory.

They were waved away. Their warnings were treated as exaggeration or agenda. Police forces chose inaction. Media voices offered smug and patronising indulgence. Institutions preferred formulaic ambiguity to judgement. What followed was permission. A climate was allowed to thicken on British, Australian, and American streets, in the places where Jewish families walk, gather and pray.

This week, the same authorities declare that the meaning is........

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