This week, the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police announced that people chanting or displaying the phrase “globalise the intifada” should expect to be arrested. No new law was passed. No parliamentary debate took place. Instead, the police declared that “the context has changed” and that words now carry consequences they did not before.
That matters, because this is not legislation. It is interpretation by enforcement.
We therefore begin with ambiguity, because that is where this phrase has always lived.
“Globalise the intifada” is not a precise instruction. Like many phrases in common use, its meaning shifts with context. “Hold the line” can mean don’t retreat, don’t panic, or simply don’t hang up. Language works that way. Courts have recognised this for years, which is precisely why earlier attempts to prosecute similar chants have failed. There is an established legal precedent that the ambiguity stands.
What has changed is not the phrase, and not the law, but the way it is being policed.
Historically, intifada refers to Palestinian uprisings against Israeli occupation. It was not coined as a religious slogan, nor as a call to kill Jews. The First Intifada was largely a civilian uprising against military rule and the denial of political rights. The Second Intifada became far more violent and morally compromised, and that shift understandably altered how the word is heard. But even then, it referred to resistance to an occupying power, not to Jews as a people. Conflating Israel with Jews is a political move, not a historical one.
That distinction matters, because the police announcement rests on the assertion that the phrase now has only one meaning, and that meaning is the most extreme one available. Ambiguity is no longer acknowledged. A phrase that once carried multiple interpretations is now treated as if it can only mean incitement, and in its darkest reading, violence against Jews.
That interpretation explains why the phrase alarms people. It is not invented out of thin air. But it remains an interpretation, not a linguistic fact, and crucially, it is not one that Parliament has written into law.
What is striking is what has been excluded from the frame. The phrase is not being assessed through the lens of the killing of civilians and children in Gaza. Not through the lens of ongoing settler violence and dispossession in the West Bank. Not through decades of occupation, grievance, and asymmetrical power. Context has not been removed accidentally. It has been selected. Only one context is now permitted, and all others are treated as irrelevant.
There is also an uncomfortable mismatch between cause and effect. The Bondi attackers were motivated by ISIS-style jihadism, not by Palestinian nationalism or resistance to Israeli occupation. Whatever one thinks of the chant, it does not belong to the ideological universe that produced that atrocity. Collapsing these distinct currents into a single category of threat may be emotionally understandable in the aftermath of violence, but it is analytically weak. It risks treating Palestinian solidarity, anger over Gaza, and ambiguous slogans as proxies for a form of extremism to which they are not historically or politically connected.
From the police perspective, the motive is not ideological but preventative. Faced with recent lethal attacks, heightened fear within Jewish communities, and the risk that certain slogans might act as accelerants in an already charged environment, their instinct is to head off any violence before it happens. That caution is understandable. Policing is, by nature, about risk management rather than fine linguistic or historical distinctions. But explanation is not the same as justification. Preventing disorder does not dissolve ambiguity, and acting to reduce risk does not confer the authority to redefine meaning or create new offences by interpretation.
In truth, the police are caught between a rock and a hard place. Do nothing, and they are accused of complacency. Act, and they are accused of repression. Seen in that light, this move looks less like a settled legal position than a form of tokenism: a visible assertion of control designed to reassure anxious communities and demonstrate resolve. It may calm the moment, but it does not resolve the underlying legal or linguistic problem. It simply pushes it downstream.
This selectivity matters because it is being used to justify enforcement without legal change. The police are not applying a new offence created by statute. They are asserting that because the moment is charged, words which were previously not prosecutable now are. Meaning is being fixed by policing guidance rather than by Parliament or the courts. Arrests may follow, but arrests are not convictions, and they do not themselves settle what the law means.
This is where legal reality intrudes. Policing decisions do not override precedent. The law has not been amended, and the courts remain the ultimate arbiters of intent, proportionality, and free expression. The same ambiguity that defeated earlier prosecutions has not evaporated simply because the emotional climate has hardened.
In the short term, the courts may well defer. With recent violence still raw, caution is likely to trump principle. The odds, for now, probably favour the authorities. But enforcement moving faster than law is not the same as enforcement being legally secure. The ground for challenge remains, and it is substantial.
This is the thin end of the wedge. If ambiguity, once recognised and protected, can be declared void whenever circumstances become fearful, then it is not a safeguard at all. It becomes a convenience, honoured only until it proves inconvenient.
None of this is to deny that words can wound, intimidate, or incite. They can. But the danger lies in pretending that language can be made unambiguous by assertion, or that one interpretation can be enforced into existence. When precedent is quietly set aside and meaning is fixed by authority rather than law, it is not just one chant that is narrowed. It is the space for dissent itself.
History suggests that once that space contracts, it rarely re-expands without a fight.
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