There is always a moment, usually quite early on, when a protest stops being about what is actually happening and starts being about the protest itself. You can almost hear it happen. The chant goes up, someone films it, and within hours the argument has shifted entirely.
In this case, the starting point is not complicated. Palestinians are being killed in large numbers by Israeli military action. People see that, feel it is wrong, and go out to protest. That is not extreme or controversial. It is a fairly basic human reaction to civilians being caught in the middle of a war.
Where it starts to go sideways is the language. “Globalise the Intifada” is one of those phrases that sounds powerful if you are saying it and rather different if you are hearing it. To the person chanting, it may mean solidarity or resistance. To a reasonable listener, particularly a Jewish one, it can land as a reference to uprisings that included attacks on civilians during the Second Intifada. That gap between intention and reception is doing most of the work here.
And once that gap opens up, the whole thing tilts. Instead of talking about civilian deaths or the conduct of the Israeli government, we end up arguing about whether a chant is threatening. It is an oddly efficient way of derailing your own protest. You begin with a strong, straightforward moral point and end up defending wording that half your audience hears as something else entirely.
The law does not help you out of that hole. Under the Human Rights Act, you are perfectly entitled to protest, even noisily and in ways that annoy people. But those rights are qualified. If there is a real risk of disorder or intimidation, the state can step in. Vague, loaded slogans make that argument easier to make, whether you meant them that way or not.
This is the bit that tends to irritate people, but it is also the practical one. If your aim is to stop civilians being killed, then say exactly that. Call for a ceasefire. Call for restraint. Call for whatever policy change you think might make a difference. It is not about watering anything down. It is about keeping your message clear enough that it cannot be bent into something you did not intend.
There is a temptation, of course, to reach for something sharper. It feels more forceful, more like you are doing something rather than just stating the obvious. But there is a difference between sounding strong and being effective. If your wording allows a reasonable person to think you might be cheering on violence, you have handed your opponents an argument they did not previously have, and they will use it.
None of this means the government gets a free pass. There is a familiar pattern where ministers discover a sudden enthusiasm for public order powers when protests become awkward. If every uncomfortable slogan is treated as incitement, you are no longer policing risk, you are managing dissent. The courts, under the same Human Rights Act, have a habit of taking a dim view when that line is crossed, but by that point the damage is usually done.
So we end up in the usual untidy British compromise. Protest is allowed, but watched. The police hover at the edges trying to decide when irritation turns into risk. Activists are free to say what they like, but not free from the consequences of choosing language that muddies their own case.
And the slightly deflating reality is this. If you want to change minds, you have to persuade people who do not already agree with you. Shouting something they can plausibly interpret as a threat might feel satisfying in the moment, but it is not, on balance, the cleverest way to go about it.
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