What you’re calling for when you call for intifada

When you say you want an intifada, a global uprising against Jews, you condone the murder of innocent people, like my son Koby and his friend Yosef, who were in eighth grade when terrorists beat them to death with rocks, leaving them in a cave with blood smeared on the walls at the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2001.

Koby was our oldest child. He loved baseball and basketball and pizza. He was just a kid, out for a hike. That’s who you are talking about killing — by any means necessary.

That murder did not move us out of Israel. That murder did not bring peace. That murder brought no positive results for the Palestinians. Supporting murder will not help the Palestinian cause, neither then 23 years ago, nor today.

When you say you want an intifada, when you shout, “Resistance by any means necessary,” you may be unwittingly losing the battle for the Palestinian people.

You condone the murder of families like the Fogel family who were murdered in their home. Their 12-year-old daughter came home that night to find her family massacred — mother, father, 3-month-old baby and two siblings. One child who survived, a 2-year-old, sat next to his parents, who lay in a pool of blood. He was trying to wake them.

The rest of the Fogel family did not leave Israel. The murder of the Fogel family did not advance the political agenda of the Palestinians.

When you say you want an intifada, you condone the murder of Hallel Ariel who was 13 when a terrorist stabbed her to death in her bed.

When you say you want a global intifada, you are saying that you believe in killing Jews at Passover seders, like the one at the Park Hotel in 2002 where 30 Israelis were murdered. You believe in killing us at discos like the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv where 21 Israelis were killed, most of them teenagers. You want to kill us at schools like Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, where a terrorist shot and murdered eight teenagers.

When you call for an intifada, you are an accomplice to atrocity and murder. You encourage violence and antisemitism. You support radical Islam, Hamas, and Iran who want to annihilate the nation of Israel. You embolden Palestinians to murder and take captives, as they did on October 7th, as though that were a pathway to peace.

You are being used. Your self-righteousness and rage are being exploited as you support terror against Jews anywhere in the world. You will not be victorious. Instead, your sensibilities will be deadened as you partake in an orgy of hatred.

Instead of resistance by any means necessary, imagine changing your slogan: Peace by any means necessary. Imagine if you told Hamas to release the Israeli hostages and stop launching missiles, so that the war could end.

Peace by any means necessary. Now that’s a slogan that would end this war, bring home the hostages, and even encourage the Israeli government to advance a Palestinian state.