The Freedom to Resist the Frame

On Mamdani, Gillibrand, and resisting the political narrowing of moral imagination.

Ismail Shammout, The Glow of Al-Intifada, Palestine, 2001, oil on canvas

I was going to write about something else this week—was writing about something else. But that will have to wait.

Yesterday, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was the featured guest on Brian Lehrer’s “Call Your Senator” segment on WNYC. She came to talk about the president’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—which she’s been calling the “Big Beautiful Betrayal”—and its devastating impact on health care and food assistance.

But that’s not what the callers wanted to talk about.

They wanted to talk about the historic victory of Zohran Mamdani, poised to become the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City, and whether Senator Gillibrand would endorse him.

Lehrer asked first. Gillibrand said, “Not today.” She explained that she had congratulated Mamdani and discussed working together, but also raised “some concerns.” When pressed, she cited public safety and Mamdani’s “statements about Israel.” She wouldn’t elaborate, calling the conversation “personal,” but said she raised the issues “on behalf of constituents.”

Another caller asked again: Would she support Mamdani in the general election? Lehrer let her pass.

Then came a call from Jersey City. The caller claimed that Mamdani planned to “target synagogues and Jewish institutions,” that donated to medical nonprofits, glorified Hamas, and had “revisionist Holocaust knowledge.” Lehrer warned that much of what was said “may be inaccurate”—but still asked Gillibrand to respond.

Gillibrand said Mamdani’s “past positions” had alarmed her constituents, especially references to “global jihad.” Then she said this:

The Global Intifada is a statement that means destroy Israel and kill all the Jews.

Lehrer didn’t challenge her immediately—and he never challenged her definition of “global intifada.” But later in the show, he clarified: Mamdani has never supported Hamas. In an appearance on Lehrer’s show, Mamdani had explained that the term intifada refers to a broad tradition of resistance, and made clear that he does not support violence.

Gillibrand responded:

If I was speaking to him directly, I would simply say that is not how the words are received. And it doesn't matter what meaning you have in your brain. It is not how the word is received. And when you use a word like Intifada to many Jewish Americans and Jewish New Yorkers, that means you are permissive for violence against Jews. It is a serious word. It is a word that has deep meaning. It has been used for wars across time and violence and destruction and slaughter and murder against the Jews. It is a harmful, hurtful, inappropriate word for anyone who wants to represent a city as diverse as New York City with 8 million people. And I would be very specific in these words, and I would say you may not use them again if you expect to represent everyone ever again because they're received as hateful and divisive and harmful, and that's it.

Lehrer further clarified: Mamdani never said “globalize the intifada.” He was asked, during an interview, whether he would denounce others who use the phrase. Gillibrand said:

Well, as a leader of a city, as diverse as New York City with 8 million people as the largest Jewish population in the country, he should denounce it and that's it, period.

It takes time to understand what Mamdani said, and the context in which he said it.

Time that Gillibrand apparently doesn’t have.

Lehrer himself wasn’t 100% correct. The phrase “globalize the intifada” came up during a June 17 interview of Mamdani on The Bulwark. One of the program’s hosts asked Mamdani what he thought of it as a protest slogan. He responded:

Antisemitism is a real issue in our city. And it’s one that can be captured in statistics… It’s also one that you will feel in conversations you have with Jewish New Yorkers across the city.

Mamdani went on to recall the very real fear of the Jewish New Yorkers he’d spoken with—who, after October 7, were afraid in their synagogues and in their homes. “This is something that has to be the focus of the next mayoral administration,” he said, and “these are the conversations that have informed our commitment” to increase funding for anti-hate-crime programming by 800 percent.

But he also said he was not comfortable with “banning the use of certain words.”

The host pressed further: did “globalize the intifada” or “from the river to the sea” make him uncomfortable?

Mamdani replied: “I know people for whom those things mean very different things,” and said, “what I hear is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He added that, as a Muslim man raised post-9/11, he knows how Arabic terms can be distorted and weaponized. The focus, he said, needs to be on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe—not on policing the permissibility of language.

But I’m not writing this because of what Mamdani said.
I’m writing this because of how Gillibrand responded.

She said the phrase globalize the intifada cannot be said, not because of what it means, but because of how it’s received. She called it “hateful, divisive, and harmful” and shared an inflammatory and inaccurate definition of the word intifada that obfuscates its history and its meaning to Palestinians and their supporters around the world.

As the Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi has said:

[T]he attempt to argue that using a term like “intifada” is antisemitic is simply absurd…Intifada simply means “uprising.”

Besides stoking fear and division, what Senator Gillibrand is saying when she defines intifada as “destroy Israel and kill all the Jews,” is that how Palestinians experience occupation, or how they name their resistance to it, is irrelevant.

That Jewish discomfort deserves public apology, but Palestinian grief doesn’t even deserve recognition.

She’s asking us to accept that only one side’s pain matters.
That only one people’s memory is politically legitimate.
And that Palestinian language must be denounced before it can even be heard.

But language does not only belong to those who fear it.
It belongs, too, to those who need it.

For Palestinians and many others around the world, intifada is not a call to kill.
It is a refusal to die quietly.
It is a word of survival, of agency, of collective dignity.

It says: we are not passive subjects of empire.
We resist.
We rise.

To treat that word as inherently violent, as something that must be disavowed in order to be eligible for leadership, is to erase its meaning for those who have the least power to shape public discourse.

This is asymmetrical empathy.
And it is not justice. It is a form of domination.

As I write this, I am reading Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Justice. The book is a collection of essays written in the aftermath of 9/11, when the U.S. government was rewriting the terms of public grief and political loyalty. In the first essay, Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear, Butler writes about a post-9/11 “hegemony” of language, one that worked by “producing a consensus on what certain terms will mean, how they will be used, and [where] lines of solidarity are implicitly drawn.”

Butler explains that after 9/11,

a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation. It seems crucial to attend to this frame, since it decides, in a forceful way, what we can hear.

What we are witnessing now is the same kind of effort to narrow the framing, a political consensus around what words must mean, and who must denounce them to prove they belong.

We must resist the frame.

Because empathy that only flows in one direction is not empathy—it’s hierarchy.

It says: your pain matters more than theirs.
Your fear counts.
Their grief does not.

But we don’t need more selective empathy.
We need solidarity.

Solidarity does not require shared experience.
It requires moral clarity.

It requires listening to words we don’t immediately understand, without demanding that they be translated into the language of our own comfort.
It requires that we refuse to make our feelings the limit of someone else’s freedom.

To show solidarity is not to say “I feel your pain.”
It is to say: Your struggle is mine. Your liberation is bound up with mine.

That’s what Mamdani tried to do. To acknowledge antisemitism and Jewish pain, while also acknowledging Palestinian pain.

If Gillibrand wanted to show real leadership, she could have said: “I hear that this phrase holds different meanings. I want to understand why it resonates with those calling for Palestinian freedom. I reject antisemitism. I also refuse to weaponize it to silence others.”

Instead, she demanded that an elected official denounce not violence, but a word.
She chose empathy for some, and silence for others.

What Senator Gillibrand says matters. When a sitting U.S. senator claims that a word rooted in struggle and survival is synonymous with extermination, she is not just expressing concern. She is redefining resistance as violence, and speech as threat.

That redefinition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in the shadow of a government that is already criminalizing dissent, already detaining and deporting people for what they say, already erasing the possibility of solidarity by framing it as extremism.

Already, there are Republicans demanding that the president revoke Mamdani’s citizenship and deport him—calls that are both unconstitutional and chilling. The president himself went further, calling Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic.”

This is not just rhetoric. It is a warning shot, a test balloon for how far the state can go in punishing those whose views fall outside the dominant narrative, especially when they come from Muslims, immigrants, Palestinians, or anyone who refuses to fall in line.

When Democrats echo that logic, they legitimize its goals.
They help build the case for repression, one word at a time.

We cannot accept this from our elected officials.
We cannot let our language, our thoughtfulness, or our care for one another be hijacked by a news cycle, or by a presidential administration that thrives on fear and feeds off division.

Because what we’re watching is not just a political disagreement.
It is a deliberate attempt to narrow the bounds of moral imagination.
To punish those who try to hold multiple truths.

To turn words like “intifada” into weapons, not because of what they mean, but because of who is speaking them.