What changed. In December 2025 the Met and Greater Manchester Police announced that they would arrest people for chanting globalise the intifada. Their own statement acknowledged that the CPS had repeatedly advised that many of these phrases do not meet the prosecution threshold, then said the forces had recalibrated to be more assertive in the wider context.
Why that matters. A criminal sanction cannot turn on political climate. It has to turn on the legal test: threatening, abusive or intimidating conduct, assessed against the individual facts. Treating Arabic political words as inherently arrestable chills lawful expression and risks discriminating by language, ethnicity and national background.
The words are not inherently violent. Intifada means uprising or shaking off. Muqawama means resistance. Those are ordinary political concepts in English. The phrase from the river to the sea is contextual and has been used for decades as a call for Palestinian freedom and equal rights. None of those phrases should be criminalised without evidence of threatening or abusive conduct.