INTIFADA REVOLUTION...

And The Attempt to Sow Linguistic Confusion

Protesters sometimes claim that “intifada” doesn’t communicate a call to violence, some media are helping them achieve this deception

Words are supple instruments. They can change meaning depending on the context, the time frame, or as they migrate from one language to another. The ambiguity of words is often a strength, rendering them malleable tools.

Take “intifada”. A mainstay of protests in and outside the Muslim world, it is a call to rise up. But what form should the uprising take?Recently an NPR report by Adrian Florido relied on the views of opposing parties to define the word.

 “Intifada means uprising in Arabic. The two Columbia students I spoke with exemplified how for people with opposing views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the same word can mean vastly different things.”

The anti-Israel protestor quoted in the piece claimed intifada to mean “an uprising”, and not necessarily a violent uprising. “It calls for freedom and for change”, says Basil Rodriguez. Which is sweet, bordering on inspirational.

The report then quotes a professor of Arabic who says that the word's literal translation is close to uprise, but adds that “Arabic words are often stigmatized, associated with violence and terrorism.” 

In the case of intifada, there is a clear reason for the stigmatization, itself a word that has religious significance to Christians and was first used to mean branded as with an iron. Who did the branding with the word intifada? The answer is the Palestinians, who rose up in 1987 in the First Intifada. That intifada saw more than 1,500 people killed, most of them Palestinian. Then, in the year 2000 there was the Second Intifada––the Al-Aqsa Intifada––and when it ended, approximately 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were dead. 

Was it more the fault of the Palestinians who were violently uprising? Or the Israelis overreacting to the violent uprising of the Palestinians? That, actually, is a debatable question. But the precise terms of the debate are: When it comes to the killing of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis, which side bears more responsibility for the violent uprising called the Second Intifada? Because while intifada does literally mean uprising, in the context of the Palestinian conflict, it means armed uprising and revolution. It's preposterous to say otherwise.

Trying to define intifada by taking the median professed definition of two opposing parties is like trying to define a screwdriver by asking someone who’s holding one by the handle what screwdriver means to them, and then asking the opinion of a person being stabbed by a screwdriver for an alternative definition.   

In the same way that intifada could mean an uprising that’s simply a call for change and freedom “9/11” could mean simply two numbers abutting 10. “September 11th” might to you mean that date of any year. But if you call for “another 9/11” while holding a sign in downtown Manhattan, or while talking about objections to America's forays in the Middle East, you can only mean one thing. 

The Ukrainian word Holodomor means famine with mass deaths. But in the context of talking about Ukrainian history, Holodomor means one specific mass famine, as orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. 

“Holocaust” once meant burnt offering, and then after a few hundred years of use came to mean a massacre. Now it means the genocide of the Jews, and to suggest other less direct definitions would be confusing, perhaps purposefully so. 

Nakba means catastrophe. But if an Israeli were to attend a rally and say that there was no Nakba, they would be engaged in denying the Palestinians their very real and catastrophic experience. 

The Middle Passage means a harrowing ocean trip which killed so many Africans enslaved by Europeans. Of course, “middle passage” can mean many other things, from a part of a book to a part of a song. But to use it flippantly or deceptively would be terribly insulting to experience, to history, and to anyone who heard it and was rightly horrified. 

I guess you can make the case that some people might say Middle Passage, Holodomor, Holocaust, or Nakba and not intend to convey painful and horrible associations. You might argue that the interpretation is on the listener not the speaker. I wouldn't make that case. I would be ashamed to make that case. I’d argue a decent or honest person with any bit of sense or sensitivity would know that case doesn’t fly. 

Yet NPR gave wings to a rhetorical deception, quoting a student protester, saying that “they refused to sanitize their language because it makes a non-Arabic speaker uncomfortable.” That's quite a standard, and not the one that was inculcated by the battles over intent of the speaker versus impact to the listener. 

NPR does quote a Jewish student who hears intifada as a violent call to revolution. I would say even discerning gentiles can and should understand the word that way too. 

We needn’t convince ourselves that there is no method or concept for understanding a word’s meanings other than a default to the professed interpretation of the listener: Jews hear it one way, anti-Israel protesters another - cue the post-modern shrug emoji. There are, in fact, time-honored concepts like plain meaning or usual and ordinary meaning that the law frequently utilizes in evaluating contracts and statutory interpretation. If I said to you, for instance, I'm going to fuck you up, as we're squaring off to fight, it could mean that I'm going to confuse and dazzle you with, say, a paradox, but it probably means I'm going to punch you. At trial, I might try to convince a jury that I meant to propose a rhetorical question about angels dancing on the head of a pin, but I’d probably be found guilty of assault.

There are some contested words––even contested Arabic words––which do not always mean what an angry and accusatory, non-Arabic speaker claims they mean. Jihad is such a word. Yes, terrorists are jihadis, and jihad can often mean armed struggle, however it really just does mean struggle; in context, there are many times when, and many ways where, jihad does not mean terrorism. Jihad is a fairly common first name in the Arab world, and not unknown among Arab-Americans. The former finance minister of Lebanon was Jihad Azour. He's a mild upper class fellow with a background in banking who works for the IMF. One imagines that his greatest jihad has been being named Jihad. 

Intifada is different from jihad. In this context of talking about a war in Israel intifada inextricably means a call to violence, as protesters know full well, even if they claim otherwise.. I believe that the protester quoted in the NPR piece who claims the only intent is to express the aspirational power of intifada is lying. That protester, and many others, are enjoying the etymological deniability NPR is providing. Their choice to use intifada is at least in part purposefully designed to cause horror to the Jews who hear it.

Therefore what NPR is doing in this report is a bit of chant-washing. They played a popular chant which goes “Intifada intifada, long live the intifada.” NPR did not play the equally, or perhaps more common version chant “intifada revolution, there is only one solution,” as heard on both the Columbia campus, and outside of an October 7th Memorial exhibit in Manhattan. “Revolution” is definitionally an extreme or violent act, as NPR knows, which is why they avoided playing tape of that particular iteration of the chant. 

While I do think reports like the ones on NPR greatly aid in offering a sanitization of a violent sentiment, I don’t think NPR intentionally said, let's give cover and permission structure to threatening the Jews. But that is exactly what they did. I think most of the protestors know that what they’re saying is threatening to Jews and Israelis, and that’s why they’re saying it. 

In the days after NPR’s report Googling “Intifada meaning” returned as the top result “a term Arabic speakers use to describe any kind of social uprising, as in the 1950s with Iraq.” 

The link was to the very NPR report in question. Now, thankfully, the NPR definition has been leapfrogged by the Merriam-Webster definition: The meaning of Intifada is uprising, rebellion, specifically an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Dictionaries aren't arbiters of meaning; they're chroniclers of understanding. They trace how words are actually used, which exactly makes my point. Intifada is used quite clearly, quite consistently, and quite knowingly to mean the armed, often violent, uprising against Israel.

For the record, public protesters shouldn’t be prevented from expressing these sentiments, though we should all know and understand what the sentiments actually are, and not hide behind purposeful obscuring of what the word’s inextricable connotation. The protesters are saying what they clearly mean to say which is an evocation of a violent and threatening recent event that resonates to Jews and Israelis. This is the intifada of the protesters chants.