Chants of 'intifada' ring out from pro-Palestinian protests. But what's it mean?
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There's a chant that's become common at pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the U.S. - it calls for intifada. That's an Arabic word; it's also a point of tension when it comes to how people talk about the war in Gaza. NPR's Adrian Florido has this report.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: This was the chant at a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University in New York in early May.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Chanting) Intifada, intifada.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) Intifada - intifada.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Chanting) Long live the intifada.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) Long live the intifada.
FLORIDO: 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.
BASIL RODRIGUEZ: For me, it just speaks to liberation...
FLORIDO: Basil Rodriguez, who was at that protest, is Palestinian American.
RODRIGUEZ: ...To free Palestine from the Apartheid regime and the military occupation. So to me, it calls for freedom and for change.
FLORIDO: It's a call for resistance to Israel, Rodriguez says, but not for violence. Palestinians first started using intifada in the 1980s, during a period of protests and civil unrest against Israeli control that came to be known as the First Intifada - but for Eliana Goldin, every time she heard it growing up...
ELIANA GOLDIN: The word intifada was only associated with death and terrorism and destruction.
FLORIDO: She's a Jewish American. For her, the word evokes the Second Intifada, a violent period in the early 2000s when Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups killed more than 1,000 Israelis, including through suicide bombings in restaurants, buses and shops.
GOLDIN: So intifada still feels just as charged as if someone were to say Holocaust, or if someone were to mention any sort of catastrophe that happened against a people you consider yourself a part of.
FLORIDO: She hears the intifada chants as antisemitic, an open call for violence against Jews and Israelis. Taoufik Ben-Amor is a linguist and professor of Arabic studies at Columbia. He says one reason the word's use in chants is so contested is because the protesters are choosing not to translate it from the Arabic.
TAOUFIK BEN-AMOR: If you turned the word intifada into uprise, then it would belong to the English vocabulary, you know, that people are completely familiar with.
FLORIDO: At many recent pro-Palestinian protests, it's not just the word intifada but entire chants that have been shouted in Arabic.
BEN-AMOR: By not translating them into English, you can actually define their meaning as you want, you know, and so they become political weapons, so to speak - sort of a weapon in both hands to be used in this political jostling that's happening.
FLORIDO: Intifada's meaning, uprising, comes from the Arabic root meaning, to shake off, as of dust from a cloth, and Ben-Amor says it's a common Arabic word for any kind of uprising - but he says Arabic words are often stigmatized, associated with violence and terrorism. As far as intifada, the torturous history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has made it a loaded word - but for whom, he asks.
BEN-AMOR: You know, the Palestinians who were killed during the Second Intifada, for example, have families, too.
FLORIDO: Three times as many Palestinians were killed as Israelis, yet Palestinians still use the word. Eliana Goldin says she would like to believe her protesting classmates aren't advocating violence against Israel and Jews, but she can't ignore the context. They're not just chanting intifada, she says.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Chanting) We don't want no two states.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) We don't want no two states.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Chanting) We want all of it.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) We want all of it.
GOLDIN: They chant, we don't want two states - we want all of it; they chant, death to the Zionist state. When there's so much other rhetoric going on within the same chants that obviously point to the destruction of Jewish people, why am I to believe that intifada doesn't mean what I think it already means?
FLORIDO: Basil Rodriguez says they refuse to sanitize their language because it makes a non-Arabic speaker uncomfortable.
RODRIGUEZ: It's our indigenous language as Palestinians, and so the idea that we have to not say a word because it's in Arabic I think just plays into the racist assumption that Arabs are terrorists - and so I'm not going to ever stop saying the word intifada.
FLORIDO: The debate over the war in Gaza has made clear the power of language. Terms like intifada, genocide, martyr, resistance - they're all fought over in the battle to shape public opinion of the war. Taoufik Ben-Amor says this is nothing new in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it's always been true, and will be for a long time.
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