Alongside the slogan 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,' chants calling for 'intifada' have become among the most controversial aspects of the protests being held in support of the Palestinian cause on American college campuses and elsewhere around the world. For many critics of these protests, the calls for intifada equate to incitement to kill Israelis and/or Jews around the world. The debate as it plays out on social media tends to be very repetitive with the same talking points, and here I hope to shed some new light.
To begin with, defenders of the chants note that intifada is a standard Arabic word for 'uprising' and is not simply confined the periods of Palestinian unrest against Israel that popularised the term. This is indeed correct. There are a whole series of other incidents of unrest that have been and can be called intifada in Arabic. For example, the Shi'i uprising in Iraq against Saddam Husayn's government in the wake of the First Gulf War is known in Arabic as the intifada sha'abaniya. The original unrest in Tunisia that led to the deposition of the Ben Ali government has similarly been described as an intifada in media, besides the more familiar term of the Jasmine Revolution. Even the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of the Jews against the Nazi German occupation during World War Two can be described as an intifada in Arabic.
In response, critics will not necessarily deny this point, but highlight that the Palestinian intifadas entailed considerable violence against Israel, including terrorist attacks. Lest there should be any debate about definitions, by terrorist attacks I mean operations that specifically targeted civilians for political purposes, such as bomb attacks on Israeli public transport and at places frequented by civilians like restaurants and cafés: a phenomenon that was notable during the Second Intifada (2000-2005).
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