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The decision this week by Harvard University not to remove its president amid a storm of criticism over her congressional testimony about campus antisemitism offers a good opportunity to discuss the relationship between language and the political possibilities and perils surrounding the ongoing crisis in Gaza.
The decision this week by Harvard University not to remove its president amid a storm of criticism over her congressional testimony about campus antisemitism offers a good opportunity to discuss the relationship between language and the political possibilities and perils surrounding the ongoing crisis in Gaza.
Let’s get the easy part out of the way: Genocide, or support for it in word or deed, should always be met with firm opposition, whether on campuses or elsewhere. If Harvard’s recently appointed leader, Claudine Gay, and the leaders of two other elite U.S. universities who testified with her that day had managed to say this clearly and forthrightly, this tempest would never have occurred.
Gay survived, in part, because she later apologized in ways that suggested an understanding of her error and of the umbrage that many people, Jewish and others, took over the congressional exchange.
To me, almost as easy as denouncing genocide comes denouncing Hamas. I have been unsparing in my condemnation of the militant group in my writing about this crisis, even as I have been firm in criticizing Israel for the unbridled nature of its offensive in the Gaza Strip. Hamas fully deserves whatever wrath comes its way. What else can one say about a group whose spokesman went on television in the early stages of the conflict not only to defend the atrocities that his organization committed, but also to affirm that Hamas would repeat Oct. 7-style attacks on Israeli civilians “again and again” until the country is “annihilated”?
But the Palestinian people do not deserve this wrath, nor the broad and, to all appearances, indiscriminate form it takes, with massive bombardments flattening entire neighborhoods and killing huge numbers of civilians, far out of proportion to the numbers of Hamas militants who are eliminated.
As of Wednesday, more than 18,600 people—most of them women and children—were estimated to have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to Gazan authorities. And although that figure does not differentiate between civilians and combatants, the Israeli military estimated that more 7,000 of those killed were armed Hamas operatives. Then there is Israel’s degrading roundup of Palestinian men, who are all but stripped naked, handcuffed, and forced to sit on display in the streets of Gaza while they await interrogation or being marched off in coffles.
As atrocious as this has all been, this is not a column about Israeli intent or its possible culpability for war crimes, which seems substantial and growing. Like others, I have already cited some of the many comments by current and former Israeli politicians whose violence of language matches the violence of the ongoing attacks on Gaza. Some recent reporting from inside Israel suggests that these things have even shocked the consciences of members of that country’s redoubtable military.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed back on calls for restraint by telling U.S. President Joe Biden that the United States also committed mass attacks on civilian targets in past conflicts, as in Germany as well as Japan, where atomic weapons were used for the first and only time in war.
Someone needs to tell Netanyahu that the “total war” approach to conflicts in the past, to use historian John Dower’s phrase, is utterly unacceptable today. Biden said he replied to Netanyahu that international institutions had been established after World War II to ensure that such things didn’t happen again, but the message that indiscriminate attacks on civilians are unacceptable to the United States has obviously not been conveyed with sufficient strength or clarity to get Israel to change course.
What I wish to discuss here, though, is the relationship between language and future outcomes in this gruesomely murderous crisis, which must somehow be brought to a halt.
For all of the dudgeon-like furor directed at Gay and other university presidents last week on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., it is far from apparent that calls for genocide have been common on U.S. campuses. Nary an example was cited during the hearing that day. The phrase that seems to have served as a surrogate for that term—and which dragged the testimony in the direction of a Japanese-style fumi-e—seems to have been the Arabic word intifada.
Fumi-e was a term for a renunciation test that Japanese religious authorities used on foreigners in the 17th century. To prove that they were not practitioners of Christianity, a forbidden religion at that time, they were forced to trod on an image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary.
In the hearing, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican, seemed to use the word intifada in a similar manner. Saying that student protesters at Harvard had used slogans advocating for an intifada against Israel, she asked Gay whether such calls, which Stefanik asserted equated to calls “to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally,” violated Harvard’s code of conduct.
When Gay equivocated, citing freedom of expression, Stefanik pounced: “Your testimony today, not being able to answer with moral clarity, speaks volumes.”
There has been too little clarity about the meaning and implications of the word intifada, though. It derives from the Arabic verb nafada, which means “to shake off,” in the sense of shaking dust off one’s clothes, say, or shaking off lethargy. The word intifada, then, literally translates as a “shudder” or “shiver,” or when used in a political context, a “popular uprising.” It does not mean genocide.
The word intifada became familiar to newsreaders worldwide in 1987, when the term was used to describe a popular uprising mounted by Palestinians that year against Israel. That uprising, which lasted until the early 1990s and came to be known as the First Intifada, began as a largely peaceful protest movement involving acts of civil disobedience, such as strikes and boycotts, but it became more violent later on, partly in reaction to the harsh Israeli security response. According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, nearly 2,000 people were killed during the First Intifada, with the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths slightly more than 3-to-1.
The Second Intifada, which took place roughly from 2000 to 2005, was far more violent—Palestinian militants carried out more than 130 suicide bombings in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza between October 2000 and July 2005—as was its suppression by Israel. More than 4,300 people were killed, again with a ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths slightly more than 3-to-1. (In the current conflict, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths since Oct. 7 is a little less than 15-to-1, not including Palestinians killed in the West Bank.)
Neither of these uprisings came anywhere close to being genocides. With the conflation of intifada with genocide seemingly now well underway, though, the world must ask itself: What does it mean to say that the act of rising up, or civil uprising, by Palestinians is impermissible? Do we really mean to say that they should not be able to resist against a miserable, constricting fate that has locked large numbers of their people into hopeless lives in Gaza, or that they should resolve themselves to seeing lands in the West Bank that they once controlled and lived on steadily annexed by Israel while they increasingly come under violent attack? Does it mean that the Palestinians of Gaza must resign themselves to being bombed and starved out of their territory?
Most importantly of all, does it mean that Palestinians must be silent, abandon demands for a state of their own, and merely accept whatever Israel deems is sufficient for them? Have people who hold this view paused to think what avenues are open to Palestinians to object to such things? Can they imagine themselves, for an instant, accepting this?
Here, we offer ourselves a chance to recognize that we—meaning the international community—have become vastly more adept at spelling out what is proscribed for the Palestinians than saying what rights they should be permitted. And it is only through the act of defining positive rights for the Palestinians that I believe one can begin inching toward a solution for this long-lasting crisis.
It is normal for Israelis to want to live in peace, and I heartily support this. But it is time for those who wish Israel well to impress upon it—and I don’t mean in the gently, gently fashion of Biden and his senior foreign-policy team—that it is going way too far and that its excesses will not ensure the country’s security in the future.
On Tuesday, Biden warned Netanyahu that international support for Israel in its war against Hamas is at increasing risk because of Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza. But the rate at which Biden is finding the appropriate message and the voice to use it is lagging woefully behind the grim realities of this crisis.
It is not just the international community’s patience with Israel that is at stake. It is the United States’ credibility and reputation both in this crisis and more broadly.
As Peter Beinart, the editor at large for Jewish Currents, warned on Tuesday, Biden is “not just a political commentator, he’s the president of the United States,” and if his—and Israel’s—course on Gaza doesn’t change, Biden’s “legacy is going to be American complicity in this historic slaughter and the destruction of the very international norms that [he] staked [his] presidency on.”
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