[On 5 December 2023, the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing they titled "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism." The hearing featured presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT responding to a range of question. In what was a signature moment that revealed both the intention and approach of the hearing, committee member Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asserted that “the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the State of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.” Such an assertion echoed broader attempt to recast Palestine solidarity in general and specific phrases and terms in particular as calls for “the genocide of Jews.” Ziad Abu-Rish, Jadaliyya Co-Editor, interviewed Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program at Arab Center Washington DC, to learn more about when, how, and why such an attempt at reframing long-used terminology in the Palestine solidarity movement as “calls for genocide” are being deployed.]
Ziad Abu-Rish (ZAR): Before we talk about this particular moment and strategy, what can you tell us about the broader history of how terminology from Palestinian history and within the Palestine solidarity movement is understood or policed in the US context?
Yousef Munayyer (YM): In a lot of ways, this is part of bigger processes that are simultaneously operating and have been for a very long time: (1) the dehumanization of Palestinians along the lines of longstanding colonialist tropes; and (2) the specific practice of deliberately mistranslating Palestinian/Arab/Muslim language and culture to suit racist agendas. A little on both of these things is in order. The first, the dehumanization of Palestinians, is not limited to Palestinians. Rather, it has operated for decades and falls along the lines of colonial tropes we are familiar with: They are barbaric; they are unreasonable; they are violent; and, most importantly, they are this way because of who they are. Thus, the only language they understand is force and ultimately they will benefit from our effort to civilize them. This logic is used to justify the worst atrocities. Second, the specific practice of mistranslating language and culture, is not new either. There is an entire genre of literature (if we must call it that) that can be summed up as non-Arabic speakers telling other non-Arabic speakers "the real meaning" of Arabic terms.
Intifada is but one of these, but this also isn't limited to the Palestine context. Madrasa, Sharia, and more—there are many examples. Central to this practice is the belief that the sneaky and barbaric Arabic speakers conceal the true meanings of their language. This both reinforces and is reinforced by the first process we identified (i.e., longstanding and consistently operating colonialist tropes about the innate barbaric nature of the colonized). It is important to note that this is not limited to the mistranslation of language—it includes the mistranslation of culture.
ZAR: Could you give us a few examples?
YM: When Palestinian babies are martyred by Israeli bombs, the very concept of martyrdom is twisted by self-appointed mistranslators as a love of death or even a desire to seek death for propaganda purposes. Alternatively, when US television personality Rachael Ray, years ago, appeared in a Dunkin Donuts commercial wearing a paisley scarf, she attacked for supporting terrorism because her scarf looked like a kaffiyeh. The commercial was pulled.
Underlying all of this is the refusal to actually listen to Palestinians. There are always others who get to tell people what our words mean, what our culture means, what our vision is, etc. And this follows from the first process we discussed. Remember, the barbarians can't speak for themselves.
The very concept of barbarian comes to us from ancient Greeks who used the term to refer to non-Greek speaking people whose languages sounded like gibberish to them, bar-bar-bar. Inability, or unwillingness to understand the other’s language has always been tied to dehumanization.
ZAR: Is what happened in the Congressional hearing and the broader discussions parallel to it a direct continuity of these dynamics or something else more related to the current moment at play as well?
YM: There are much more proximate reasons that I will get into. But it is important to start with this history because it is this broader context that shapes and informs the strategy I am about to discuss. If I had to point to one key moment that is most important in recent years, it is the fall of 2015. This moment was a consequential one in Israeli government policy.
For years, before this, the Israeli government was struggling to respond to dissent in global civil society against its treatment of Palestinians. It was much better at blowing up houses than destroying arguments against Apartheid. Israeli policymakers saw global civil society dissent growing and believed that their approach to dealing with it was failing and that they had to shift gears.
Israeli policymakers ultimately concluded that trying to defend their policies was not working. Importantly, they never concluded that this was because something was wrong with their policies, rather because something was wrong with dissenters. So they adopted a shift in policy that they referred to as moving "from defense to offense". In other words, instead of trying to defend their policy from global criticism, they adopted a policy of attacking the critics.
This policy shift was formalized into Israeli government machinery in the fall of 2015 with a mandate given to the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs. This agency's goal would be to figure out how to repress global activism. To do so, it partnered with a wide-ranging network of like-minded actors to advance repressive objectives, including things like anti-BDS laws in the United States and Europe. One of the problems they ran into, more in the United States than in Europe, was freedom of expression laws. In the United States this is the First Amendment, which is fairly robust. This was a problem for a couple of reasons. Along with anti-BDS laws getting successfully challenged in courts, the optics didn't help. It became counterproductive as even those who didn't necessarily care about Palestine still saw the repression effort as heavy-handed.
So how do you repress protected activity like speech and get around the First Amendment? The answer is: define the speech of those you are targeting as speech that doesn't merit protection (i.e., discriminatory or violence inciting speech). To do this, effectively and at scale, you need to institute a decoder—a framework that converts protected speech into non-protected speech. Enter the International Holocaust Remembrance Museum (IHRA) definition of Antisemitism.
Hegemonizing the IHRA definition became a major focus of the MSA and its network of partners, especially after 2019. Once institutions adopt the decoder, you can begin using it to demand enforcement. The specific examples included with the IHRA definition are vague enough as to potentially include all sorts of Palestinian expression and it enables smear campaigns that will keep mistranslators busy for a long time. There is no shortage of examples of how this alleged decoder can spin Palestinian speech into antisemitism. Let's deal with a few
Let's say you call for the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and villages. Since refugees returning would mean more Palestinians and less Jewish majoritarian control, that means you are denying the right of Jews to self-determination, therefore you can be accused of Antisemitism!
Let's say you call for equality before the law in Israel so it could be a state of all its citizens. Since that would mean an end to privileging Jews over Arabs that means you are denying the right of Jews to self-determination, therefore you can be accused of Antisemitism!
Let's say you call for an end to occupation, well now you are calling Jews occupiers in their homeland and therefore denying the right of Jews to self-determination, therefore you can be accused of Antisemitism!
Let's say you post a call for the Israeli government to be sanctioned for its human rights violations. Well, have you posted this for every country in the world? No, well that's a double-standard against Israel, therefore you can be accused of Antisemitism!
We can go on for a very long time, but readers get the point. The aim of this conversion device is to legitimize repression of dissent against Israel and to recruit, in the process, the law enforcement apparatuses of third countries to do the work.