Since the acceleration of the Zionist entity’s genocide, we’ve seen lots of debate about language and terminology. It’s a common kind of debate, usually more annoying than enlightening, especially when it occurs among thought-leaders in the Anglosphere. As Gaza suffers incalculable horror, a parade of sophisticates has decided that it’s of paramount importance for Palestinians to look presentable. Their interventions are the intellectual equivalent of a grandparent insisting that if you die in a car crash it’s important to be wearing clean underwear.
“From the river to the sea,” “the Zionist entity,” and “genocide” have drawn the most heat, the first one particularly. There’s also some grumbling about “intifada” and putting “Israel” in scare quotes, done to suggest that the country is illegitimate.
We tell stories or allude to a deeper politics every time we deploy a term redolent with connotation and every time we select among competing (or complementary) vocabularies. There’s no getting around it. We will always debate word-choice because word-choice represents ideology.
Sometimes, though, the debates are manufactured in bad faith. Take the phrase “from the river to the sea.” It was never controversial among Palestinians. Zionists turned it into a national issue through manipulation and misinterpretation. There is no reason for Palestinians to debate its use, then. It’s part of our vocabulary. Zionists need not like it. In fact, it’s better if they don’t.
The same is true of “the Zionist entity.” It can sound clunky because it is an Arabic term translated into English, but some Anglophone Arabs (myself included) have maintained its usage as a form of rejection. The term is disrespectful in just the right measure and implies that “Israel” is a temporary phenomenon haunted by something older and more lasting. It evokes Palestine even when describing the occupier.
Using “the Zionist entity” won’t liberate Palestine and it has some history of abuse among preening Arab politicians. Still, there’s something to be said for these gestures of refusal. They keep the idea of Palestine alive. The nation cannot come into formal existence if it dies in the imagination.
Liberal Zionists across the professions view this approach as offensive or unproductive, but I’m not interested in unsolicited sermons about effective outreach from a community whose entire brand is to be annoying.
The most important thing to remember is that Zionists create the ambivalence which supposed anti-Zionists then take up as an intellectual exercise. “From the river to the sea” was never considered violent or racist in the Palestine solidarity movement. “The Zionist entity” wasn’t in much use until recently—it has a long history in Arabic—and is still pretty uncommon. It’s had a growth in popularity concurrent to the rejection of accommodationist discourses that once dominated the Anglophone left. As Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims forced their way into those discourses, they drew from linguistic and philosophical traditions that best expressed their viewpoints.
Now this language is being criminalized in the United States and Germany. Politicians in both countries (among others) seek to persecute any expression of anti-Zionism, which is exactly the purpose of all the outrage about “from the river to the sea.” So ask yourself: was it worthwhile to validate the controversy just to play the role of Reasonable Intellectual on the internet?
No matter how you feel about the utility or effectiveness of certain phrasing, it’s critical to remember that when it comes to Palestine, language itself doesn’t create perceptions of incivility; a built-in perception of incivility underlies disgust for the language. All of our speech acts are objectionable if their demand is freedom. Our putative saviors who keep instructing us to be nicer don’t oppose bad optics; they oppose Palestinian liberation.
I don’t want to hear anything about appealing to a neutral audience, either. The “average Joe” or “fence-sitter” or whatever is nothing but a convenient myth. He doesn’t exist. He is a bugaboo invoked as a pretext for dissimulation.
Keep digging and you’ll find that the lectures about appealing to an everyman are fundamentally racist. This mythical creature to whom we must appeal isn’t disembodied. He has a physiology, an identity, a nationality, an economic class. He already has a politics, as well. He is a cipher for the unstated tenets of U.S. exceptionalism that underlie notions of mature and pragmatic communication. This creature must be identified, appeased, gratified, or else we forfeit access to the public sphere. When the creature comes up in conversation, we’re not being invited into dialogue. We’re being told to stand down.
My point isn’t to advise you which vocabulary to use or avoid. Speak as you desire. We all have a unique relationship with language. My point is to caution against pretending that the terrain is neutral. Certain terms and phrases aren’t viewed as crude based on some timeless metric for appropriate locution, but on ideological criteria that are inherently hostile to Palestinians. We will always be perceived as uncivil because the demand for freedom is disagreeable to power. Conveyance of the demand is incidental. Never think for a single moment that Zionists—and, by extension, the mythical fence-sitters who inevitably default to Zionism—will accept less than our complete disappearance.
Yes, one of our jobs in the Anglosphere is to persuade and we have to acknowledge certain realities about Western attitudes even if we don’t like them. We constantly adjust our diction to accommodate these realities, pretty much every time we open our mouths. It’s incredibly tiresome.
But what about responsibility to our own community, to our sisters and brothers in Palestine, to people around the world who choose not to adapt their language to bourgeois sensibilities? Don’t we owe them the courtesy of accurate representation? Shouldn’t they be our main priority?
Why do they never seem to enter into the calculation?
There it is, right?
Always the same goddamn problem.
And where are the obligations for people in the Anglosphere? Their countries are funding the Zionist genocide. Their countries are treating good people like criminals. Their countries are stealing resources from the Global South. Maybe they can try reflecting on their discomfort. Maybe they can quit being so uptight. Or maybe for once they can shut up and listen.
When somebody lectures Palestinians about our ways of speaking, always ask: who is the audience? The Palestinians or the sophisticates who long ago decided that Palestinians don’t deserve anything of our own, not even a language?
All of the words are chosen carefully and to minimize hasbara is very dangerous. There is a reason they use settler, prisoner and arrested instead of colonizer, hostage and kidnapped. The one that gets me is “fought in the War of Independence” – independence from whom?? How can a colonizer and terrorist be also resisting colonization and oppression? They can’t! So much of Zionism is created on delusions – of victimhood, of grandeur, of [white] saviorism, of righteousness etc. It’s maddeningly obvious and pervasive once you decolonize your mind from all the brainwashing.