The Anti-Israel Protest Dictionary
Anti-Israel protest terms defined, A to Z.
The past few months have seen a surge in protest encampments on college campuses across the United States. These have spawned in response to the Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza, but go far beyond seeking an end to war – they instead seek an end to Israel as a nation and Israelis as a people. The protests have been violent, illegal, and violative of university rules, yet they have been praised throughout the media and the chattering classes, including by politicians on the progressive left. There are some solutions to these protests – including my modest proposal – but we must understand them while they remain operative. One of the ways these protesters – and leftists more generally – camouflage their true venom is to redefine terms to make them sound reasonable and benign. This came up recently on Twitter, when the word “intifada” (see actual definition below) was defined as merely “shaking off,” which is, I think, the definition of chutzpah.
In that vein, here is a glossary of terms that have shown up repeatedly at these protests and in the fawning media coverage of them. And these are the actual definitions of these words and phrases, not the invented benevolent or neutral meanings used by the left to hide their real intentions.
This is what the protesters and their media allies really mean when they use these terms.
Anti-Zionism: the idea that Israel should not exist as a nation-state, which would, in reality, mean the extermination or forced exile of millions of Jews
BDS: the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions movement that seeks to turn Israel into a pariah state and treats it uniquely bad compared to all other nations
Ceasefire: a Hamas victory that will result in far more future terrorist violence against Israel
De-escalate: the act of giving into the absurd demands of either student protesters or Hamas
Direct action: the act of protesters deliberately becoming violent to escalate the situation
Excessive force: the appropriate removal of student demonstrators who violate the law, often involving absolutely no injuries to the arrestees
Famine: the state of not starving to death while being flooded with food aid, when applied to Gazan civilians
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”: a common chant that calls for the forced removal of Jews from Israel – dead or alive – and the destruction of the world’s lone Jewish state
Genocide: the justified defensive response to a massive terrorist atrocity that has killed nearly as many terrorists as it has the civilians they deliberately endanger
Grassroots: professionally-organized, billionaire-funded, NGO-backed demonstrations undertaken by elite university students
Hamas: the good guys (in reality, an Iranian terrorist proxy seeking the genocide of Jews)
Hunger strike: intermittent fasting as a virtue signal
Imperialist: anything the West or a Western-aligned nation does (note: this can never apply to imperialism done by anyone else, especially not the Arabs who colonized the Levant)
Intifada: the violent terrorist mass murder of Israeli civilians in the late 1980s/early 1990s and the early 2000s and, in the context of the chant “Globalize the Intifada,” Jews across the world in the future
Jihad: the violent fight to kill or convert every non-Muslim to Islam
Keffiyeh: a cheap, ugly scarf bought on Amazon that was probably made by a Uighur Muslim slave in China
Liberation: the total elimination of Israeli Jews and the complete subsuming of the land under a totalitarian terrorist government
Martyrs: terrorists who died fighting to kill Israelis who seek to defend their people from unjustified assault
Nakba: the “catastrophe,” also known as the creation of the nation of Israel and the Arab loss in the existential war they launched in response
Occupation: Israel’s existence as a polity in any part of the land it controls
Peaceful protest: violent demonstrations, property damage, illegal encampments, forcible occupation of private property, and antisemitic actions
Pro-Palestinian: in favor of Hamas, its constant war against Jews, and the total destruction of Israel and its people; anti-Israel
Queers for Palestine: very stupid people who Hamas would very much like to murder
Resistance: any violent action, especially terrorism, against Israeli civilians
Settler: every single Israeli civilian, no matter where they reside in the land or how long they have lived there
War crime: every single action by the Israeli military, but definitely not any actions by Palestinian terrorists
“We don’t want two states, we want ‘48”: the common chant that declares that protesters want the total elimination of the nation of Israel and the entire land given over to Arab control
Zionists: Jews that would prefer not to be killed by Palestinian terrorists
This dictionary will be updated as new anti-Israel phraseology drops. If you have any suggestions for additions to the project, leave a comment below or drop me a line on Twitter @ratlpolicy.