By Kaitlyn Hashem
During the last 14 months, a period straddling two academic years, college students across the country have adopted intifada as a slogan in their protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. Meanwhile, reporters and opinion writers have filled the pages of major publications with varying interpretations of the Arabic word, which has come to mean “uprising” but stems from the root of “shaking off.” Accordingly, data from LexisNexis shows that, from October 2023 to October 2024, the word intifada appeared in U.S.-based news sources more than 3,600 times, as compared to just over 1,000 times in the year preceding the Hamas attack on Israel and the start of the Jewish State’s retaliatory campaign, which has led to the deaths of over 40,000 people in Gaza.
When undefined, inaccurately defined and insufficiently defined in this expanded coverage, intifada has taken on the taint associated with other Arabic-language terms such as Allahu Akbar, sharia, bismillah and jihad. Ever since the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, these words have come to constitute a commonly understood yet narrowly defined glossary of terrorism in the English-language media.
This general ambience of threat surrounding Arabic might partly explain why, a month into the current war, CNN credulously broadcast the claims of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as it purported to provide evidence that Hamas might have used the facilities of a Gaza hospital to hold Israeli hostages. In one clip, a military spokesperson pointed to a piece of paper taped to a wall in the hospital’s basement, asserting that it was “a guardian list where every terrorist writes his name, and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here.” In reality, the Arabic words on the paper were names of days of the week organized in a calendar format that began on October 7, under the header “Al Aqsa Flood,” which is the title that Hamas gave to the attack. However, the spokesperson’s explanation about a “guarding list” appeared in a CNN report without a fact check regarding the substance of the Arabic text.[I] This portion of CNN’s “exclusive look on the ground in Gaza”–which occurred under escort of the IDF–was evidently intended for an audience illiterate in Arabic, the zoomed-in camera shot of the calendar positioning the Arabic letters as an appropriately ominous prop.
Indeed, in the aftermath of the violent Hamas raid of October 7, 2023, the role of translated – and mistranslated – Arabic in weaving and buttressing journalistic narratives has come to the fore. And beyond the realm of explicit mistranslation exists a hazier category of journalistic malpractice that relates to the presentation of stand-alone Arabic words and phrases in English-language accounts.
Less than a month after the war began, the New Yorker published an article titled “The Hamas Propaganda War,” which opened with an analysis of an eerie video clip circulated online. The video footage showed Hamas fighters interacting with Jewish children at a kibbutz that Hamas had just ravaged. One scene featured a fighter coaxing a young boy into saying bismillah, which, as the authors pointed out, is the Arabic phrase that translates to “in the name of God.” The New Yorker authors, despite continuing to refer to the footage as “the bismillah video” throughout the article, offered no further explanation of the term, which, in fact, is used daily by Muslims across the world to dignify a diverse variety of mundane and sacred undertakings. By ignoring the commonplace nature of bismillah and seeding the impression that the word itself is central to the clip’s sinister nature, the article presented bismillah as a Hamas word – radical, creepy, and as the article’s title suggested, a statement of propaganda.
By early May, while U.S. universities braced for disruptions to commencement ceremonies as a result of anti-war protests, a report about the word intifada that aired on CBS was dominated by the personal definition offered by just one interviewee: “Intifada is bloodshed.” A few days later, a writer for the Atlantic declared that even “at its most innocuous,” intifada “still implies violence.” The article went on to call out the “menace implicit” in an Arabic variation of “From the River to the Sea” without mentioning the fact that the slogan has also been embraced by some Israeli political actors, including the Likud party in its original platform. Around the same time, an opinion piece in the New York Post – a publication long known for sensationalized coverage and right-wing politics – synthesized the feelings of many critics in the most direct way possible: “College idiots calling for ‘Intifada’ have no idea how many innocents have died from that word.” According to this reasoning, words themselves, rather than the political realities in which they have arisen, are the source of violence.
To be certain, while intifada literally means “shaking off,” the term is most prominently associated with two periods of Palestinian revolt against Israeli control. In much of the coverage mentioned above, this distinction is presented as a taunting gotcha-style response to those who might defend the usage of the word as a protest slogan on the basis of its etymology. However, among Palestinians and movements standing in solidarity with them, these two facts are not alternative descriptors. Rather, the appellation assigned to the two uprisings represents the concept of “shaking off” being applied to the Palestinian political situation.
The First Intifada, which broke out in 1987, started as a grassroots popular uprising, and was met with harsh Israeli violence. Between 1987 and the launch of the Second Intifada in 2000, approximately 1,500 Palestinians and 400 Israelis were killed. The Second Intifada, following the breakdown of the peace process initiated after the First, was bloodier and characterized by Palestinians’ usage of tactics such as suicide bombings, in addition to further Israeli repression. By 2005, thousands more had been killed, with Palestinian deaths again significantly outnumbering Israeli deaths.
Some coverage of the current war and the protests it has inspired across the U.S. quotes activists and their critics’ use of expressions such as “Globalize the Intifada” and “Intifada Revolution” without providing any such context for readers. Reporters mention banners and signs emblazoned with the Arabic word as self-explanatory symbols, often listed in articles alongside checkered keffiyehs and tents as the natural accoutrements of tense pro-Palestine protests. Referring to Arabic words without offering an accompanying translation is a lazy method employed by journalists intent on setting a scene without actually interrogating it, and readers are left with a nebulous tangle of associations.
This approach has benefited politicians determined to advance their own definitions of Arabic terms. In December 2023, during a hearing about antisemitism on college campuses held by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, the Republican representative Elise Stefanik defined that “intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict” is “a call for violent armed resistance against the State of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.” Stefanik then demanded that the three testifying university presidents – representing Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania – condemn student protest chants on the basis of her invented definition. The congresswoman’s challenge prompted equivocating answers, which, in turn, provoked enormous pressure from university donors and the swift resignation of two of the university presidents questioned by Stefanik.
The journalist Daoud Kuttab and other discerning commentators drew attention to Stefanik’s definitional sleight-of-hand. Yet her claims went largely unchallenged in a number of reports about the hearing, including a New York Times article that transcribed Stefanik’s remarks verbatim without correcting the meaning she assigned to intifada, instead describing the back-and-forth she instigated as “contentious” and “pointed.”
Other flawed formulas for reporting on Arabic words take a both-sides approach to the task of defining, with journalists quoting the thoughts of two dueling parties – usually pro-Palestine protesters and supporters of Israel. In such coverage, the reporter often does not intervene with an actual definition of the term. Rather, meaning is portrayed as a matter of opinion and a byproduct of insinuation. A New York Times article about political tensions at Harvard exemplifies this style. Describing the university’s “deeply divided campus,” the reporters cited “the fears of many Jews, who say certain slogans used by pro-Palestinian demonstrators – like “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” – are antisemitic and a call for violence against them.” In the next paragraph, the article, without offering any meaningful explanation of the aforementioned Arabic word, simply moved on to the reflections of another student, who said: “We’re all using different definitions of the same word. Giving the benefit of the doubt to my peers, my faculty and my community is really important.”
The reporters made no attempt to parse these “different definitions.”
Meanwhile, activists and Arabic speakers have advanced a corrective narrative for years to broaden the public’s understanding of words closely associated with terroristic violence in the news media. A collection of rebuttals to widespread overgeneralizations has proliferated, even as these interventions have seemingly negligible impact on the tone of the most prominent coverage: Uprisings against Arab governments have been called intifadas, too. Jihad signifies different forms of struggle, including internally with one’s self. Allahu Akbar, an exceedingly common invocation of the Almighty, might be exclaimed by a group of anxious soccer fans during a match. Since October 7, individual journalists and organizations like Respond Crisis Translation, a coalition of translators and interpreters, have published extended discussions of Arabic words of relevance to the war in Gaza.
Moreover, as with any area of specialized knowledge, journalists’ coverage of Arabic words is strengthened by the inclusion of expert perspective from scholars and translators. A piece about campus turmoil broadcast by NPR in June provides a constructive model. Reporting about the usage of the word intifada from Columbia University, the site of arguably the most visible pro-Palestine protest movement at any American campus, the NPR reporter cited the opinion of a Jewish student in addition to an interpretation offered by a Palestinian American student. Yet the reporter also quoted, at length, a professor of Arabic studies, who provided historical, political and etymological context about the word.
It is, of course, unrealistic to expect journalists to understand the nuances of each foreign language they might encounter in their reporting. However, because of the sizable corpus of Arabic terms animating political discourse, journalists should seek to report on Arabic words more comprehensively, imparting information about the structures of the language and the diversity in usage of words already laden with substantial political baggage. Taking this care is especially important, as organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, traditionally viewed as a legitimate source for journalists, proffer misleading pronouncements in the context of the current war.[ii]
Handling Arabic vocabulary ethically does not require already knowing the language before a reporting project. Moreover, an ethical approach does not, as the Harvard student quoted by the New York Times suggested, demand that a reporter extend “the benefit of the doubt” to sources using particular words. Knowing, living and absorbing the realities of a catastrophic war in another language are not sensations that can be transmitted easily to the uninitiated. But good journalism should be as immersive as possible.
In a media resource guide published in 2023, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association urged newsrooms covering the aftermath of October 7 to “remember the broader context of Palestinian-Israeli relations,” including the fact that, according to international law, Israel occupies Palestinian territory, and Palestinians are subject to a “separate and unequal system of law, rules, and services.” This advice should also apply to the linguistic context that defines the Palestinian experience. The word intifada, for instance, is just one term in a Palestinian political vocabulary, which includes words like nakba, the original “catastrophe” of 1948 that resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians upon the creation of the state of Israel; the naksa, or “setback” of the 1967 War; and al ihtilal, the occupation.
There is some evidence that the word nakba has begun to pierce the broader English-language media landscape, as Palestinians and their supporters have narrated their experience of the war in Gaza. According to a search of LexisNexis, between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2024, nakba – used by many Palestinians to describe not just the events of 1948 but also their ongoing plight—appeared in U.S.-based news sources more than 2,000 times, compared to 513 times the previous year. This jump represents a remarkable increase, especially considering the fact that the 75th anniversary of the nakba was commemorated in the period preceding the current war. This conflict, along with the First and Second Intifadas, did not break out in a political and linguistic vacuum. Moving forward, quality reporting on Arabic vocabulary should acknowledge this fact and make reference to the foundations of the language, including the roots system from which words are built.
As just one example, if journalists were to more seriously consider the roots of shaheed (“martyr” in English), another Arabic word often glossed over with sweeping generalizations, readers might be surprised to learn that the word’s root is associated with witnessing and attesting. Appropriately, the related noun istishhad can refer[iii] both to the act of martyrdom and the practice of citing sources when making a claim.
Kaitlyn Hashem is a writer, editor and recent graduate of Columbia Journalism School. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled “A Broken Plural: The Story of America’s Two-Century Encounter with the Arabic Language,” a narrative history of Arabic in the United States to be published by Bloomsbury.
[i] According to reporting published by the Huffington Post, the reference to the guard list was excised from other versions of CNN’s report. In a statement to the Huffington Post, a CNN spokesperson stated that the cut was made “purely for length,” adding that such changes were not uncommon. France 24 shared a complete fact check of the video: https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20231116-idf-claims-to-find-list-of-hamas-names-but-it-s-the-days-of-the-week-in-arabic.
[ii] In a November 2023 explainer titled “Stop and Think: Anti-Israel Chants and What They Mean,” the ADL defines “Globalize the Intifada” thus: “The chant is a reference to violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel, specifically acts of terrorism and indiscriminate violence against civilians by terrorist groups, including suicide bombings in buses and restaurants. This slogan has been chanted at anti-Israel rallies for years. Jews and Israelis hear this slogan as a call for indiscriminate violence against Israel, and potentially against Jews and Jewish institutions worldwide.”
[iii] See the definition here.