The defence is not merely intellectually dishonest; it reveals why it is only words
is among the most dangerous sentences people permit themselves to believe.
As an Arabic noun, intifada does indeed possess an old, generic sense: a shaking, a dusting off. That is hardly unusual: holocaust once meant nothing more than a burnt offering; pogrom, in Russian, mere devastation; nakba, in Arabic, a misfortune ranging from mishap to calamity.
Words such as these begin life as ordinary common nouns. But each was claimed by a particular event: from 1945, the Holocaust; from 1987, the intifada. After that, the generic sense survives only in the dictionaries. It does not survive in the public mind.
Linguists call the process prototype entrenchment
. The mind, hearing a word, reaches for the most vivid, most repeated, most emotionally charged instance and treats that as what the word stands for. Once the historical event has acquired that role, the bare definition recorded in the dictionary can no longer be peeled away from the moral, emotional and political charge the word has come to convey. To hear "Globalise the Holocaust" in 2026 and think proliferate the supply of burnt offerings
is to misunderstand spoken English.
Struggles in the abstract
Exactly the same is true with intifada. Its prototype, in the global imagination, is not struggle in the abstract: it is two uprisings whose iconography, indelibly embedded by the violence that broke out in September 2000, includes suicide bombings of buses, restaurants and a Passover Seder. That is what the word now carries, not at its margins but as its core. The defender of Globalise the intifada
is in effect asking language itself to forget history. But human communication does not work that way.
The point is more general: a slogan is not a sentence, and the test of whether one has understood it is not whether one can render it in a dictionary gloss. It compresses an entire moral world - heroes, villains, demands, threats — into a phrase made for chanting, and succeeds by being two things at once: precise enough to be grasped, ambiguous enough to be denied.
Paul Grice, one of the 20th century’s most important linguistic philosophers, gave the manoeuvre its name: implicature, the part of communication that travels not by what one says but by what one obviously means. To remark I am not going to call him corrupt
is to inform the room that he is corrupt.
The structure is double-jointed: tested under cross-examination, the speaker retreats to what was literally uttered and accuses the critic of putting words in his mouth. The implicature does the work; the deniability provides the shelter. Globalise the intifada
provides a textbook case.
Internationalising the struggle
A public forum, called Why it’s right to say: globalise the intifada
, at a park in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, after City of Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore announced council had revoked the organisers' booking of City of Sydney-owned venue.
Pressed in a courtroom, the chant is glossed away as internationalise the struggle
. Chanted from a stage on a Saturday afternoon, it means burnt buses, bombed cafes, murdered children.
The audiences who hear it ∼ on both sides ∼ hear that second meaning with perfect clarity. A slogan that everyone really took to mean only internationalise the struggle
would hardly stir emotions; what does the stirring is precisely the violent imagery the speaker can also deny.
The genuinely dangerous moment, however, is not the slogan in isolation; it comes once the slogan begins to repeat.
Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist who retained his sanity during the Third Reich by recording its language in his diary, observed that the regime’s most powerful instrument was its vocabulary, not its decrees: a handful of words, drilled into daily life, did more to remake ordinary Germans than any speech. Fanatisch
, once unambiguously pejorative, became under repetition a term of praise.
Slaughter of millions of Jews
Aktion
became the bureaucratic veil behind which mass shootings disappeared — to incite an aktion was to incite the slaughter of millions of Jews, without actually saying so. Those shifts required no argument, only iteration.
Repetition is, in short, normalisation: hear a phrase once and it can shock; hear it for the 200th time and it has become part of the air we breathe. The extreme becomes ambient; the ambient, obvious; the obvious, embarrassing to question. Thus, each repetition of Globalise the intifada
wears the menace in rather than out. The cost of saying it falls while the cost of objecting rises. What was once unsayable becomes ever easier to say.
Repetition does its most lethal work, however, not on the solitary newspaper reader but on bodies in a crowd. Slogans are designed not to be murmured but to be chanted rhythmically in unison. Once a phrase enters a crowd, it ceases to function as communication and begins to function as synchronisation. Voices align, breath aligns, sometimes feet align. Individuals shed the small frictions of doubt and hesitation that, in private, would have given them pause.
Sociologists call this collective effervescence
and anyone who has been in a stadium at the right moment has felt it. What was an idea in a single skull becomes a felt fact across thousands. Disagreement is not refuted; in the passion of the moment it simply ceases to be available.
Pioneering scholars of mass behaviour
This is what the pioneering scholars of mass behaviour ∼ Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Elias Canetti ∼ meant by a crowd having a kind of mind
. Not a mind in the literal sense but something far more dangerous: a temporarily uniform attention, a uniform emotion and ∼ crucially ∼ a uniform sense of who is us
and who is them
. Slogans are the instrument that does the tuning: and they are, as Canetti observed in the rise of Nazi antisemitism, the tool that drills in the hatred.
Put these mechanisms together and the result is not innocent speech but the manufacture of an atmosphere. A word historically captured by a violent prototype, dressed up in a deniable paraphrase and chanted by bodies whose private hesitations have been switched off — that is the recipe by which a society talks itself into permission.
It tells one group who it is by telling it who its mortal enemy is. And it tells the other
∼ nowadays the Zios
∼ that they are no longer part of the moral community. It hardens the shouters against dialogue and compromise. And it thickens the air with the sense that violence, when it comes, will have been only the natural conclusion of what everyone already knew.
Slogans are innocent?
The historical record is unambiguous: where crowds are taught to chant a word that already names a massacre, the distance between word and violence, speech and act, never grows: it shortens.
The claim that slogans are innocent has always been a flattering one because it relieves us of the duty to attend to what is being said. It allows us to continue repeating comforting platitudes about freedom of expression. But words are not inert, and chanted words least of all.
Whatever else Globalise the intifada
may mean in the dictionary, what it means in the street is what we must be willing to hear. Pretending otherwise is not tolerance. It is how societies learn, slowly and without noticing, to live with the unforgivable.
