Slogans. Once, a succinct expression of goals or aspirations (“Proletarians of all countries, unite!” or “No Taxation Without Representation”), they became a much more ambiguous affairs lately. Especially when we are talking about a pretty complicated matter, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Slogans are the key in the battle for the public opinion, an integral part of this war. The art of sloganeering requires that the slogans are open to interpretation, and mean different things to different people (and peoples). I would like to look at a few of them here, as seen on protests splashing on the streets here and there.
Ceasefire Now. If you asked me how to interpret this slogan, I’d say that it appeals to our repulsion of horrors of war, and asks the aggressor, the party that started the war1Gaza government, in case you didn’t know., to stop fighting, to disband their military and to release the hostages. That would with certainty stop any kinetic actions, stop the horror of civilians dying and suffering, and could be a start of a (difficult and painful) road to a two-state solution.
This, however, is not how Ceasefire Now is normally interpreted. Normally, the slogan is used to call for Israel to stop its military operations and to withdraw from the Strip. The pressure to stop the deadly march of the war is applied squarely to the Israeli side (and to the US government, to end any support of the Jewish state).
Of course, it is hard to expect that such a ceasefire would last: after all, the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 broke a previous ceasefire of May 2021, which stopped the hostilities started by Hamas breaking an earlier ceasefire, which,… and on and on can we go, all the way to the takeover of Gaza by Hamas in 2007. So, probably this is not what the “Ceasefire Now” (often formulated as “Permanent Ceasefire Now”) slogans ask for.
Calling on just one party of an armed conflict to stop, calling to end any support of that party, while ignoring continuing attacks by the other party amounts to taking sides in the war. The slogan Ceasefire Now, as it is used, asks to weaken the Israeli side, and to help the Gaza one. This slogan is not about ending this war quickly; it is about this war not ending on Israel’s terms.
So, the Ceasefire Now protesters want the Palestinian side of the conflict to win. What the win will achieve, – this is presumably captured by the next slogan: Free Palestine.
Freedom, as we know, is a loaded notion. Still, we probably can recognize one when we see it. To me, Free Gaza is Gaza without Hamas, but I am not sure that that is what the slogan means to those raising it.
What does the victory (or at least some kind of survival for the current Gaza government2which they will, inevitably, call the victory, as they do whenever yet another ceasefire is achieved, the natural outcome of the Ceasefire Now call) mean, in terms of freedom? Not much, at least for Gaza citizens. The Gaza Strip is governed by one party. They had no elections for the past 17 years, understandably so: the territory is in kind of permanent civil war and the rulers developed a habit to resolve political disagreements by pushing its opponents off the rooftops. Blasphemy is criminalized, and the media are not allowed to mention inconvenient facts, like fatalities happening on construction sites of the tunnel network, or caused by misfired rockets. In sum, one can assume that life under Islamic Resistance Movement or Palestinian Islamic Jihad is not what the people chanting Free Palestine really want for Palestinians of the Strip3although, caution is needed: it might be that their image of Palestinians is a Norman Rockwell-ish caricature of checkered scarfs wearing huddled masses permanently peacefully protesting in front of Israeli tanks..
And indeed, one can feel that merely cementing the rule of the current government over the people of Gaza Strip is not all the sloganeers want. The abundance of calls for the Right to Return and Decolonization indicates that their ambitions go much farther.
How much farther can be seen in one of the most frequent slogans, From the River to the Sea. It asserts that whichever polity will be established in the end, it will be one and only, from the Jordan valley to the Mediterranean Sea. Out there the idea of a single state on the territory of the ex-mandate Palestine is shared primarily by the theocratic politicians: the extreme right in Israel and, well, the dominant party in Gaza. The program of that party states openly that Palestine “is an integral territorial unit” and is “an Arab Islamic land.” It also “rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
We surely can agree that the Western crowds chanting From the River to the Sea don’t do it to support Ben Gvir and Smotrich. This leaves us with the inevitable conclusion: they support the goals of the Gaza governing party, of obliterating the Jewish state (democratic, if imperfect; diverse, culturally, ethnically, and politically; liberal in policies and lifestyle) and setting up an Islamic one (modeled, perhaps, on the current Hamas political practices) in its place, and beyond.
Now, how does one dismantle a strong vibrant modern state, one might ask? What are the mechanisms to achieve that? It would be a stretch to expect from our crowds of protesters a thought-out program of political, economic, diplomatic efforts needed to achieve such a goal by peaceful means.
In lieu of that we have the slogan Resistance is not Terrorism (and its versions).
As ever, the meaning of this slogan is not what it says: that something with noble connotations (La Résistance etc) is not something we all abhor (Terrorism).
What the slogan asserts is, quite clearly, a different message: that the acts of the Islamic Resistance Movement and Palestinian Islamic Jihad might look bad (and called Terror by the Western sold-outs to Israel), but are, in fact, justifiable as the Resistance (to something that is even worse than rape and murder).
The blatant simplicity of this message not only whitewashes the intentional horrors inflicted on Israeli civilians whenever Gaza militants can reach them.
It also answers, how the goal of the integral Islamic unit from the River to the Sea will be achieved: by the kind of resistance we saw on October 7, 2023.
Taken together, the slogans we see in those peaceful protests form a remarkable chain of political statements. They call to abandon the support for Israel, a free country in a war it did not choose. They call to enable a theocratic, illiberal regime, to cement its rule over Palestinians. More, they call to support the takeover by this regime over the territory of Israel by violence (as long as it is called resistance).
If they mean it,4and I would be last to underestimate the ability of crowds to be totally oblivious to what they are agitating for I think they owe it to themselves, to introspect: why they chose specifically the Jewish state to weaken in the raging conflict, never ever calling out its opponent’s militaristic, violent strategy and tactic. Are they indeed so eager for Israel to lose that they want Hamas to win?
That’s quite some Free Palestine to fight for.