During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of CNN International’s “Amanpour,” Mahmoud Khalil defended “from the river to the sea” chants and “globalize the intifada” chants because the First Intifada and the Second Intifada were “largely a mass civil resistance against Israel[i] apartheid and Israeli occupation,” and “intifada is simply a word for uprising.”
Khalil said people chant “from the river to the sea” “because language matters, history matters. And from the river to the sea is a call for justice, for freedom for all people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Unfortunately, the pro-Israel camp in this country and around the world, they would rather deliberately misrepresent this slogan. Because, for them, to cancel speech is easier than actually engaging and reflecting on this speech.”
He continued, “And I even would go, like, further with the globalize the intifada that, now, the whole country is mad about. Globalize the intifada, we have to take it within [its] context, because globalize the intifada is a call to globalize solidarity in the world. The intifada is simply a word for uprising. And I don’t want to give a history lesson now about like what intifada, like, First Intifada and Second Intifada were, but were largely a mass civil resistance against Israel[i] apartheid and Israeli occupation, whether in the ’90s or early 2000. So, this, again, goes with the fact that what we should be worried about is the bombs that are killing people, rather than the chants that are making some people uncomfortable.”
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