Protesting for Palestine without antisemitism

You are reading something written by the other side, and it is better to say so at the top than to have it discovered halfway down. This is a Jewish site that argues for Israel. We disagree with you about a great deal.

None of that is what this page is for. It is about four things people chant. It is not about Gaza, or the occupation, or who is right, and it is not going to sidle into those arguments later. They exist elsewhere here at length and you are welcome to them.

Almost everybody on a Palestine march is not antisemitic and would be appalled to be. That is the assumption running through all of this, and it is why the page was worth writing at all.

“Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud”

Begin with the one that is not a close call.

The chant in full is Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud, jaysh Muhammad sawfa ya’ud.

Translated: Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.

Khaybar was an oasis north of Medina, in what is now Saudi Arabia. In 628 its Jewish community was besieged and defeated by Muhammad’s forces, and its people were killed, subjugated or expelled.

Read the second line again, because that is the line that does the work. It does not name Israel. It does not name Zionists, or the government, or the army, or the occupation, or a settlement, or a border. It says ya Yahud. O Jews. And it is not a complaint about anything that has happened. It is a promise about what is coming.

There is no available reading in which the object of that sentence is a state. It was a battle cry against a Jewish community fourteen centuries ago, and it is in use now for exactly that reason.

If you have joined in with it, you may genuinely not have known. A great many people around you did not either. The person at the front who started it knew.

Ask that person what the second line means. Not us. Them.

“Globalise the intifada”

You will have been told that intifada simply means uprising, and that is true. It is the ordinary Arabic word, it means a shaking off, and anybody who tells you it means terrorism is wrong and can be shown to be.

The difficulty is the other word. An uprising is against the power that governs you. Nobody in Britain is governed by Israel. So the honest question, and it is a question rather than an accusation, is what a globalised version acts on where you live, and on whom.

The rest of it, including the dates and the death tolls of the uprising the word actually names, is at globalise the intifada. One fact from there, because it is the one that tends to stop people: the earliest recorded use of the phrase was at an antiwar rally in Washington in April 2002, three weeks after a bomber walked into a Passover dinner at a hotel in Netanya and killed thirty people. Middle East Eye established that, not us.

“Death to the IDF”

Chanted from the Glastonbury stage on 28 June 2025, and on marches since.

Military service in Israel is compulsory from the age of eighteen, for women as well as men.

That single fact changes what this chant is.

It means there is no Israeli family standing at a distance from the army. There is a cousin in it, or a nephew, or the girl who used to babysit, or somebody who came out of it eight months ago and is not sleeping. The Jewish person near your march is usually two phone calls from a teenager in uniform.

So when a field of people chants death to the IDF, what a family hears is not a criticism of a military doctrine. It is a crowd wishing death on a nineteen year old they had dinner with at Passover.

You may well mean the institution. It is worth knowing that no one has ever chanted “death to” an institution and been heard as talking about one.

The things you probably meant are all still available, and they are sharper:

• Stop arming Israel.
• End the siege.
• Not in our name.

Each of those names a policy and somebody who could change it. None of them names a teenager.

“From the river to the sea”

This one is genuinely contested, and you deserve to be told that rather than shouted at.

Many people chanting it mean equal rights for everybody living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and a Palestinian historian writing in The Conversation makes that case seriously and in good faith. A fair number could not put either the river or the sea on a map, which is not a criticism; most people cannot.

Here is what somebody who does know the geography hears. That territory is Israel, the West Bank and Gaza together, with no border in it: Tel Aviv, Haifa and West Jerusalem as well as Ramallah and Gaza City. So the words describe one sovereignty over all of it, and the sentence stops before saying what becomes of the seven million Jews inside it.

Every worked out programme ever published under that geography lands in the same place. The PLO’s, Hamas’s 2017 document, and Likud’s own founding platform of 1977 running in the opposite direction, all resolve into one state with one of the two peoples in it and without one.

You may not mean any of that. It is what the words locate. If you want to keep using them, have an answer ready to the question the chant leaves out: what happens to the people already living there who are not in your sentence.

The test for anything else you hear

Three questions, and they take four seconds.

1. Does it name Jews rather than a state, a government or a policy? Khaybar fails on this one alone.
2. Does it call for somebody to die rather than for something to change?
3. Would it still make sense if the Jews there were staying? If the honest answer is no, that is the whole objection, and it is not about tone.

What these cost you, which is the part we would say last if we were being tactical

Every one of these is filmed, and not by us. They are the clips that run on the evening news, that get read out in Parliament, and that arrive in the inbox of the MP you were trying to move. They need no editing and no context to do their work, and they are the only footage from your march that anybody outside it will ever see.

They also cost you the person who was nearly with you. Someone standing on the pavement, half persuaded, who hears a promise that an army is returning for the Jews and goes home. You will never know that happened, and it happens every weekend.

A cause with a real case does not need a chant about a seventh century massacre.

Before your next march

Four things, none of which requires you to change your politics by a single degree.

Learn the four. If a chant starts that you do not recognise, stay quiet until you know what the second line says. That costs nothing and it is the whole of the practical advice.

If you steward, decide in advance. Name the chants your event does not use, say it in the briefing, and give people a replacement. A steward who says “not that one, we’re doing this one” and starts something else is nearly always followed, because a crowd would rather be led than be right.

If it starts near you and you are not stewarding, do not argue with anybody. Start a different chant, loudly. Whichever chant is louder is the chant, and this works far more often than debating does.

Then say something to one person, quietly, afterwards. Not in the crowd, not online. Something like:

“Do you know what the second line of that one means? It says O Jews. It’s about a massacre in 628.”

“I didn’t know what it meant either until last week. Have a look at the second line.”

“I’m with you on Gaza. I’m not going to shout for a nineteen year old conscript to die.”

“If our case is right, we don’t need that chant. It’s the only bit of footage they’ll use.”

And the smallest version of all of it, if you take nothing else: find out what the second line means before you join in with the first.

Fifteen minutes, with a day on it. “Before the next one” is not a cue, because the next one arrives as a crowd already moving and you will not be reading anything. If it is tonight and the phone is already in my hand, then I will read the four second lines above until I can say what each one is about without looking, and pick the one chant I would be willing to start myself.

And if I get it wrong in front of people, which is the likeliest way this goes, then I will not defend the chant and I will not apologise at length. I will say “I didn’t know what the second line said” once, and go on marching, because nobody on either side of this is helped by somebody making it about themselves.