In the empty spaces between the words...

Does "make America great again" signal a desire for a recovery of American self confidence and more products made in the United States, or a last clutch at a white supremacist social order? Either, or both, depending on who you ask. 

Does "defund the police" refer to a proposal to shift responsibility for social and mental health issues from the police, jails, and prisons, and redirect the associated funding to health and social service agencies, or does it mean disbanding all police agencies? It depends on who you ask; I have heard both interpretations of the slogan asserted with conviction.

Does the slogan "land back" mean Indigenous nations should have increased jurisdiction over resource development, land use, and environmental decision making within their traditional territories, or does it mean packing "white" people back to their place of origin?

 

Does the chant "from the river to the sea" call for a single, democratic, non-confessional state with room for all believers between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea? Does it mean a single Palestinian Muslim-majority state from which Jewish inhabitants, or most of them, have fled or forced to leave? Does it mean a single Jewish Israeli state from the Mediterranean, as a Likud slogan has advocated, or even beyond the Jordan, as some advocates of "Biblical Israel" claim?

Simplistic slogans, policies reduced to rhyming couplets or a 140 character micro-blog postings have the disadvantages of their advantage: they allow large numbers of people to coalesce around an issue without needing a clear idea of what they want. Three people can chant side by side in a demonstration without ever knowing if they want the same thing, or if what they each want could ever fit into a consensus any government could turn into a policy. This allows large crowds to gather and passionately advocate, even if they cannot change their advocacy into action. Indeed, demonstrators can, and sometimes do, march and chant with little or no idea of what the rhymes and chants mean.

Demonstrations without a clear and actionable program to advocate have a void at their center, and opponents will gladly fill that space with their own claims about what the demonstrators advocate. Supporters of Israel have lost no time advancing their own definition of "from the river to the sea": The former British home secretary Suella Braverman described the slogan as "widely understood as a demand for the destruction of Israel... Attempts to pretend otherwise are disingenuous.” This phrasing bears some analysis, because the two parts of the statement, while literally true, leave a misleading impression. Many people do indeed interpret the slogan as a call for the destruction of Israel, and indeed, it does strongly imply a call for fundamental change in the nature, or at least to policies, of the Israeli state. That does not mean all, or many, or even any of the people chanting this slogan advocate expelling the Jewish population from the current state of Israel. Adding the phrase "attempts to pretend otherwise are disingenuous" suggests the phrase has a universally agreed upon meaning, a single meaning the diverse political entities that have used the phrase could obviously never agree on. While Ms. Braverman could obviously not have read the intentions of the demonstrators from one ambiguous slogan, her tweet does make one true statement: many people find the demonstrations and the chant intimidating, because they fear the demonstrators advocate for the most extreme meaning of the slogan.

I believe unclear slogans do more harm than good. The drawbacks range from a lack of clarity, a lack of any real program or coherent demand, to the ability of opponents to attack the most extreme interpretation of the slogan; these more than cancel any advantage derived from a widespread apparent consensus. Since I certainly believe I have the obligation to bear witness to my beliefs in public, and since I, with ten thousand people in the street, can hardly read out a detailed manifesto together, I have three suggestions for the organizers of any demonstration.

 

First: if you organize a demonstration where you expect participants will use an ambiguous slogan, agree on what you mean by it, and what you expect participants to mean, and  publish a clear statement with the meaning. Even better, avoid slogans with multiple meanings, especially when some of those meanings call for ethnic cleansing. 

 

Second: have a specific goal. No public demonstration the power to fix everything about an issue. A demonstration that leads a government, business, or person to do something or stop doing just one thing has managed a greater success than the vast majority of marches, sit-ins, or pickets. In relation to the unfolding strife in Southwest Asia, demonstrators have no shortage of specific actions to demand. All but a few extremists can agree to a demand to feed the children of Gaza. A call for negotiation not retaliation, while more controversial in some quarters, might well save many Israeli as well as Palestinian lives. A demonstration with a limited goal such as these might or might not succeed, but it at least has a focus on an actionable demand.

Finally, remember to follow the first rule of medicine: don't make things worse. Demonstrations matter. They have a greater purpose than simple self expression or a release of anger. They aim to stand in solidarity with communities, often deeply traumatized and profoundly divided communities. If a demonstration hardens opposition without serving any other purpose, it has done the opposite of what a demonstration ought to accomplish. Going further: if wording a chant or slogan in one way leads to confusion, pain, and hostility, it makes sense to choose words with a clear meaning.