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IS "From the River to the Sea..." benign, or menacing? [1]

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Date: 2023-11-25

I recently read an interesting quote by John Keating. "No matter what anybody tells you, words can change the world".

This struck me as profound, although, I must say, that the "No matter what anybody tells you..." part seems to undermine the message. He's literally telling you not to listen to words because they are meaningless, before telling you how meaningful they are.

Maybe this is why when you look up John Keating on Wikipedia, it gives you listings for a sportscaster, hockey player and Scottish musician. There is no listing for "John Keating: Man who said really profound, internally consistent things that make sense".

Putting Mr. Keating aside...forever, I wanted to share a few thoughts about the controversial use of the phrase "From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free" used by pro-Palestinian protestors at their rallies.

Those sympathetic to Israel view these words as a call to eliminate the state of Israel at best, and perhaps even a call to genocide. And some pro-Palestinian protestors gleefully agree that this is in fact the intent of the phrase. If anyone doubts this, you have a long, exciting afternoon of YouTube viewing ahead of you!

Some on the Palestinian side however argue that there is no anti-semitic or even anti-Israel motive involved. They provide a much more benign interpretation, saying that the phrase is merely a call for universal freedom for all people on all of the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean sea. And who could be against that?

So who's right? What does the phrase mean, what is it's history and what do those chanting it see as the future of the Middle East?

Well, let's begin with the words themselves. I only remember two things from the "Statutory Interpretation" class I took in law school. The first is that Mindy, the adorable student who sat next to me definitely did NOT want to come over to my apartment to see my Peter Tosh record collection, and that absent any ambiguity in the language, the plain meaning of the text should control how it is interpreted.

In this case, the text does seem to provide some fairly powerful weight to the Israeli side of the argument. After all, a Palestine "from the river to the sea" doesn't leave a lot of room for Israel. None in fact.

And that is what the text says. "From the River to the Sea 'PALESTINE' shall be free". It does not say "we all shall be free" or "people shall be free". It doesn't even say that " Palestinians " shall be free. It says "Palestine", and unlike "Palestinians" who are people, "Palestine" is a place. It is the name of something that the people chanting it hope will be a fully sovereign country. And if "Palestine" as opposed to "Palestinians" shall be free in the entire space that now makes up Palestine and Israel, it does suggest that there will be no Israel. And it also suggests, less clearly perhaps, that there will also be no Jews, or at least that they will not share in the freedom being chanted about.

Moving beyond the text into the history, the case gets a bit murkier, but still, on the whole, not particularly reassuring to the Israeli people. Certainly, there are examples of political leaders who don't appear to have taken a particular shine to Israel's existence using it in ominous ways.

Let's take Hamas for example, These are the folks who unilaterally and brutally broke the then-existing ceasefire on October 7th, and are, let’s not forget, the elected government of Gaza.

They continue to use the phrase in a completely eliminationist way. I'm not talking about their original 1988 charter, which was, as they Jews might say, truly "meshugganah". I'm talking about their 2017 Constitution, where they were supposed to show the world the new and improved, moderate and reasonable Hamas. Just six years ago in that document, they said “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea,”.

Along those lines, Khaled Mashaal, the founder of Hamas has said “Palestine is ours from the river to the sea and from the south to the north,” although clearly, that's not as catchy to intonate en masse outside of the local Israeli consulate.

Hafez al-Assad, the former president of Syria would follow the use of the phrase with a very specific codicil of what "From the river to the sea" would look like. "We will only accept war and oust you into the sea for good". Other Arab leaders, from Gamel Abdel Nasser to Yasir Arafat have voiced similar ambitions at various times.

On the other hand, some Palestinian supporters point out that the phrase, which took root in the mid-1960s, predates many of its worst invocations. Yousef Munayyer, a scholar at the Arab Center in Washington DC makes an impassioned case for the phrase being nothing more than a call for universal human rights, and that the fear of the phrase can be traced to the Islamophobic notion that Muslims cannot be trusted to be both free and non-violent. Although nowhere in his treatise does Mr. Munayyer explicitly endorse the idea of Israel's continued existence.

What about those who are actually on the streets, today, doing the chanting?

Well, I haven't seen empirical data, but I'm sure views on the ultimate fate of Israel vary among the chanters. I have been disheartened by the number of people I've seen interviewed whose throats are sore from yelling so vociferously, but when asked questions don't know the first thing about the conflict. They may be all about "The river to the sea", but they can't for the life of them tell you which river and which sea they are yelling about, and would be unsurprised if told that Israel and Palestine were located in southern Nebraska. That it’s the cool cause of the day is all that matters to them.

This obviously doesn't represent all of the protestors, but even some who seem more informed about the basic facts grope for an answer as to what should happen with the state of Israel at the end of the current war. Of course, there are some who are very clear on this, and although it is not a statistically scientific sample, the majority do not seem sympathetic to Israel's continued existence, which lends credence to those who find the phrase in question threatening.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/25/2207956/-IS-From-the-River-to-the-Sea-benign-or-menacing?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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