From the river to the sea, do not try to gaslight me.

We know very well what this slogan means. Spare us your whitewashed and delusional apologia.

courtesy: Effie Deans/X

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay written by Elissa Wald of Never Alone.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Recently, I published a Facebook post that is getting some good traction. It said:

“Saying ‘From the River to the Sea’ means different things to different people, like saying the Confederate flag means different things to different people.”

I posted it because of statements like this recent one from Palestinian-American and U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib:

“From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.”

Well, Congresswoman, take that up with your friends in Hamas. And I say “friends” because Tlaib was in the tiny minority of House of Representatives who voted against a resolution to condemn Hamas after the October 7th massacre.

Hamas leader Khaled Mashal explained in a recent podcast exactly what “From the River to the Sea” means:

“First of all, we have nothing to do with the two-state solution. It is an unacceptable term, because it means you have some kind of a ‘promised state’ while you are required to acknowledge another state, the Zionist entity, recognize its legitimacy, and that is unacceptable. This is the enemy. I don’t want him.”

“For me, the position of Hamas, as well as the majority of the Palestinian people, especially after October 7th, there’s a renewal of the dream and hope: Palestine, from the river to the sea, from the north to the south.”

“Our Palestinian project, to which the vast majority of Palestinians agree, even those who have a different opinion and are forced to say it due to political circumstances, but the one thing most of the Palestinians agree to is that we must not give up our right to Palestine, from the river to the sea and from Rosh HaNikra (the very north of Israel) to Eilat (the very south of Israel). That is our Palestinian right.”¹

Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary to Britain during the decade of Israel’s inception, and no friend of the Jews, went to the British Parliament in February of 1947 to explain why Britain had succeeded in fulfilling the British Mandate for Palestine to create sovereign states in the Levant on behalf of the Arabs (with the creation of Transjordan and Iraq), but was failing to fulfill it on behalf of the region’s Jews.

“His Majesty’s government has come to the conclusion that the conflict in the land is irreconcilable,” he told them.

Bevin went on to explain that, in this land between the river and the sea, there were two groups, Jews and Arabs, and each of them had a cardinal priority. The cardinal priority of the Jews was to achieve self-determination within their own state, no matter how scant, and no matter how unyielding the land.

The cardinal priority of the Arabs was to prevent the Jews from having any parcel of land for a state, no matter how tiny or undesirable.

Please read the preceding sentence again and absorb it fully: The cardinal priority of the region’s Arabs was not to have their own state, but to prevent the Jews from having one, of any size, anywhere. That was true then and it is just as true now.

Keep in mind that there was no occupation, no blockade, no oppression, no checkpoints — for that matter, no State of Israel. But full-throttle opposition to Jewish self-sovereignty in any tiny island (and our indigenous homeland) within the Arab world was absolute nonetheless.

Indeed, nearly a full decade before Israel even achieved statehood, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met with Adolf Hitler to discuss joining forces against the Jewish scourge and making Jewish genocide a transcontinental undertaking.

There were dozens and dozens of horrifically vicious massacres of Jews by Arabs in the region long before Israel achieved statehood — and those massacres were just as gleefully sadistic as the atrocities of October 7th.

In the Western imagination, there was a beautiful country called “Palestine” where Palestinians lived in peace until Jewish imperialists from Europe came in and ethnically cleansed them from the region. These European imperialists then stole the land and declared it their own.

The truth is there has never in human history been a sovereign country called “Palestine.” The “Palestinian” identity is a recent construct created to describe regional Arabs who actively opposed the presence of Jews in the region. That’s right — read it again: It is an entire identity based on opposition to the region’s Jews.

There is no conceivable interpretation of “From the River to the Sea” that does not mean the eradication of Israel, the Jewish state.

Do not allow yourself to be gaslit on this front. Just as White supremacists will insist that the Confederate flag is about “Heritage, Not Hate,” there are plenty of people like Rashida Tlaib who claim it is a peaceful chant. But there is no angle from which it can be read that way, not even if you squint.

The Confederate flag is clearly an emblem of nostalgia for a time when White supremacy was enshrined as the law of the land. Similarly, Jews were second-class citizens — dhimmis in Arabic — throughout the Ottoman Empire for the six centuries preceding Israel’s inception. (The Ottomans ruled “Palestine” before the British.)

In accordance with their inferior status, the area’s Jews were subject to taxation without representation — a special tax just for them, known in Arabic as jizya.

They also had to follow a code of draconian rules. Jews had to defer to Muslims at all times. They could not own weapons. They could not ride horses or use a saddle. They could neither construct synagogues nor repair existing ones, and their prayers could not be audible to others.

They were banned from the military and from public offices. Their homes and houses of worship could not be as tall as those of Muslims. Jewish witnesses could not testify in court. And there were many other discriminatory laws meant to enshrine Jewish inferiority.

The phrase “Ottoman Empire” might sound like an ancient entity to those not versed in the history of the region. But in fact, it did not end until 1922 — long after Zionism had taken root as a dream.

And the region’s Arabs were no more in favor of accepting Jewish equality and self-determination than the Confederate South was in favor of accepting Black equality and self-determination.

All this is why I have a bedrock-level conviction that any reasonable person who truly understands the region’s history (as well as the whole geopolitical picture) cannot deny that Zionism is a deeply progressive value and liberal triumph.

It was really quite an extraordinary PR trick when Israel was (and still is) cast as the Goliath in this region.

That an infinitesimally tiny and universally persecuted minority who had just gone through the Holocaust managed, against all odds, to drive out the region’s British colonizers and resist the joint genocidal attack of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt was nothing short of miraculous.

That it has held its own in the region against 75-plus years of relentless violence is equally extraordinary.

And that fact remains a bone in the throat of too many of its neighbors — hence the dream of a Judenrein (German for “free of Jews”) “Palestine” from the river to the sea.

Spare us your whitewashed and delusional apologia for the slogan. We know very well what it means.

Am Yisrael Chai.

---

1. Shasha podcast