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.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is a funny thing about so-called “pro-Palestinian” slogans: When you invert them, they always seem to make a lot more sense.
Here are just a few examples:
1) ‘Save humanity. Free Palestine.’
Palestinian culture, an outgrowth of Arab and Muslim variants, can be described in three words: antisemitic death cult. There is nothing humane about Palestinians, as we so eloquently witnessed on October 7th — and this has always been the case.
All the way back in 1834, brutal riots known as the “Peasants’ Revolt” broke out in Ottoman-era Palestine. In theory, the revolt had nothing to do with Jews at all. It started because local Arabs (i.e. Palestinians) resented conscription duty to the Egyptian army. But when the governmental order was disrupted, the Jews immediately became its victims.
During the revolt, the rebels from the surrounding villages rioted against the Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed (the Four Holy Cities of Judaism). The evil acts that occurred in the Israeli towns around Gaza on October 7th took place there and then as well. Jews were murdered, beaten, and abused, and their property was looted and plundered — all preceded by incitement in mosques, just like in our times. The result was terrible destruction.
Many Jews’ homes were destroyed or set on fire. Jews who tried to find refuge in synagogues were beaten to death. The rioters took hundreds of Torah scrolls from the holy arks and disgracefully desecrated them in the streets. They also blocked the roads leading out, so that the Jews could not inform government officials, military forces, and foreign consuls about the pogroms.
At the time, there was no issue of “occupation” or “oppression” or even Zionism, nor any other vain excuses that felons try to use to explain their lust for murder to the naive. It was pure, unadulterated hatred of Jews.
Even just today, top Hamas official Khaled Mashaal called for a resumption of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israelis.1
Across the Palestinian Territories, such propaganda has been indoctrinated in children from very young ages, as they are taught the supreme value and various methods of killing Jews. In United Nations schools, mosques, and other government-sanctioned venues, they learn to glorify hatred and nurture violence. In “summer camps,” they teach kids how to fire automatic weapons and kidnap Israelis.
It was not by accident that former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said (all the way back in the 1970s):
“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
Meanwhile, in Israel, most Israelis celebrate life. We do not rejoice in war. We rejoice when a new kind of museum opens and when flowers bloom in the Negev. We fight wars as a matter of self-defense, not as a matter of ethno-religious tensions, imperialism, or other tumors of nationalism.
Therefore, if you really want to save humanity, free Israel.
2) ‘Ceasefire now!’
As long as Hamas is still operating as a governing and military apparatus in Gaza, the only thing a ceasefire will do is make Israel cease so the Jihadist, genocidal terrorist organization can still fire.
Anyone who tells you otherwise under the guise of “love and peace” and “the poor women and children” is either ignorant, naive, or pro-Hamas.
Indeed, Hamas has broken many ceasefires since its violent, oppressive rise to authoritarian control of Gaza in 2007 — while purposely creating conditions in Gaza that maximize Palestinian casualties which can then be broadcast across the West to gullible audiences who demonstrate superficial sympathy and aimlessly yell things like, “Ceasefire now!”
So long as Hamas is still operating Gaza, the more accurate slogan is: “Ceasefire never!”
3) ‘Jews go back home — Palestine is ours alone.’
Actually it was the Arabs from Arabia who immigrated to the territories known today as the State of Israel and, only in the 1800s, started calling themselves “Palestinians” (despite no sovereign territory known as “Palestine” ever existing).
And when Dr. Israel Kligler, a Jewish microbiologist, eradicated malaria from the region during the 1920s, many Arabs moved from other places in the Middle East to British-era Palestine. Local Arabs said that Zionists made the land “livable” and came to take advantage of new work opportunities provided by the growing population.
Even then, many Palestinians did not want their own state prior to Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. They wanted to be a part of “Greater Syria.” It was only after the State of Israel was established that Palestinians pondered statehood, not alongside Israel, but in place of it.
That is like a teacher asking two kindergarteners, Jack and Jackie, if they each want a popsicle. Jackie says “yes” and Jack says “no” with a smirky attitude. When the teacher gives Jackie a popsicle, Jack screams out in torment: “But I want a popsicle!” So the teacher gives Jack a popsicle and what does Jack do? He pushes the popsicle into the teacher’s face and tries to grab Jackie’s popsicle, while demanding: “I only want this one!”
That is the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; everything else is commentary.
As such, the real slogan should be: “Arabs, go back home (to Arabia) — Israel is ours alone.” (Or, alternatively: Arabs, learn to live in peace with the Jews in our own state in our indigenous homeland.)
4) ‘No Peace on Stolen Land’
Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, the Jews who arrived to Ottoman-era and then British-era Palestine purchased dunams (land area in parts of the Ottoman Empire, including Israel) from landlords.
The now Israeli city Petah Tikva was founded in 1878 by ultra-Orthodox Jewish pioneers who bought properties from two Christian businessmen.
In 1882, Haim Amzaleg purchased 835 acres of land from Mustafa Abdallah ali Dajan — in what is today Rishon LeZion, an Israeli city south of Tel Aviv — which created “a convenient launching pad for early land purchase initiatives which shaped the pattern of Jewish settlement until the beginning of the British Mandate” (according to Roy Marom, an Israeli historian and historical geographer).2
Sir Moses Montefiore, famous for his intervention in favor of Jews around the world, established a legal colony for Jews in Ottoman-era Palestine. In 1854, his friend Judah Touro bequeathed money to fund Jewish residential settlement there. Montefiore was appointed executor of his will, and used the funds for a variety of projects, including building the first legal Jewish residential settlement and almshouse outside of the old walled city of Jerusalem in 1860 — today known as Mishkenot Sha’ananim.
The official beginning of the construction of the “New Yishuv” — Jewish residents in Palestine — is usually dated to the arrival of the Bilu group in 1882, which commenced “The First Aliyah.” Most immigrants came from the Russian Empire, escaping the frequent pogroms and state-led persecution in what are now Ukraine and Poland. They founded a number of agricultural settlements with financial support from Jewish philanthropists in Western Europe.
In 1904, “The Second Aliyah” saw an additional 35,000 Jews arrive, mostly from the Russian Empire, and some more from Yemen. Among them was David Ben-Gurion, the State of Israel’s eventual first prime minister.
In 1921, Golda Meir (who went on to become Israel’s first and only female prime minister) arrived on the scene. And that same year, Albert Einstein attended a fundraiser to establish the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Do you honestly think that Einstein would sacrifice his world-renowned personal brand by attending a fundraiser for a university “on stolen land”?
Thus, the more canonical slogan should be: “Peace on Purchased Land.”
5) ‘When people are occupied, resistance is justified.’
The “occupation” is a make-believe fairy tale that propaganda-savvy Soviets helped the Palestinians craft beginning in the 1960s in order to more effectively fight a Cold War-era proxy conflict against the United States via its ally, Israel.
In reality, there is no occupation of Palestinians, in the same way that murderous felons are not occupied by prison guards. Yet the heavily biased (anti-Israel) mainstream media do not like to talk as much about the uglier sides of Palestinian society, such as their infatuation with primitive anti-Jewish terrorism.
Throughout the decades, as more heinous Palestinian terrorist attacks were inflicted upon Israelis, the State of Israel built more walls and fences to protect its citizens. Given the circumstances, I would hope that you would want your country to do the same.
And it isn’t only Israel that shelters its people from primitive Palestinian terrorism. Look at the other countries which border the Palestinian Territories. There are very clear reasons why Jordan and Egypt keep Palestinians out of their countries: The Palestinians remain an existential threat to every country that shares a border with them.
So, no, the Palestinians are not a group of innocent bystanders “occupied” by the big, bad Israeli wolf. They are simply living with the consequences of their decades-long anti-Jewish behaviors. Thus, the more valid slogan would be: “When people are terrorized, occupation is justified.”
6) ‘Students demand a free Palestine!’
Western schools and universities have been increasingly infiltrated by “pro-Palestinian” propaganda designed to subvert Western norms, values, and ideals by putting on a far-too-high faulty pedestal an overstated “refugee” group that has nothing to do with anything.
As one of our guest writers, Shauna Small, put it: Institutions that were once a place for intellectual discourse and learning have evolved into dangerous, radical petri dishes which breed antisemitism (disguised as “anti-Zionism”). Ideas can no longer be challenged, since every course of study has begun to embed an ideology that is working to divide people and demonize select groups.
This is exactly how “Palestine” has made its way into classrooms across the West. In Canada, for example, the Palestinian “Nakba” has already been commemorated on the multi-faith calendar of school boards, even though it is not a “faith-based” holiday. It is a twisted political agenda.
Children in Syria do not learn about the American Civil War. On July 1st, students in Jordan do not commemorate Canada Day. Moroccan and Lebanese institutions surely do not acknowledge November 11th as a day to honor the UK’s armed forces members who died in the line of duty during World War One. On January 26th, Australia Day is not celebrated in Iraq or Egypt.
Why, then, are children in the West being subjected to narratives that belong to another people (the Palestinians) in another part of the world (the Middle East)? What intentions are behind the introduction of “Palestine” into Western schools and universities?
Perhaps the more honest slogan is: “Adults demand an education free of Palestine.”
7) ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’
I’ll leave this part to one of our guest writers, Elissa Wald, who wrote:
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.
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.
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 who claim “From the River to the Sea” is a peaceful chant. But there is no angle from which it can be read that way, not even if you squint.
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.
Spare us your whitewashed and delusional apologia for the slogan. We know very well what it means.
If anything the slogan should be: From the River to the Sea, Israel will be free.
“Top Hamas official urges resumption of suicide terror attacks against Israel.” The Times of Israel.
Marom, Roy. “Jindās: A History of Lydda's Rural Hinterland in the 15th to the 20th Centuries CE.” Lod, Lydda, Diospolis. 1: 26.
Brilliant! I will say to people from now on ‘From the river to the sea, Israel must be free’ This was a really interesting and educational article!
The sad part of all this, it that all this information is available online, in books, etc., but I guess no one outside of our supporters can read. I am certain the members against us in the UN must be illerate as well, as well as many college students in many countries besides the US and Canada.