From the River to the Sea...
Good faith, bad faith and free speech
To begin with I will say the words, because they have been made more important than they were before, “From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”
I have known these words throughout my relationship with the Palestinian cause, something that has been a fairly lifelong awareness, though with greater closeness since cycling through Palestine in 2018, when writing my book Fifty Miles Wide.
I have never been a huge fan of the slogan; though more because I don’t much like slogans or chanting them, and not because I think there is anything remotely wrong with this one. If anything, the call - a straightforward insistence on liberty for Palestinians between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea - always felt a little hippy to me, more tree-hugging than anything else, so that it has been strange in recent months to hear propagandists for the Israelis state suggest, along with those taken-in by the lie, that it is actually a sinister call for genocide of Jewish people in Palestine. Apparently the statement is not endorsing the freedom of Palestine (as the slogan clearly states), but driving Jews into the sea (which the slogan clearly doesn’t state).
Because the European genocide against its Jewish population in the 1940s is a core element of Israeli propaganda and the ability to cultivate a complicit Western silence towards its crimes, the disingenuous claim that an honest and urgent call for Palestinian liberty is akin to a European genocide has, however and very sadly, been made potent.
It cannot be said enough times that “From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” is a liberationist cry for the freedom of Palestinians. This is uncomfortable for Westerners to hear, because implicit to it is the fact that Palestinians are not free, or rather, their basic freedoms are forever curtailed by the Israelis. This in turn contains the truth of the brutality and dispossession the Israelis have wrought in Palestine, a fact that sits at-odds with a need for Western niceties, a learned and well-internalised dishonesty, concerning what the state of Israel really is. Even as we currently see babies die in the power-cuts of Gaza hospitals, still many Westerners, and certainly their establishment figures, need to go on insisting and believing the lies they have told themselves about the Israeli state.
Polite killings
At the present moment there are a number of facts to point out about From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free, that are not really revelatory, and I am unlikely to be the first and only person to say them. Nevertheless they are worth saying.
As with anything, the Israelis and their propagandists like to suggest that the words (just as they now allege even UN workers, and world media to be) is associated with Hamas. “From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” originates in the 1960s, with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. In this, the slogan is some two decades older than Hamas, so that the idea that it originates with them is - like so many other claims - either an absurdity or a lie.
At the present time we are witnessing the most violent and clearly genocidal Israeli campaign since 1948. The Israelis are endeavouring to kill or remove millions of Palestinians from their homes, between the River and the Sea, on the basis of some claim to “biblical lands”.
That, in this time, while the Israeli state - uncensored - enacts a policy of genocide between the River and the Sea, Palestinians are to be censored for simply imagining their freedom between the River and the Sea, is as evil as it is absurd. The claim here is that a Palestinian claim for freedom does more damage, and is more deserving of sanction, than an Israeli bomb or bullet, or a concerted Israeli campaign to collapse public health and sanitation in Gaza.
It doesn’t do to go too deep into the deranged psychology behind this, because it is an immoral and indefensible position. Nonetheless, I do feel that because the average Westerner can relate to the idea of being offended, and of taking action against that which causes them offence, but cannot relate to the theft of their home, or a threat of genocide by bombing, they find it easier to take a stand against that which causes offence, rather than that which causes a genocide.
Although this is a clear and banal failure of empathy, the Zionist myth that Jews are always at risk of a genocide, a claim that even if true (it isn’t) is exclusively because of European genocidal tendencies, allows Western censors to pretend that they are actually committing a brave act in the service of preserving (Jewish) life, even as Palestinians die for this catastrophe of moral judgment.
Good Faith and Bad
There would be a simple and conventional way to find out what Palestinians really mean by From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free - we could ask Palestinians.
The problem in following this convention is that it would break the stranglehold by which other people are expected to talk on behalf of Palestinians, and to say things amenable to Western ears, and be censored if they step out of line.
We would have thought it odd to ask white power activists, or randomly disinterested individuals, what Black America really meant when it said “Black Lives Matter”. Similarly you would not ask a Nazi for her views on the Holocaust and take the answer as revealing of anything other than that person’s own view and its likely prejudices. We hear frequently that the idea of a free Palestine even being vocalised can intimidate Jewish people in the West. We hear very little, if anything at all, about how phrases like “Israel has a right to defend itself”, or “We stand with Israel”, might legitimately make Palestinians and related communities feel traumatised at this moment, and yet the phrases are all over the lips of Western politicians, with no call for their censorship.
For all the absurdity of having to spell all this out, I do think it is important to appreciate that some of those, Jewish people especially, who are not familiar with the tradition or imperative of a Palestine free from military occupation and apartheid, might genuinely misunderstand the meaning of From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free. This is not least of all because there are industrial propaganda efforts designed by the state of Israel, and Zionism more broadly, to achieve precisely that.
These efforts have to be seen in the context of efforts to constantly re-traumatise Jewish people with images and ideas of their own imminent persecution. Either Israeli state propaganda is happy with this re-traumatisation as collateral damage of its propaganda, or it is the deliberate intent.
A recent candlelit vigil for Palestinian deaths, held at a United States university, was cancelled because it was deemed to be “harassing” for Jewish students. Events that target even Israeli weapons companies, which trade in weapons of murder, have been condemned as if they were a version of bullying. Pro-Israeli lawyers in recent years waged a successful campaign against a London hospital displaying paintings by children in Gaza. Apparently the paintings were “traumatising” for Jewish patients. Meanwhile today, Palestinian babies are dying in incubators that have run out of power.
In this context, it isn’t a great surprise or leap of imagination to reach the conclusion that the mere words “From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” could be made to appear to Israelis and their supporters as a notion that they, despite being the oppressor of the situation, are the one being intimidated. If a protest against an Israeli company can be internalised as if an attack on a Jewish person, then not only does this violate basic principles designed to combat prejudice against Jews based on perceived affiliation to the Israeli state, it also demonstrates that a great act of voodoo is taking place, one in which it is acceptable to overstate threat, and to misrepresent calls for justice as calls for injustice. This voodoo is facilitated further by the prominence given in Western history to World War II, and with it the Holocaust, almost as if it were the singular notable catastrophe of Western history, so that it can be turned easily into the central navigating feature of what is left of the Western moral compass. If so much of our latent historical understanding and metaphor leads back to the Holocaust, it is very easy to make anything else lead back there also.
The issue, then, is that some people might genuinely have been made traumatised by hearing the words From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free. This is unfortunate because the words themselves have, if anything, always been really quite benign. It is an interesting predicament that a spurious attack, and an imputation of meaning, upon a liberationist phrase, perhaps gives it a greater potency than it had before that attack. Either way, assuming some of these people have now been genuinely traumatised by the statement - what are we supposed to do?
In the case of those people genuinely scared by the words, we can separate them into two camps. Firstly, and owing to the prominent representation of Jewish sensibility in Western media, many Jewish-heritage journalists and public figures, unfamiliar with the origins of the slogan From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free, have a professional duty to educate themselves in what it actually means. If they don’t believe in educating themselves then there are other professions that don’t rely on being educated.
Those who work in media also have a responsibility to their profession and their public not only to be informed, but also to be rational and proportionate. Running around suggesting that boycotts are harassment, that mere mention of Palestinian liberation is traumatising for Jews in Britain and the US, suggests an inability to navigate reality that is as unsuited to the work of a journalist as the shakes are to the work of a surgeon.
It is so hard to prove bad faith that it is almost redundant to accuse it - to do so requires an act of mind-reading concerning whether someone does something with honest or dishonest intent. Whether someone’s misrepresentation of From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free, is being done in error of its origins, or deliberately.
At this stage, however, it is important - and I say this as someone who identifies comfortably with my support of Palestinian rights - to ask who the onus for reeducation should be on? If people are taken-in by a lie, then who is primarily required to set them straight; the liar, the deceived, or the target of the lie? At a time when Palestinians die in the tens of thousands, is it fair or even sane to ask Palestinians and a community trying to support them to also give time to convincing Westerners that they have been misled about the meaning of a political slogan that at any point in the last half century they could have improved their understanding of?
Hostage-taking
It is apt that we might have this conversation in a moment of moral and historical crisis precipitated by a Palestinian hostage-taking, in response to the decades-long Israeli hostage-taking of Palestinians, who are held by the thousands in Israeli jails. The Israelis even hold hostage the bodies of Palestinians they kill or who die in Israeli custody, preventing the family and community from grieving or gaining closure.
This, in general, is a strategy common among authoritarian states, where it is understood that the resources and energies of the community can be drained by obliging them to fight instead for the basic liberty of the hostage. While we are talking about From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free, we are not talking about the Israeli cover-up of how many Israelis died under Israeli fire on October 7. We are not talking about the destruction of irrigation and drinking water by West Bank settlers attacking Palestinian farmers. We are not talking about past attacks by the Israeli state against Iraqi Jews to destabilise Jewish communities in neighbouring countries. We are not talking about the fact - right this second - of the Al-Shifa Hospital running out of power in Gaza, where patients are operated on without anaesthetic, where wounds cannot be washed because there is no water.
In a similar spirit then, because while we are talking of it we cannot be talking of that, it is useful to understand that From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free, has been taken hostage. The intention is to suck the energy from the community, so that while the Israelis commit genocide in Palestine, we have to fight merely to retrieve our sequence of words from their possession.
There is no problem with the slogan From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free. If some people have worked themselves into a state where it has become a problem to them, then this is not a problem for Palestinians, who have a genocide to resist.