What “From the River to the Sea” Really Means

IMEU Policy Project Memo #3

Today, the House of Representatives is voting on H.Res.883, an inaccurate and inflammatory anti-Palestinian resolution being pushed by the GOP to incite anti-Palestinian racism, which has had a deadly impact here in the US. 

This resolution willfully distorts the meaning of a widespread popular Palestinian slogan for freedom into something which it is not. The resolution also contains inaccurate statements, which have been thoroughly debunked, about what happened on October 7.   

What does the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” actually mean? 

It is a call for democracy, freedom, justice, equality, and self-determination. As Arielle Angel, Editor-In-Chief of Jewish Currents notes, attempts to depict the slogan otherwise are rooted more in the “racism and Islamophobia of the listeners than to any unified or vested interpretation.” 

In 2021, Palestinian American analyst Yousef Munayyer, Head of Palestine/Israel Program and Senior Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC, wrote in Jewish Currents that the slogan advocates for “a state in which Palestinians can live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominated by others nor dominating them. When we call for a free Palestine from the river to the sea, it is precisely the existing system of domination that we seek to end.”

Palestinians live in Gaza and the West Bank, but also inside Israel and have Israeli citizenship. Wherever they live, between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, Israel denies them their full freedom and rights. In addition, millions of Palestinian refugees are exiled and denied their right to live in their homeland.The slogan is a call for freedom for Palestinians, no matter where they live.

Palestinians created this slogan; they are the experts on what it means. 

Congressional condemnations of this slogan when used by Palestinians to advocate for freedom but not by Israelis when they employ the same geographic terms to call for perpetual Israeli apartheid rule also raise troubling questions about the employment of double standards. 

For example, the original Likud party platform–Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party–states explicitly that “between the Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

In addition, the Israeli government continues to colonize the Palestinian West Bank and impose indefinite military rule over Palestinians there. There is a consensus among Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, that this is part of a system of Israeli apartheid rule from the river to the sea. 

As the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem notes:

“In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group…over another.”

Moreover, in 2018, the Israeli parliament passed the Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People. As Adalah, a Haifa-based NGO advocating for equality between Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel, noted: 

“The law constitutionally enshrines – for the first time – the identity of the State of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people only. The law identifies Eretz Israel, or the ‘Land of Israel’, as the area to which it applies. Eretz Israel includes all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

In other words, the law, which enjoys constitutional status as a basic law, prescribes exclusive self-determination for only one people between the river and the sea and not for Palestinians in that same area. This is discrimination, plain and simple.

Where are the censure resolutions of the Members of Congress who agree with this exclusivist vision, and who have advocated for Israel’s annexation of the Palestinian West Bank and the denial of Palestinian freedom between the river and the sea?

Members of Congress have no standing to criticize the Palestinian slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” if they actively or tacitly support the perpetuation of Israel’s apartheid regime of rule between the river and the sea and its denial of freedom to Palestinians.

Photo Credit: Matt Hrkac, Creative Commons license.