Hey, tribe.
Today I created a Facebook post that’s getting some good traction.
For those not on Facebook, here is a screenshot:
I posted this because of statements like this one from 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,” Tlaib insisted recently.
Well, Congresswoman, take that up with your friends in Hamas. And I say “friends” because Tlaib was in the tiny minority of House members who voted against a resolution to condemn Hamas after the October 7th massacre.
Hamas leader Khaled Mashal explains exactly what the slogan means here.
Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary to Britian 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 Mandate 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. (For more on this epsiode in history, and for first-rate scholarship on this topic in general, read the magnificent Dr. Einat Wilf's most recent book: The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace.) 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’s 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 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 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 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.
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 Tlaib who will claim it’s a peaceful chant. But there’s no angle from which it can be read that way, not even if we squint.
The Confederate flag is clearly an emblem of nostalgia for a time when white supremacy was enshrined as the law of the land.
Similiarly, Jews were second-class citizens — dhimmis — throughout the Ottoman Empire for the six centuries preceding Israel’s inception. In accordance with their inferior status, the area’s Jews were subject to taxation without representation — a special tax just for them, known as the 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 not 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) can't deny that Zionism is a deeply progressive value and liberal triumph.
It was really quite an extraordinary P.R. trick when Israel was cast as the Goliath in the 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+ 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 Palestine from the river to the sea.
Spare us your whitewashed and delusional apologia for the slogan. We know very well what it means.
Okay, fam. Until tomorrow, then. I love you all very much. Stay strong.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Thank-you, Elissa! Another masterpiece!
Congrats, Elissa, for getting this piece onto Future of Jewish. I saw the title of today’s post from Joshua, and thought it sounded very familiar. Then I saw it was you!! 😊