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“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Facebook legitimizes a historic absolutist slogan of Palestinian nationalism.

By Poder & Dinero

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Facebook legitimizes a historic absolutist slogan of Palestinian nationalism.

Julián Schvindlerman from Mundo Israelita for Poder & Dinero and FinGurú

In the six months following the Palestinian invasion on October 7 of last year, Facebook saw an exponential increase in the use of the phrase "from the river to the sea" and consequently called its Oversight Board to provide an opinion on the matter. Outside of social media, the slogan is chanted at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, especially on university campuses in the West, where it is written on banners held by young people wearing the Keffiyeh, another Palestinian symbol (Yasser Arafat popularized it by using it in an aesthetic that, as the myth goes, shaped the map of Palestine).

The Facebook Oversight Board is made up of experts and lawyers who monitor the content management of Facebook and Instagram. It operates independently but is funded by Mark Zuckerberg's company. After studying the matter, it determined that the slogan was politically acceptable. Shlomo Levin indicated in his blog in The Times of Israel that on September 4, the Board decided that the phrase, as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinians, could be used, as long as it wasn't accompanied by calls for violence or praises for terrorist groups. He argued that the phrase has several meanings, thus it would not be inherently violent, offensive, or discriminatory.

The Board acknowledged that the phrase is controversial and resonates poorly among Israelis, Jews in the diaspora, and their allies. However, it also asserted that it allows for different interpretations:

“The phrase [...] has been adopted by various groups and individuals, and its meaning depends on the speaker, the listener, and the context [...] many understand the phrase as a call for equal rights and self-determination for the Palestinian people. At times, it is used to indicate support for one or more specific political objectives: a single bi-national state across the entire territory, a two-state solution for both groups, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, or among other goals, an end to the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories occupied in the 1967 war. In other contexts, the phrase is a simple assertion of a place, a people, and a history without political goals or concrete tactics.”

It is difficult to accept the peaceful meanings that the Board attributes to this slogan. Historically, it has been associated with the extremist rhetoric of Palestinian nationalism, as it euphemistically refers to the liberation of the entire area that stretches from "the river" (Jordan) "to the sea" (Mediterranean). Anyone who bothers to look at a map of the area will notice that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea lies Israel. In other words, the phrase is a battle cry for the elimination of the State of Israel.

The original complete slogan in Arabic Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Filastin sa-takun hurrah, means "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." It emerged from the ranks of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s and was later adopted by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) decades later. Let’s look at some relevant statements that illustrate the unequivocal intent of the phrase:

“The victorious march will continue until the Palestinian flag is raised over Jerusalem and over the entire area of Palestine from the river to the sea” --Yasser Arafat, PLO leader, in 1980.

“From its sea to its river... it is ours” –Facebook post by the main Palestinian organization Fatah, in 2015.

“There is no Israel, the entire land is ours, from the sea to the river” –words of the Palestinian Authority (PA) minister Marwan Awratani at a girls' high school in Qalqilya, in 2021.

“Palestine is still occupied, and Hamas will not halt the holy war until the liberation of all Palestine from the river to the sea” --Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, founder of Hamas, in 1997.

“Hamas rejects any alternative to the total and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” –from Hamas’s Constitution of 2017.

Based precisely on this last piece of information, a minority opinion within the Board noted that the phrase equates to a "glorification of Hamas." Nevertheless, “context is crucial,” said Board co-chair Pamela San Martín. The same had been argued by one of the three presidents of Harvard, U. Penn, and MIT in her testimony before the U.S. Congress when asked whether their statutes allowed calls for the commission of genocide against Jews on their campus, which were being vocally chanted. Since then, two of them lost their positions due to that unsustainable permissiveness, as did the president of Columbia University later for the suboptimal handling of the anti-Zionist situation there.

Like the distinguished American academics, what most members of the Facebook Oversight Board fail to understand is that there is a dividing line between supporting Palestinian statehood and calling for the elimination of Israel. Those who have historically used this slogan, as cited earlier, have not wanted and do not want to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel; rather, they want it atop Israel. In any case, “on October 7, Hamas demonstrated what it really means from the river to the sea, regardless of what it means in theory for some,” pointed out Ahmad Sharawi and David Adesnik from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In an essay of mine published by Milá publishing house in 2004 dedicated to analyzing the interconnection between anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism, and anti-Americanism, while observing the spread of slogans and Palestinian historical narratives in circles of the global elite, I noted: “What we are witnessing here is essentially a process of the Palestinianization of the Western intellectual discourse.” Two decades later, the phenomenon is no longer confined to UN elites or academic intelligentsia, but has become popularized.

The acceptance and validation of the absolutist slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" has been so total that even Facebook has approved it as a legitimate argument in public discourse. Yasser Arafat would be delighted. Yahia Sinwar is. What does this tell us about this decision?

Julián Schvindlerman is a writer and international political analyst specializing in Middle Eastern affairs.

He is a Full Professor of World Politics in the International Relations career at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Palermo, and a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Mexico.

He is the editor of Coloquio, the flagship magazine of the Latin American Jewish Congress.

He is the author of Escape to Utopia: Mao's Red Book and Gaddafi's Green Book; The Hidden Letter: History of an Arab-Jewish Family; Rome and Jerusalem: Vatican Politics towards the Jewish State; Lands for Peace, Lands for War; and Triangle of Infamy: Richard Wagner, the Nazis, and Israel.

He has a blog in The Times of Israel, is a columnist for Radio Universidad de Córdoba, and regularly publishes in Perfil and Infobae (Argentina) and Libertad Digital (Spain). His articles have been published in The Washington Times (United States), Clarín (Argentina), El País (Uruguay), La Prensa (Panama), Página Siete (Bolivia), and La Razón (Spain), among others. He has been interviewed by France24 in Spanish, CNN in Spanish, RT in Spanish (Russia), I24 News in Spanish (Israel), TV7 Helsinki (Finland), and NTN24 (Colombia), among others.

He has given lectures at universities and institutions in Argentina, Aruba, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Curacao, Ecuador, Spain, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

He was a columnist for the Miami Herald (United States), Deputy Executive Director of United Nations Watch (Switzerland), a lecturer at the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary (Argentina), and an instructor at the Institute for Foreign Young Leaders (Israel). He was a commentator on several radio programs in Argentina.

He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Administration from the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and a Master's Degree in Social Sciences from the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He is a member of Republican Professors.

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Poder & Dinero

Poder & Dinero

We are a group of professionals from various fields, passionate about learning and understanding what happens in the world, and its consequences, in order to transmit knowledge.
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