"The Rescuers "What Israel’s video of ‘Hamas tunnel’ under al-Shifa tells us "
When it comes to the Middle East, the right-wingers remember nothing.
MJ Rosenberg has worked on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years. He was also a Clinton political appointee at USAID.
Published On 19 Dec 2011 19 Dec 2011
Commentary magazine recently called Times columnist Tom Friedman a practitioner of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ [EPA]
It has been over a week since the lobby that deems itself “pro-Israel” began its recent effort to suppress the views of those of us it considers Israel-haters, self-hating Jews, or – in a most ridiculous twist given that most of us are Jews – “anti-Semites”.
The effort to silence us now stems from (1) the determination to defeat President Obama, and (2) the need to intimidate us as the lobby and its congressional acolytes cowboy up for a bombing campaign against Iran.
I am one of the least significant figures to come under attack.
The bill of particulars against me is that I use the term “Israel firster” to describe those who consistently thwart the efforts of US presidents to achieve Middle East peace. Their goals are those of the Israeli right: to maintain the occupation and prevent diplomacy with Iran.
These people (take a look at Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post) think nothing of attacking the President of the United States in the most vicious of terms, but condemn anyone with the temerity to criticise anything done by the prime minister of Israel.
As I have explained, it is not Israel they put first, but rather the Israeli right. (They had no objection to criticism of Yitzhak Rabin, whose pursuit of peace with the Palestinians led to him being portrayed as an enemy of Israel by many, including Israel’s current prime minister.)
If Tom Friedman is an anti-Semite, there is no such thing; the charge has simply lost its meaning.
After a week attacking me, they have turned their guns to bigger prey: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman is under attack for writing a column denouncing Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who praised the recent Russian election as “absolutely fair, free and democratic”, and lamenting a host of anti-democratic actions in Israel (all of which have been roundly condemned inside the country).
I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.
For this, Commentary called Friedman a practitioner of the “new anti-Semitism”, with virtually all of the usual suspects following suit.
Tom Friedman an anti-Semite! Imagine.
It feels ridiculous rebutting this outlandish charge. Tom Friedman has, for virtually his entire career, been condemned by real anti-Israel types as an apologist for Israel. He’s Jewish (although the crazies now call Jews anti-Semites!); he became a journalist through his involvement with Israel; he and his family are huge donors to pro-Israel causes; and he hardly publishes a column without reference to one of his Israeli pals at Hebrew or Haifa University. Advertisement
If Tom Friedman is an anti-Semite, there is no such thing; the charge has simply lost its meaning. I don’t think Tom would object if I said that not only does he not hate Israel, he loves Israel and makes no effort to hide it.
As for his quote about the lobby and Netanyahu’s standing ovation at that joint session, everyone knows that the only reason there even was a (rare) joint meeting of Congress honouring Netanyahu (for what?) was because House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) wanted to make it harder for the president to promote an Israeli-Palestinian agreement by demonstrating that Congress supported Bibi and not Obama.
And it was because they wanted to put on a show for the lobby. No one in the Republican congressional leadership even implied otherwise.
The pro-Bibi ovation was about as sincere and free of political considerations (i.e., campaign donations) as was Newt Gingrich’s sudden announcement that Palestinians are an “invented people”.
But the silly attack on Tom Friedman wasn’t enough.
On Thursday, the right-wing Republican Emergency Committee for Israel ran ads across the country (including a full-page in the New York Times) denouncing the Obama administration for treating Israel like a “punching bag”. (Specifically, they went after the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta.)
The administration’s sin, as always, is that it has (intermittently, in my opinion) tried to get Israel back to negotiations and has (very intermittently) cited Israel for human rights violations. The attacks on all three people are dumb, but the one on Hillary Clinton takes the cake. (Has there ever been an American political figure more outspokenly pro-Israel?)
As for treating Israel like a punching bag, what a joke! The pro-Israel peace camp (of which I am a member in good standing) has consistently denounced the Obama administration for never criticising Israeli policies.
For example, the administration’s demand for a measly 90-day settlement freeze was dropped when Netanyahu balked. Even ultra-right Elliott Abrams (a board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel) says that under Obama the strategic relationship between Israel and the United States has reached an all-time high. Netanyahu himself said in September that Obama has earned a “badge of honour” for his support for Israel.
So, why all the hate from the right?
The reason is simple.
It is not that the targets of its wrath are anti-Israel; that is demonstrably false.
It is that some of us (Friedman, for instance) oppose the status quo that the Bibi crowd treasures above all else. They support the unsustainable occupation and the determination to heighten tensions (and hence the likelihood of war) with Iran. To put it simply, they are coming at us because we object to those policies endorsed by the right that we believe could lead to Israel’s destruction.
I often recall a similar situation back in 1971. Israel at that time was riding high and feeling pretty invulnerable. Still in a technical state of war with Egypt, it was separated from its enemy by the Israeli-controlled Sinai Peninsula, which was four times the size of Israel itself.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, already contemplating a peace deal with Israel, sent word to the Israeli government that if Israel would pull back two miles from the Suez Canal (allowing Egypt to reopen it), he would commence negotiations with Israel.
The US immediately sent an envoy to Jerusalem to ask the Israelis to at least consider Sadat’s offer. What’s two miles? Israel would still have the rest and, maybe, peace with the most powerful Arab nation.
Israel said absolutely not. It was strong; Egypt was weak. The US told the Israelis that if they refused to consider Sadat’s offer, he might go to war to recover the land. The Israelis scoffed.
Two years later, on October 6, 1973, Sadat led an Egyptian attack to regain the Sinai and came very close to conquering Israel itself. After three weeks, Israel prevailed – with the invaluable aid of the US – at the cost of 3,000 soldiers. Ultimately, Israel had to give up not just two miles of the Sinai, but the whole peninsula altogether.
All this could have been avoided if Israel had simply told the US that, yes, it would consider Sadat’s offer.
Needless to say, AIPAC and the other organisations that believe one must never, ever question an Israeli leader – along with their devotees in Congress – supported Israel’s incredibly stupid and eventually tragic decision to reject Sadat’s offer. When the US administration asked for the lobby’s support in getting Israel to consider Sadat’s offer, the lobby said no. It stood with the Israeli government, right or (in that case) tragically wrong.
And thousands of Israeli kids grew up with missing fathers.
Of course, the lobby and its cutouts in Congress never apologised for backing the worst decision Israel has ever made (so far).
It occurs to me that one of the reasons I feel so strongly about the necessity of Israel pursuing peace is that I remember (although not as clearly as an Israeli) what October 6, 1973, felt like.
It was Yom Kippur. We were in synagogue. In came the amazing and utterly shocking news that Israel was under attack and that all its positions along the Suez Canal had fallen. Casualties were high. With the exception of November 22, 1963, and 9/11, I cannot remember a worse day.
The problem with the right-wingers is that, when it comes to the Middle East, they remember nothing. Lucky them.
MJ Rosenberg is a Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network. The above article first appeared in Foreign Policy Matters, a part of the Media Matters Action Network.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
MJ Rosenberg has worked on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years. He was also a Clinton political appointee at USAID.
The controversial phrase “from the river to sea,” explained
"The Rescuers "What Israel’s video of ‘Hamas tunnel’ under al-Shifa tells us "Opinion Guest Essay - What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide "International community is ‘failing to prevent genocide’ in Gaza, UN experts warn" [...] They aren’t thinking about the Jewish mother in Jerusalem who told me in one breath how she just got a gun license to protect her kids from Hamas, and in the next about how much she trusted her kids’ Palestinian Arab teacher, who rushed her children to the school bomb shelter during a recent Hamas air raid. They aren’t thinking about Alaa Amara, the Israeli Arab shop owner from Taibe, who donated 50 bicycles .. https://www.timesofisrael.com/taibe-bike-shop-torched-after-arab-israeli-owner-donates-bikes-to-jewish-kids/amp/ .. to Jewish kids who survived the Hamas attack on their border communities on Oct. 7, only to see his shop torched, apparently by hard-line nationalist Israeli Arab youth .. https://www.timesofisrael.com/seven-indicted-for-torching-cycle-shop-after-arab-israeli-owner-donates-bikes-to-jews/ , a few days later, only to see a crowdfunding campaign in Hebrew and English raise more than $200,000 to help him rebuild that same shop just a few days after that. [...]To that end, I devoted a lot of time on my trip to Israel and the West Bank this month observing and probing the actual day-to-day interactions among Israeli Arabs and Jews. These are always complex, sometimes surprising, occasionally depressing — and, more often than you might expect, uplifting — experiences. Because they reveal enough seeds of coexistence scattered around that one can still dream the impossible dream — that we might one day have a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. P - So, this Thanksgiving week, I ask you to spare a few moments with me to reflect on some of these people, including some of the extraordinary acts of rescue that they committed on Oct. 7. They will give you more faith in humanity than the headlines around this story would ever suggest."
--- Related: How Netanyahu's Hamas policy came back to haunt him — and Israel "Ehud Barak blames Binyamin Netanyahu for “the greatest failure in Israel’s history” Israel says it kills second Hamas commander in refugee camp, first evacuees leave Gaza See also: Vengeance Is Not a Policy" The Israeli leader and Hamas are deadly enemies — and allies in opposing a 2-state solution [...] Today, some of the same extremists who called for Rabin's death hold power in Netanyahu's government. A youthful Ben Gvir shows off a Cadillac hood ornament he claimed to have taken from Yitzhak Rabin's car shortly before the Israeli peacemaker was assassinated. Convicted of terrorism charges, Ben Gvir is today Israel's minister of national security. (Screengrab YouTube) P - Just two weeks before Rabin's assassination, a young settler extremist posed for the cameras with a Cadillac hood ornament he said he had stolen from Rabin's car. "Just like we got to this emblem," he said, "we could get to Rabin." P - Today, that young man, Itamar Ben Gvir, is 45 years old and has eight Israeli criminal convictions — including convictions for supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. Once he was rejected by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for his extremist views. Now, Israel's police must answer to him .. https://www.timesofisrael.com/police-chief-and-ben-gvir-spar-over-who-cops-should-obey-in-constitutional-crisis/ .. as Benjamin Netanyahu's minister of national security. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173146869 ---
“From the river to the sea” demands conversations about the future of Israel and Palestine.
By Ellen Ioanes Nov 24, 2023, 7:00am EST
Ellen Ioanes covers breaking and general assignment news as the weekend reporter at Vox. She previously worked at Business Insider covering the military and global conflicts.
On US college campuses, on social media, and even in the halls of Congress, the 10-word slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is either a joyous call for Palestinian dignity and future statehood — or a threat to many Jewish people in Israel and around the world.
The slogan rhymes both in English and in Arabic — one modern Arabic version can be transliterated as “min al-nahr ila al-bahr / Filastin satatharrar” — and the river and sea in question are the Jordan in the east and the Mediterranean in the west. The phrase has been around in various iterations for a few decades. It’s only in the past five years or so, as US public support for Palestinians among younger demographics has steadily increased, that the phrase has become a flashpoint in the political debate about the future of Israel and Palestine.
Now, amid the Israel-Hamas war, the increased attention to the decades-long conflict over the land, and mass protests against Israel’s military operations in Gaza, those 10 words have suddenly become highly controversial.
Historians, experts, and activists who use and study it say iterations of the phrase have had many meanings over the course of the Palestinian national struggle. Some of those sources said that in the context most people at ceasefire rallies are using it today, it likely indicates a desire for Palestinian liberation and dignity — as well as a vision for the future in which Palestinians have equal rights in their homeland. But to many Jewish people, it’s a mortal threat to the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Discourse around the phrase has become so extreme that Congress’s recent censure of its only Palestinian-American member, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), was driven in no small part by her use of it. The government of Berlin has criminalized the use of the slogan as well as other pro-Palestinian symbols and actions. And after yet another endorsement of anti-semitic conspiracy theories, Elon Musk seemingly redeemed himself in the eyes of the mainstream Jewish, pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) by condemning this phrase on Twitter. Multiple prominent Jewish organizations, including the ADL and the American Jewish Committee, have defined the phrase as inherently antisemitic because, they say, it at best denies the Jewish right to self-determination and at worst calls for ethnic cleansing against Israeli Jews.
The question of whether “from the river to the sea” is offensive or a call for liberation is a “Rorschach test,” as the writer Robert Wright put it in a recent Substack post .. https://nonzero.substack.com/p/the-river-to-the-sea-rorschach-test . The answer is dependent less on the phrase itself than on the speaker, the listener, and the context.
But it also invites questions about what the future of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories could be, which remains unresolved 75 years after Israel was founded and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes in 1948, during the Nakba, or catastrophe.
The international community and particularly the United States has called for a two-state configuration, both in previous decades and in the context of the current war. Although that seemed like a potential solution in the 1990s, that hope faded after Hamas took over Gaza in 2006 and Israel’s government moved ever further to the right.
[Insert: Quite against the grain i submit that the hope for a two state solution faded from the year Hamas started getting stronger. Here is the crunch: From the year Netanyahu first came to power. How Netanyahu's Hamas policy came back to haunt him — and Israel [...]'Keep Hamas alive and kicking' This symbiotic relationship between Netanyahu and Hamas has been remarked on for years .. http://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/opinion/israel-netanyahu-hamas.html .. , by both friends and enemies, hawks and doves. P - Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, told the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2013 that "if we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas's strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister." https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173146869 As we have read Netanyahu supported and built-up Hamas with "suitcases full of cash" since his first year as pm. 1996, we probably should say was really the year hope for a two state solution faded. Speaking in retrospect now we know what we didn't know then. 1996. If you haven't read that suggestion before you first read it from me. In 1996 with Netanyahu's election as PM, the hope for a two state solution started to fade. 😒]
The other possibility would be a one-state solution. One version of that — in which Israel occupies Palestinian territories to varying degrees, controls people’s movement from those territories, surveils everyday activity, and controls access to basic goods — is arguably already the reality, as an April piece in Foreign Affairs argues .. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/israel-palestine-one-state-solution . Another version of a singular state — the one envisioned by some activists Vox spoke to who use the “from the river to the sea” phrase — is a pluralistic, secular, democratic one in which Palestinians, Jewish Israelis, and all citizens would live in political equality.
[Which of course Netanyahu and all Zionists anything like him at all would never consider accepting.]
But what the future looks like now seems more critical than ever to address, as the Israel Defense Forces have killed more than 14,000 Palestinians following the October 7 massacre, in which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants killed around 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped about 240. If Palestinians and Israelis, and more specifically their allies on both sides, can’t agree on the meaning of 10 words, what are the chances they can agree on how to peacefully and fairly govern some of the most hotly contested 10,000 square miles in the world?
The history of the phrase and how it came to be so controversial
It’s not clear where the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” comes from, or even when it came about. Elliott Colla, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, says that the phrase as it’s currently known first came about around the time of the first intifada and the Oslo accords process in the 1990s. Other sources, though, place its origins much earlier .. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/us/politics/river-to-the-sea-israel-gaza-palestinians.html , to the 1960s and the birth of the Palestinian nationalist movement.
Earlier iterations of the slogan in Arabic included explicitly Islamist and Arab nationalist sentiments; one early version translates to “‘From the river to the sea’ ... or ‘from the water to the water, Palestine [is] Islamic,’” Colla said. “Maybe a more common version is, ‘Palestine is Arab.’” But as different political movements like pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism have fallen out of power, and other actors and movements have taken use of the slogan, the second half of the phrase has increasingly become “will be free,” especially within English-speaking solidarity circles .. https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/on-the-history-meaning-and-power-of-from-the-river-to-the-sea/ . That reflects, typically, a vision of liberation and peace throughout the territory of historical Palestine, and more explicitly, liberation for Palestinian people living in the occupied territories.
Throughout all its iterations, one of its core themes .. https://theconversation.com/from-the-river-to-the-sea-a-palestinian-historian-explores-the-meaning-and-intent-of-scrutinized-slogan-217491 .. has been around the unity of the Palestinian experience of displacement and division. Palestinian Arabs living in what is now Israel, backed by other Arab nations, rejected a 1947 UN partition plan .. https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-Nations-Resolution-181 .. which divided the land into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem internationalized. The Jewish population understood that resolution to be their mandate to create the state of Israel, and, with British backing, fought and defeated Palestinian and Arab forces, culminating in the founding of Israel as a specifically Jewish state in 1948.
Over the decades, and particularly after the 1967 war in which Israel captured the Golan Heights (originally part of Syria), Gaza (previously part of Egypt) and the West Bank (previously belonging to Jordan), as well as East Jerusalem, Israel has claimed, encroached on, or occupied the land in which Palestinians live. It has also become more difficult for Palestinians to assert a unified national identity due to political fracture within Palestinian leadership and because Palestinians living in the territories and in Israel are geographically separated and often restricted from reaching each other, thus unable to effectively organize.
“The first thing to know is that it does have something to do with the history of partition. So it is articulating an image of historic Palestine undivided and unpartitioned” within the Palestinian community, Colla said. “That could be aspirational — this is a dream, all of Palestine” that is not always tied to a specific political outcome.
Seen here in 2020, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds up a placard showing maps of (L to R) historical Palestine, the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, the 1947 United Nations partition plan on Palestine, the 1948-1967 borders between the Palestinian territories and Israel, and a map of representing a proposed Palestinian state under a plan proposed by then-US President Donald Trump. Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images
It’s critical to consider that the slogan is used in different ways in different contexts, whether that’s in the US and other Western countries or in the Palestinian territories themselves, though the spirit may be similar.
People in the West Bank have also apparently used the Arabic translation of the phrase “to protest the Palestinian Authority, or the PA, when it compromises with Israel and when it collaborates with Israel to fragment the West Bank and Gaza,” Colla said. “It’s a protest against not just Israel and the United States but also those Palestinian leaders who have collaborated in the partition.”
PA President Mahmoud Abbas is deeply unpopular within the Palestinian community and particularly in the West Bank, where he has nominally been in charge since 2005. Abbas’s leadership has brought the West Bank not increased autonomy and hope for a Palestinian state but intensive surveillance and increased Jewish Israeli settler communities.
Hamas, which controls Gaza, also adopted a version of the phrase in its 2017 charter. The militant group previously called in its founding charter for the destruction of the Israeli state and killing Jewish people; though the more recent document allows for the possibility of a two-state solution according to the borders in effect prior to the 1967 war, Hamas has continued to attack Israel, most violently in the October 7 massacre.
But it is this question — whether the slogan allows room for a two-state solution or is calling for a one-state solution, and if the latter, which sort of singular state — that is at the root of the debate over the phrase.
It’s a slogan with multiple meanings to different groups of people
In the US, pro-Israel organizations such as the American Jewish Council and the Anti-Defamation League have called the phrase antisemitic because “it calls for the establishment of a State of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing the State of Israel and its people,” according to the American Jewish Committee’s definition. The AJC also calls it “a rallying cry for terrorist groups and their sympathizers, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to Hamas.”
It took on new meaning after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Holly Huffnagle, AJC’s US director for combating antisemitism, told Vox. “Antisemitism isn’t static, it’s dynamic.” (Though she insisted that “from the river to the sea” has always been antisemitic.) “We saw what ‘From the river to the sea’ looked like on October 7.”
Groups including Hamas and the PLO have called for the destruction of the state of Israel in the past — meaning the end of Israel as a political entity and the expulsion of Jewish people from what is now Israeli territory. Some groups and individuals may still use the phrase this way, but it’s worth noting that that outcome just isn’t plausible in the current context, in which Israel has strong support from powerful Western countries and has military and economic strength that far outmatches anything on the Palestinian side.
Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shia militia based in southern Lebanon, has also used the slogan in calling for the return of Palestine to the Palestinian people, as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah did in a 2020 speech .. https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-quds-day-speech-nasrallah-says-jews-must-leave-israel/ . “Palestine from the river to the sea is the property of the Palestinian people and they shall return to it,” Nasrallah said in the speech, adding that Jewish Israelis should leave. “Anything that has been stolen cannot become the legal property of a thief, even if the entire world recognizes its ownership.”
These uses can’t be dismissed and are the basis for understandable Israeli security fears. But in the US and other countries where there have been pro-Palestinian protests and calls for ceasefire, the phrase might mean something entirely different from what it means in the West Bank or in a speech by Nasrallah. In these cases, “the text is not [just] the words, the text is the performance” of the phrase, Colla said — people singing, dancing, embracing, and raising their fists in the context of a protest are all part of that performance, and its invocation of joy and solidarity. Those protesters — members of the Palestinian diaspora and their allies — are likely embracing the possibility of Palestinian liberation and calling for the dignity and full civil rights of Palestinians in their homeland.
If a two-state solution cannot be negotiated, the only plausible alternative that doesn’t perpetuate the unsustainable and unjust status quo is a democratic, secular state comprising Jewish Israelis and Palestinians and granting equal rights and political participation to all. That would, ultimately, mean the end of the state of Israel as a Jewish nation — both because the Palestinian population would be roughly equivalent to the Jewish population and in terms of national identity. Many pro-Israel activists and Jewish people consider this possibility to be painful at least and genocidal at most.
But some, like Alon-Lee Green, a Jewish Israeli and one of the leaders along with Palestinian Israeli activist Sally Abed of the peace movement Standing Together, insist that this is the only way forward. As Abed put it, the Jewish state has failed both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.
“The question is, how do we create a system that provides equality and freedom for all, without the necessity of controlling millions of people militarily, without giving them rights,” Abed said.
A slogan can’t encompass a political platform or political change
Like Hamas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own right-wing Likud party used a version of the slogan “from the river to the sea” in its platform,as the Associated Press reported .. https://apnews.com/article/river-sea-israel-gaza-hamas-protests-d7abbd756f481fe50b6fa5c0b907cd49 . That platform, issued in 1977 during the height of the Palestinian armed resistance movement, denied any possibility of a two-state solution and called for only Israeli sovereignty “between the Sea and the Jordan.” In decades since, it has “traditionally supported the idea of the whole Land of Israel, even if it has not always defined the state’s borders precisely,” according to the Israel Democracy Institute. Likud under Netanyahu has opposed a two-state solution .. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/world/middleeast/benjamin-netanyahu-campaign-settlement.html .. and instituted a basic law in 2018 declaring that the right of national self-determination in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” That further entrenched the inequality between the country’s Jewish and Palestinian citizens, who make up about 21 percent of the population in Israel.
Netanyahu’s rhetoric and that of the early Likud party echo the aims of extremist Jewish Israeli settler activists like Daniella Weiss, whom New Yorker writer Isaac Chotiner .. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extreme-ambitions-of-west-bank-settlers .. interviewed for a November story. To Weiss, the borders of “the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest,” which, as Chotiner notes, includes territory currently in many Middle Eastern nations, including Egypt and Iraq.
In Weiss and other extremist settlers’ view, Palestinians who live in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem should accept that “We the Jews are the sovereigns in the state of Israel and in the Land of Israel,” she told Chotiner, and should not have the right to vote in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. Though Weiss’s views are extreme, she is a leader of a large and growing Israeli settler movement that has significant power in the government via allies like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir.
[Heh, guess Capon and many other gang leaders from his time to now have said similar things about other residents in their neighborhoods. ]
In response to Israel’s increasingly right-wing government — and its war in Gaza — the slogan has become increasingly prominent in pro-Palestinian circles, and the discourse around it is increasingly fraught.
“Activist groups compose and adapt and revise slogans — oftentimes they recycle old things and kind of spruce them up or change them to serve whatever the specific context is that they’re protesting,” Colla said. “So in that context, slogans are highly occasion-specific, just as protests are.”
Tlaib, for example, was censured by her colleagues in Congress for her response to the war in Gaza, particularly the attack on Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital, using the phrase in a video posted to the social network X on November 3.
As Vox’s Li Zhou wrote, the censure resolution accused Tlaib of ”calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.”
One of the flashpoints was a slogan used in a video she shared on social media — calling for freedom “from the river to the sea” — which critics say calls for the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state and which advocates say calls for Palestinian freedom.”
Tlaib explained in a following post what the slogan means to her, calling it an “aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”
Ultimately, slogans are a distraction from the conversations that matter; slogans aren’t a substitute for a political vision that actually works for the people who live in Israel and the Palestinian territories and brings sustainable peace, Green told Vox.
“Slogans like ‘decolonization’ and ‘from the river to the sea,’ when they don’t say clearly, ‘Israeli-Palestinian peace, Jews and Palestinians living together,’ when they don’t take under consideration the very simple, undeniable fact that millions of Palestinians will remain on this land, and millions of Jewish people will remain on this land, and that’s the starting point for any solution,” Green said, “then you’re just working on something so theoretical, something so unconnected to our reality.”
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