This past Wednesday, Nov. 8, a coalition of several student organizations rallied around Walking to the Sky to listen to students and community members speak about the conflict in Gaza and Israel; the speakers emphasized the need for a ceasefire, and gave impassioned and personal speeches about the need for Palestinian liberation.
Among the many chants that took place, one was significant enough to draw the attention of school administrators: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The phrase is so polarizing that President Jahanian sent out an email specifically condemning it, a rare decision.
“From the river to the sea” is a phrase that has been adopted by Hamas to describe their desire to reestablish a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and with it, the erasure of Jewish people from the Middle East. The association of these words with Hamas, a terrorist group with specifically violent and antisemitic aims, has turned it to hate speech in the eyes of many. But the use of this phrase at Wednesday’s rally deserves special consideration and context.
Symbols, phrases, and ideas are often adopted by hate groups in ways that shape their meaning, from something culturally significant as the Sanskrit swastika being adopted by Hitler, to something as culturally frivolous as Pepe the frog being adopted by fascists and racists on the internet. These symbols are not inherently hateful — no symbol inherently has any meaning, for that matter — but their usage by hate groups incurs a responsibility on the rest of society to end, or at least limit, their usage.
Note the use of “limit.” In the case of Pepe, you might not mean anything when you send your friend a sad frog meme, but you can’t avoid the association it now evokes. And critically, it is also used by hate groups in the context of memes — an outside observer may not reliably be able to tell, based on the context, which category your usage falls under. And as strangers on the internet, they don’t owe you that benefit of the doubt. At the end of the day, a meme isn’t that important, and you really ought not share that symbol.
In the case of the swastika however, its ancient and contextually different usage permits, in some cases, socially accepted depictions. Religious art that uses a non-rotated swastika, in a context very clearly unrelated to Germany or the Nazi Party, is not impossible to find, and generally not cause for controversy.
But some instances are not so cut-and-dry. Whether or not a hate symbol can be appropriately used in its pre-hate context is something we determine societally, and rarely will there be unanimity. Pepe and the swastika are perhaps very clear edge cases; one does not have justified usage, the other does.
The chant, “from the river, to the sea” lies somewhere in the middle, and the consensus on its acceptable usage feels about as remote as a consensus on a two-state solution. This week, the House censured Representative Rashida Tlaib for sharing a video on social media that featured protestors using the chant. Tlaib insists that the chant represents “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”
Analyzing the history of the chant gives substance to Tlaib’s claim. The phrase predates Hamas, and its usage by different Palestinian political groups has connoted different meanings over time. It was used by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1960s to call for a return to the original borders of Palestine when under British rule. As the conflict has shaped the borders over time, the meaning of the phrase shifted as well.
The American Defamation League asserts, in no uncertain terms, that the chant calls for “erasing and destroying the entire Jewish state..” According to the American Jewish Committee, “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.” Yet this interpretation is contested; Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington DC says that the chant is pointing out that “within this space, Palestinians live along with Israelis, but it’s the Palestinians that don’t have freedom”; in essence, a free Palestinian state does not necessarily demand the erasure of Jewish Israelis. Yet of course, many who use the chant demand precisely that.
The history and intended meaning of this chant — or more broadly, of any symbol — only matters as much as the effect it produces. Though those at the rally can plead ignorance of its meaning, or argue they did not intend to evoke the exterminationist rhetoric of Hamas, they cannot be fully exonerated if it alluded to it nonetheless. If a passerby heard these chants, particularly a Jewish student, it’s very likely that they would feel unsafe or fearful; nobody deserves to feel this way on our campus, and it’s our duty to ensure that does not happen.
The word of the month has been compassion, so let’s try to extend it to one another in this very case. The compassionate and forgiving assumption should be that your peers at the rally do not desire the extermination of Jews. Though it requires a great deal of patience, explaining the meaning of this phrase is important in educating one another about the conflict. We need to be on the same page about the meaning and history of these sorts of phrases to have productive discourse on the matter. And to provide context from the rally itself, one of the speakers who began a chant of “from the river to the sea” was a Jewish activist.
The truth of the matter is, this chant should not have been used. In any public demonstration on our campus, one of the highest priorities should be making sure not to antagonize other students or make anyone feel unsafe, and by using a chant with ambiguous and debated meaning, it appears to have caused exactly that. However, there should be a willingness from all parties to give the benefit of the doubt to one another and extend compassion. If we can’t do that on our own campus, how can we expect things to get better beyond it?
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