🤥 “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is proof of anti-Semitism and a call for genocide.

This slogan is a call for freedom for Palestinians and an end of apartheid in historic Palestine. It is neither a call for genocide nor anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it represents the hope of creating a single secular, democratic state where all people are equal and free from discrimination.

Anti-Semitism is not to be confused with anti-Zionism. Judaism is a religion and anti-Semitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. Zionism is an ideology founded in the expansionist concept of a Greater Israel to be built from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, Zionism was the movement that first coined the phrase “from the river to the sea.” Anti-Zionism is a movement responding to the plan to create a Greater Israel on the ashes of historic Palestine from the river to the sea, without Palestinians in it.

The only genocide that has been committed on the territories between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has been carried out by the State of Israel. There are also ample examples of ethnic cleansing committed by Zionists since 1948 in the same territory (i.e. from the river to the sea).

To suggest that freedom for Palestinians can only come at the expense of Israelis is to suggest that the existence of Israel can only come at the expense of Palestinians’ freedom. This is an absurd contention, as there is room for coexistence of all people in the land of historic Palestine, in freedom and equality.

Misrepresenting and weaponizing the slogan as a call for a genocide has led to a McCarthyist response to the call to end a ruthless occupation and for the freedom of the Palestinians living under this occupation. The right to protest, the freedom to have an opinion and livelihoods have been curtailed, threatened, or destroyed because this slogan has been hijacked by a political agenda to continue supporting Israel and its war in Gaza.

It’s wild that we’re being sucked into massive, deflective  arguments over the “nuances” of protest slogans while Israeli officials are straight up, without metaphor or obscurity, stating that the intention  of the 2023-2024 onslaught in Gaza  is to erase all signs of Palestinian existence, including the Palestinians.

Is this a better slogan? From parts of area A to parts of area B Palestine will be a non-contiguous, non sovereign unviable non-state with no control of borders or access to the sea, all pending final status negotiations which will never take place and Gaza remains an isolated ghetto.

“From the river to the sea” is also interpreted as a death knell to the unviable two-state solution, and a call for one state for all peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Zionists fear this not because it will result in the displacement of Jews, but rather it would mark the demise of the Jewish ethno-state and would require the equal treatment of Palestinians. That’s what they are truly afraid of.

We must differentiate Judaism from Zionism. Judaism is a religion, while Zionism is a nationalist, supremacist movement with racist ideologies. Until the 1990s, the UN classified Zionism as a racist movement, a designation that shifted primarily due to political pressure from the U.S.