“From the river to the sea, Israel will be free. »
Okay, that’s not how things are supposed to go, is it? But in this moment of war and mass death, this proposition deserves reflection: Palestine cannot be free without Israel – or at least Israelis – being free. True freedom between the river and the sea can only be achieved by freeing ourselves from the chains of settler colonialism but also from the narrow confines of the nation-state.
Before explaining further, let me address the current debate over the slogan “from the river to the sea”.
When most Israelis, and undoubtedly a significant number of Palestinians, hear the phrase “from the river to the sea,” they imagine it in exclusivist terms. It’s not surprising.
The zero-sum conception of the nation-state – a specific territory under the exclusive control of a national community – has been the defining community identity for at least four centuries. Its logic is as simple as it is violent: if this territory belongs to my group, it cannot belong to yours.
Not every country’s identity and politics are based on this logic, but many are. Even countries with a long tradition of intercommunal tolerance can quickly veer into chauvinism.
The dynamic is even clearer in colonial societies, where the settler community must conquer the territory and subjugate or expel the indigenous population in order to build its own society. Genocide is most often a central experience of this process.
Israel is, of course, the quintessence of colonial society; but it is also a model whose maximalist impulse has not yet been realized. Palestinians have not been reduced to a small, manageable minority who can be granted formal political rights and then ignored, repressed and expelled without significant resistance – as was the case with Native Americans and Australians.
Given the violence inherent in colonialism, indigenous resistance has naturally been imagined by settler societies as a reflection of their eliminationist impulses and policies: we want them to disappear and will commit whatever violence is necessary to achieve this goal, they must so want it and would do it. the same. It is not surprising that when resistance takes the form of mass violence, as happened on October 7, this imagination is powerfully reinforced.
In this context, when most Zionist Israelis and supporters of Israel hear the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, they hear “a genocidal call for violence to destroy the State of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The fact that some Palestinians, particularly Hamas, have leaned heavily into a violently exclusivist connotation of the phrase only reinforces this idea.
But Hamas has never represented most Palestinians, despite concerted efforts by the movement and successive Israeli governments (for very different reasons) to elevate its status. His popularity in Gaza, even his control, had declined considerably before the October 7 attack.
Into this deeply dysfunctional mix enters Rep. Rashida Tlaib, currently the only Palestinian American member of the United States Congress. Along with her colleague Ilhan Omar and occasionally other members of “The Squad,” she has been the only national political voice to unhesitatingly defend Palestinian rights.
For the vast majority of her colleagues in Congress and most of those who describe themselves as “pro-Israel,” Tlaib’s use of the slogan “from the river to the sea” definitively marked her as an enemy of Israel. This is why, on November 6, it was officially censored by the House of Representatives.
Of course, the Palestinians are not the only ones advocating a “river to sea” discourse. This has more or less been the official policy of the Israeli state since 1967, when it occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Since then, all Israeli governments have pushed for the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, making the two-state solution impossible long before the Oslo peace process began.
In the Israeli political space, from the far right to the liberal left, the idea of sharing land with the Palestinians on an equal footing has never been on the table.
The problem facing Israel – like other colonial powers – is that indigenous populations rarely, if ever, show gentleness on this good night. The founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, would not have disagreed with the argument Tlaib made in the aftermath of the Hamas attack that the “suffocating and dehumanizing conditions” of the ongoing occupation “lead inevitably to resistance.”
Exactly a century ago, in his 1923 manifesto, The Iron Wall, he advocated overwhelming Jewish power to transform Palestine, from river to sea, into a Jewish ethno-state, precisely because of the inevitability of Palestinian resistance.
Regardless of which camp one is on, as long as one’s understanding of the “river to sea” discourse is filtered through the prism of the inherently colonial nation-state, one person’s imagination of others possibilities will be severely limited. And a much broader imagination is precisely what we most desperately need today, not only to establish freedom, justice and peace for all the inhabitants of Palestine/Israel in the midst of the current horror, but also to resolve the countless existential problems of humanity, in which the Israeli occupation is deeply rooted.
In this regard, Tlaib’s argument – echoed by countless Palestinian activists and their allies, including many Jews – that “from the river to the sea is an ambitious call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hatred” represents a radically post-nationalist imagination of the future in Palestine and Israel. In fact, it is a policy that Palestinians on the front lines of the occupation, joined by Israeli and international solidarity activists, have been putting into practice, albeit hesitantly and against overwhelming force, for decades, as anyone else engaged in solidarity work in the occupied territories will bear witness to this.
Share a common meal in Nabi Saleh or Bil’in, Atwani or in the Jordan Valley after a day spent planting or harvesting olive trees, accompanying children to school, facing Israeli settlers, bulldozers or tear gas – and now fighting together on a daily basis in the United States and throughout the West is repeating an experience common to the Freedom Riders, the multiracial African National Congress and others who fought for freedom.
Intercommunity solidarity and common action for a common future were at the heart of all these struggles, because they pushed us to imagine possibilities for sharing land, resources and power that previously seemed naive, far-fetched, even dangerous.
Every day, more Jews and others join Palestinians in causing precisely the kind of “good trouble” that helped end — however imperfectly — apartheid in America and South Africa , as well as formal colonial rule in the countries of the South. There is a growing awareness, particularly among young people, that the issues in Gaza extend beyond Palestine and Israel, representing the front lines of a battle for the future, for possibility that humanity will not be engulfed by increasing violence and inequality as we move toward ever more deadly threats to our collective survival.
For those still locked in binary identities and secure in an increasingly psychopathic global capitalist system, a free Palestine from the river to the sea – indeed, a truly free, equal and sustainable world – remains an unthinkable proposition.
But as the latest wave of violence confirms, Israel cannot be free until Palestine is free, and the price of that freedom is true decolonization. This means the creation of a political order, whatever its name or form, in which all people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be granted the same fundamental rights and freedoms.
Faced with the horrors of Gaza, we should work to encourage true decolonization, not only in Israel/Palestine, but around the world, before violence engulfs us all.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
