Last month, at the request of Queen Mary senior management, university maintenance broke into the offices of the local UCU branch to tear down two posters expressing solidarity with Palestine. One of the posters, produced by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (which the UCU is affiliated with) called to ‘end apartheid’ and contained the slogan ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’.  The university management have claimed that some ‘students, staff and visitors…consider the slogan anti-semitic and threatening’ and, in a bizarre irony, justified the union office raid on the basis of their Code of Practice on Free Speech.

From the perspective of Palestinians, the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free’ is a call for a political future in which Palestinians can live in freedom and equality, an end to occupation and discrimination, and the right of refugees to return to their land. As Maha Nassar has written, ‘the majority of Palestinians who use this phrase do so because they believe that, in 10 short words, it sums up their personal ties, their national rights and their vision for the land they call Palestine’. As Youssef Munayyer writes, ‘the phrase “from the river to the sea” captures this future as no other can, because it encompasses the entire space in which Palestinian rights are denied. It is in this space that Palestinians seek to live freely. It is across this space—and across the political and geographic divisions that Israeli rule has imposed—that Palestinians must unite to create change. It is this space that Palestinians call home, regardless of what anyone else calls it.’ 

However,  Israel and its supporters have attempted to weaponise the slogan and claim it as anti-semitic. This must be challenged. How can one group’s call for freedom, dignity and justice for all, be construed as racist and anti-semitic? The reality is that this weaponisation is part of a much broader propaganda campaign to justify Israel’s occupation of Palestine, its system of apartheid and its policy and practice of settler colonialism. 

Following the 1948 Nakba during which Palestine was effectively lost to Zionist terrorist organisations, some 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 750,000 were forever driven from their homes. Palestinians henceforth were prevented from living ‘with full freedom and dignity anywhere in their homeland’. Those who remained in what was now Israel lived as second-class citizens while those ‘contained’ in what have become the prisons of Gaza and the West Bank were subjected to restrictions over every aspect of their lives. 

As B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have made clear, there is already one regime which controls all aspects of life from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea and that is Israel. Israel’s weaponisation of the Palestinian aspiration for freedom, embodied in the slogan, is a calculated propaganda tactic, in an armoury of such tactics, to victimise the oppressors and demonise the oppressed. Israel has made it abundantly and explicitly clear that it wants the whole territory of historic Palestine for a ‘Greater Israel’. What is ultimately at stake in criminalising expressions of Palestinian freedom is the nature of the regime – Israel’s central ethno-religious organising goal of a Jewish-Zionist supremacist state in which the indigenous Palestinians have no place.

As Gaza undergoes a genocidal assault, the slogan represents a rejection of the brutal reality of settler colonialism, occupation and apartheid in favour of equal human rights and equal freedom for everyone living in historic Palestine, regardless of religion or ethnicity.

As Maha Nassar has again written, ‘What Palestinians do want is equal rights. They want to be able work hard to achieve their dreams without being discriminated against. They want to be able to live where they choose without being told they can’t because of their ethnicity or religion. They want to be able to choose the leaders who control their lives. In other words, they want freedom. And they want that freedom throughout their historic homeland, not just on the 22% that comprise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

To subscribe to Israel’s interpretation of the slogan is an act of racist ‘othering’, a silencing and denial of the Palestinian voice and identity. ‘From the River to the Sea’ expresses a legitimate and historic aspiration for Palestinian freedom, equality and dignity. The notion that a free Palestine threatens the very existence of Israeli Jews is wrong, ignorant of Palestinian aspirations and racist in its very assumptions.

We should all be calling for a secular state in which Palestinians and Israelis of all faiths and none can live together with dignity, equal rights and mutual respect. This is what ‘From the River to the Sea’ means.

Queen Mary, University of London, Guest Writer