A slogan is a small thing, a handful of words easily chanted and easily dismissed, and yet slogans have a power out of all proportion to their size, for they compress a whole worldview into a phrase that a crowd can shout and a child can learn. Few slogans of our day have traveled farther or been chanted by more throats than the one that demands a Palestine free from the river to the sea, and few have been more fiercely disputed in their meaning. To its chanters in the Western street it sounds like a cry for freedom and justice; to the Jewish ear it sounds like a sentence of death. Both cannot be right about what the words finally mean, and the disagreement is not trivial, for it concerns nothing less than whether the most fashionable slogan of the age is a call for coexistence or a call for the elimination of a nation. We propose to examine it honestly, in its geography, its history, its original language, and its fruits, and to let the evidence settle what the chant itself leaves ambiguous.

We approach the question without assuming the worst of every individual who has ever repeated the words, for slogans are often chanted by people who have never examined them, drawn by the music of the phrase and the company of the crowd rather than by any settled intent. Many a student who has shouted it would be horrified at the meaning its authors poured into it, and to such people the honest examination is not an accusation but an education. Our quarrel is not with the confused and the well-meaning who have taken up a chant they do not understand; it is with the meaning the chant was made to carry, and with those who know that meaning and conceal it behind the language of justice.

The Geography of the Phrase

Begin with the plain geography, for the words name a territory, and the territory tells the tale. The river is the Jordan, which runs down the eastern edge of the land; the sea is the Mediterranean, which bounds it on the west. Between the river and the sea lies the whole of the land—not a portion of it, not the territories disputed since one war or another, but all of it: the State of Israel together with the West Bank and Gaza, every acre from the eastern border to the western shore. To call for a Palestine that stretches from the river to the sea is therefore to call for a Palestine that occupies the entire territory, leaving no room beside it for any other state. The geography is not ambiguous. The phrase describes the whole land, and a whole-land Palestine is, by simple arithmetic, a land with no Israel in it.

This is the fact that no amount of reinterpretation can finally evade. Whatever the chanter intends, the phrase he chants describes a single state covering the entire territory, and there is no version of that single state that leaves the Jewish state standing, for the two claims occupy the same ground and cannot both be satisfied. One may argue about what is to become of the Jews who live there—and we shall come to that—but one cannot argue that the slogan leaves Israel in place, for a Palestine from the river to the sea is, in its very definition, a Palestine that has replaced Israel. The geography forecloses the coexistence reading before the debate over intent even begins, for there is no line on the map at which the river-to-the-sea Palestine and the State of Israel can both exist.

The Word in Its Own Tongue

The English version of the slogan is, in fact, the softened one, and the honest examiner must attend to the original, for the Arabic versions that have accompanied and underlie it are often more explicit about the character of the state envisioned. Where the English speaks vaguely of a Palestine that is free, the Arabic has frequently specified that Palestine is to be Arab, or Islamic—not a binational democracy of equal citizens but an Arab and Muslim state from the river to the sea, which is a very different thing. The rhyming Arabic couplet from which the slogan descends speaks of a Palestine that is Arab in its character and identity across the whole territory, and that specification answers, in advance, the question the English leaves open. A state defined as Arab and Islamic across the entire land is not a state in which a Jewish national home survives; it is a state that has supplanted it.

This matters because the defenders of the slogan in the West almost always argue from the English, and from its vaguest possible construction, while the slogan’s power in the region from which it comes derives from the Arabic and its plain sense. To debate only the softened translation is to debate a version of the slogan that its originators did not mean and its most committed users do not chant. The honest test of a phrase’s meaning is not the most charitable construction a foreign sympathizer can place upon it but the meaning it carries among those who coined it and those who chant it with knowledge of its history. And by that test the river-to-the-sea slogan has, from its origins, named a single Arab and Islamic state across the whole land—which is to say, the replacement of Israel.

What ‘Free’ Requires

Press now on the crucial word, the word free, for everything turns on what the land is to be freed from. In the mouth of the slogan, Palestine is to be liberated from the river to the sea—but liberated from what? The only thing occupying the territory that the slogan does not claim is the Jewish state and the Jewish presence that sustains it. To free the whole land, therefore, is to free it of Israel, and to free it of Israel is, at the least, to end Jewish sovereignty over every part of it, and at the most—in the mouths of the movements we have examined—to remove the Jews themselves. The innocent-sounding word free conceals, in this construction, a program of removal, for one cannot free a land of a people without removing that people’s presence, by emigration, by subjugation, or by worse.

Here the slogan rejoins the themes of this whole series, for the question of what is to become of the Jews of a river-to-the-sea Palestine has been answered, by the movements that chant it most fervently, in the language we have already traced—the covenant of annihilation, the dhimmi subjugation, the cult of death. The kindest construction the committed advocate offers is that the Jews might remain as a tolerated minority under Arab and Islamic rule, which is to say, restored to the dhimmi condition that Israel was created to abolish forever. The harshest construction needs no spelling out. In neither case does the Jewish nation survive as a free and sovereign people, and the word free in the slogan turns out to mean, for the Jew, the precise opposite of freedom.

The Defenders’ Reading

We owe the contrary case its fullest and fairest statement, for it is sincerely made by many. The defenders of the slogan insist that it is a call not for elimination but for liberation—for the freeing of the Palestinian people from occupation and inequality, for a single democratic state in which Arabs and Jews would live together as equal citizens from the river to the sea, with no one expelled and no one subjugated. On this reading the slogan is the very opposite of genocidal; it is a vision of shared and equal belonging, and to hear in it a call for the destruction of the Jews is, they say, a slander that confuses a demand for justice with a threat of murder. This reading is held sincerely by many who chant the words, and it deserves to be heard and weighed rather than dismissed.

And it must be granted that, taken purely as an abstract proposition, a single democratic state of equal citizens is not in itself a call for anyone’s destruction; one can imagine, in the abstract, a chanter who means exactly that and nothing worse. The honest examiner concedes that not every voice raising the slogan intends the elimination of the Jews, and that some intend precisely the coexistence they describe. But a slogan is not an abstract proposition; it is a historical artifact with authors and a pedigree and a record of use, and the question is not what an innocent construction might make it mean but what those who forged it and those who wield it have meant by it. And on that question the abstract defense runs aground, for the single-state vision it describes has never been what the slogan’s originators sought, and the record of its use tells a different story than the defense.

The Test of the Authors

The decisive test of a slogan’s meaning is the intent of those who made it and the conduct of those who chant it most fervently, and by that test the eliminationist reading prevails. The slogan did not arise among advocates of a binational democracy of equal citizens; it arose and spread among movements whose charters and conduct we have already examined—movements that have never sought a shared state of equal Arabs and Jews but the replacement of the Jewish state by an Arab and Islamic one, and that have pursued that replacement by war and terror rather than by the ballot of a shared democracy. When the movement that wrote a covenant of annihilation chants the slogan, it does not suddenly mean by it a liberal vision it has explicitly repudiated; it means by it what its covenant says. The slogan’s most committed users are precisely those who have ruled out the coexistence the Western defenders read into it.

The maps tell the same tale as the charters. The movements and institutions that chant the slogan most fervently display, again and again, maps of the land in which Israel does not appear at all—the whole territory from the river to the sea colored as Palestine, the Jewish state simply erased, not reduced or bordered but absent. A map is a statement of aspiration, and a map that shows the whole land as Palestine with no Israel upon it is the slogan rendered in cartography: it depicts not two states, nor one shared state, but a single Palestine that has replaced the Jewish state entirely. The textbooks that carry these maps, the broadcasts that display them, the official emblems that incorporate them—all confirm that the river-to-the-sea aspiration, among those who hold it most seriously, is the aspiration to a land with no Israel in it, however the slogan may be softened for foreign ears.

The Laundering on the Campus

The slogan’s remarkable career in the Western street and on the Western campus is a case study in the laundering we examined in our study of the Hamas charter, and it deserves notice here, for it is how a phrase of elimination came to be chanted by people who would recoil from elimination. Carried abroad and stripped of its Arabic specificity and its eliminationist pedigree, the slogan is received by many sympathetic Westerners as a generic cry for justice, its history unknown and its plain geography unexamined, until people who sincerely oppose all bigotry find themselves chanting a phrase that names the erasure of a nation. The laundering is effective precisely because the launderers can point to the charitable construction—the single democratic state of equal citizens—as the slogan’s real meaning, even as the movements that coined it mean by it what their charters say.

The Christian’s task here is the unglamorous one of restoring the history that the laundering erases. He need not impute murderous intent to every confused student; he need only insist, patiently and against the fashion, on the facts the slogan’s defenders pass over—the geography that leaves no room for Israel, the Arabic that specifies an Arab and Islamic state, the charters that rule out coexistence, the maps that erase the Jewish state. To bring the conversation back from the laundered abstraction to the concrete record is not to slander the well-meaning; it is to give them the knowledge that the launderers withheld, and to let them decide, in full possession of the facts, whether the phrase they are chanting means what they thought it meant. The euphemism is the slogan’s passport into the decent world, and the antidote is simply the truth about where it came from and what it has always meant to those who forged it.

The Echo of an Older Cry

The slogan did not appear from nowhere, and its true character is illumined by the cry it descends from, for before there was a chant about the river and the sea there was a cruder and more candid one—the threat, raised in the years around Israel’s founding, to drive the Jews into the sea. That older cry needed no interpretation; it named, in plain words, the destruction of the Jewish presence by pushing it off the edge of the land and into the water. The river-to-the-sea slogan is the same geography turned the other way: where the old cry threatened to drive the Jews to the sea, the new one claims the land from the river all the way to that same sea. The sea is the same sea, and the aspiration is the same aspiration, refined for a more squeamish age into language that can pass on a campus.

To hear the slogan against the background of its ancestor is to understand why the Jewish ear receives it as a threat and not a hope. The Jew who hears from the river to the sea does not hear it in a vacuum; he hears it as the latest form of a cry that has pursued him since before the state was born, the cry for a land cleansed of his presence, and he files it, as we noted earlier in this series, beside every other announcement of intended removal that the comfortable dismissed and the event confirmed. The continuity from drive them into the sea to a Palestine from the river to the sea is not an accident of phrasing; it is the persistence of a single aspiration across the decades, learning, with each defeat, to speak a little more carefully to the world while meaning, to those who coined it, very much the same thing.

Why Two States Was Never the Point

The slogan also answers, more honestly than its chanters may intend, the long-debated question of why the two-state solution has so persistently failed, for the slogan is a two-state solution’s explicit negation. A genuine two-state vision would speak of a Palestine beside Israel, the two sharing the land between river and sea; the slogan speaks of a Palestine that is the whole of it, from the river to the sea, with no Israel beside it at all. Those who chant it are not asking for the Palestinian state that has been offered and re-offered across the decades; they are rejecting, in the very words of the chant, the premise that the land is to be shared, and claiming the whole of it for one side. The slogan is the confession that the maximalist aim was never a state alongside Israel but a state instead of Israel.

This is why the offers of partition—made in 1937, in 1947, at Camp David, at Taba, and since—were refused, and why their refusal puzzles those who assume both sides sought the same two states. One side, for long stretches, did seek two states; the other, animated by the aspiration the slogan names, sought the whole land, and could not accept a partition that conceded the permanence of any Jewish state on any part of it. The slogan strips away the diplomatic ambiguity and states the maximalist position plainly: not a fair division of the land between river and sea, but the whole of it, freed of the Jewish state. To understand the slogan is to understand why peace has been so elusive, for one cannot partition a land with a movement that has defined its aim as possessing all of it.

The Inversion of Justice

There is a deep and bitter irony in the slogan’s success, for it has managed to clothe a program of national elimination in the language of liberation and justice, and thereby to recruit the moral energies of decent people to a cause whose true aim they would abhor. The vocabulary of the slogan—freedom, liberation, the ending of oppression—is the vocabulary of every just cause, and it is borrowed precisely because it disarms moral scrutiny: who, after all, could oppose freedom? But the freedom the slogan names is the freedom of a land from a people, and the liberation it seeks is the liberation of a territory by the removal of the nation that lives there. To dress the elimination of a state in the borrowed robes of justice is among the great propaganda achievements of the age, and it has turned the moral instincts of the compassionate into a weapon against the very people—the Jewish people—who have most often been justice’s victims.

This inversion is why the slogan must be answered not only with facts but with a recovery of moral clarity, for the deepest deception it works is upon the conscience. It persuades the tender-hearted that they are standing for the oppressed when they are in fact chanting the erasure of a nation; it recruits the love of justice to the service of injustice; it makes the elimination of the one Jewish state on earth feel like a blow for human dignity. To answer it, the believer must do more than correct the geography; he must restore the moral frame the slogan has inverted, insisting that the survival of a people is not oppression, that the self-defense of a nation is not occupation in the sense the slogan implies, and that a chant for the removal of the Jewish state is not a cry for justice however sincerely the love of justice may have been enlisted in its support.

From the River to the Sea: the Other Voice

And now we come to the deepest matter, the one the Christian alone may be positioned to see, for the very geography the slogan claims for the erasure of Israel is the geography the God of Israel claimed, long before, for her possession. From the river to the sea is not first the language of Israel’s enemies; it is, in substance, the language of the covenant. To Abraham the LORD said, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates; and to the people at Sinai He promised to set their bounds from the sea even unto the sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth. The sweep of land that the slogan would empty of Jews is the very sweep of land that God deeded to the Jews by an oath He swore to their fathers. The phrase the enemies of Israel chant for her removal is a dark echo and inversion of the promise God made for her possession.

Once this is seen, the slogan appears in its true light—not merely as a political program but as a contest of covenants, the same contest we met in the Hamas charter, fought now over the same stretch of ground the Almighty marked out for His people. The men who chant the erasure of Israel from the river to the sea are contending, whether they know it or not, against a deed of grant signed by the God who made the river and the sea, and recorded in a covenant He has sworn never to revoke. They claim the land for Palestine; He has given it to the seed of Abraham. They would free it of the Jew; He has planted the Jew in it, no more to be pulled up. The slogan sets the word of the chanting crowd against the word of the covenant-keeping God, and between those two words there is no real contest, however long and bloody the appearance of one may be.

A Question for the Chanter

To the sincere and decent person who has chanted the slogan believing it a cry for justice, we owe not a denunciation but a question, asked in good faith and worth sitting with. If the slogan truly means a single state of equal citizens, Arab and Jew alike, secure and free from the river to the sea—then why is it chanted most fervently by movements that have explicitly rejected any such state, that have written covenants of annihilation, that display maps with no Israel upon them, and that have pursued their aim by the murder of Jewish civilians rather than by any campaign for shared and equal citizenship? A vision of coexistence does not arm itself with a covenant of annihilation. If the slogan meant what its gentlest defenders say, its loudest users would not be the very movements that have ruled coexistence out.

The honest chanter, pressed by that question, faces a choice, and it is the choice the whole examination has been driving toward. He may discover that the phrase he took for a cry of justice was forged by those who meant by it the erasure of a nation, and lay it down; or he may keep chanting it while telling himself that his private construction overrides the meaning its authors and its fiercest users have always given it. The first is the path of honesty, and many who have walked it have set the slogan aside with relief once they understood it. The second is the path of willed self-deception, and it ends with a decent person lending his voice, knowingly now, to an aspiration he would never endorse if it were stated plainly. The question is a gift, for it offers the first path; and the believer asks it not to shame but to free.

The Believer’s Response

How then shall the believer answer the slogan of the age? Not with a counter-chant of hatred, and not with contempt for the many who repeat it without understanding, but with patient truth and recovered clarity. He restores the history the laundering erased—the geography, the Arabic, the charters, the maps—so that the well-meaning may know what they chant. He refuses the inversion that dresses elimination as justice, insisting that the survival of a people is not oppression and that a chant for the removal of the Jewish state is no cry for freedom. And he distinguishes, carefully and charitably, between the confused who have taken up a phrase they do not understand and the committed who know exactly what it means; to the first he offers the truth as a gift, and the second he simply, soberly, refuses to follow.

And he lifts his eyes, last of all, from the slogan of men to the promise of God, and finds his confidence there. The crowds may chant the erasure of Israel from the river to the sea; but the river and the sea, and all the land between them, belong to the LORD, who gave that land to His people by an everlasting covenant and has sworn that He will plant them in it and not pluck them up again. The slogan is loud, and it is fashionable, and it has gathered the energies of the age behind it; but it is, in the end, only the word of men, and the word of men passes away. From the river to the sea the land was promised to the seed of Abraham by the mouth of the LORD; and what the mouth of the LORD has promised, no slogan, however widely chanted, shall ever overturn. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, and the chant shall fade with them; but the word of our God shall stand for ever, and with it the people and the land He has joined by His own unbreakable oath.