From the River to The Sea: An Intro to Palestine Solidarity

11/30/2023

- Israel / Palestine

7.5 Minute Read

by Ken Barrios

We have hit an overdue tipping point in US solidarity with Palestine. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are starting to see through the Zionism of US culture and politics. On November 4, 300,000 people marched on Washington, DC to stop the genocide of Palestinians. However, the instinctive flowering of this solidarity has not been matched with political education.

The gulf between instinct and education manifested in the mixed response to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s use of the slogan, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. This led to her censure in Congress, but it also stirred debate about whether or not the slogan is appropriate among layers of comrades just starting to learn about Palestine.

While there will always be bad-faith arguments against expressions of Palestinian solidarity, we have to be able to honestly and patiently take on concerns from those that are new to the movement. Just as our society tries to indoctrinate us with racism, transphobia, etc it also pushes Zionism. So let's use this as an opportunity to better understand the slogan and address other common questions.

First things first

“From the river to the sea” is chanted at all Palestine solidarity events. It would be impossible to attend a pro-Palestine event without hearing this chanted by all attendees, without malice or violence. Everyone that has supported Palestine has chanted this for years. Everyone new to the movement will hear it in the years to come.

What does the slogan mean?

“From the river to the sea” is referencing the geography of historic Palestine: from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Before World War I, the territory of Palestine was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. With the fall of the Ottomans, the entire Middle East was carved up by the British and French empires through the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Britain took control of Palestine and then worked with Zionists to begin colonial settlement as decreed in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Zionists gradually moved to Palestine in the 1890s, building up their forces with British aid, until launching Plan Dalet in 1948, establishing the state of Israel. Plan Dalet violently displaced upwards of 750,000 Palestinians: some ending up in Gaza (along the Mediterranean), others in the West Bank (along the Jordan River), and others into the global diaspora. This ethnic cleansing is remembered as “Al-Nakba” (i.e. “The Catastrophe”).

To this day, Gaza and the West Bank remain open-air prisons where Palestinians face economic blockades and military attacks, while being denied access to their historic lands, now controlled by Israel. In addition, Zionist settlers continue to steal land in the West Bank, shrinking it and dividing Palestinian communities within. In other words, since 1917, Palestinians have been denied self-determination on the land “from the river to the sea”. It is freedom to self-determination on their land that they demand.

Maps of Palestine colonized since 1946

What would a “Free Palestine” look like?

No one can see into the future. What organizers can do is influence the trajectory of events with our politics and look for parallels in history.

All nations, all social movements contain political wings (left and right). The left-wing of the Palestinian liberation movement has always fought for one, secular, democratic state for all. This call has historically been the dominant voice within the movement, until the top-down Oslo Accords imposed a two-state solution in 1993. But as the two-state solution has dragged on with no progress in 30 years, the call for a one state solution has made its way back.

So while it is true that more conservative forces within the Palestinian liberation movement will try to use the slogan in their own way, we can’t allow the right-wing of the freedom movement to dictate the course and slogans of the struggle.

All slogans, movements, and political organizations are contested spaces and it is up to leftists to fight for and define them. If you want a negative example of this, remember that Israel helped create Hamas as an alternative to the left-wing and secular Palestinian organizations because they know that politics are contested.

If we look to history for analogous liberation movements, there is the struggle against South African apartheid. In South Africa, there was a colonial government with a minority white population that dominated a Black population through a combination of racist laws and mixed state/vigilante violence. The white settlers largely refused to collaborate to end their colonial privilege. Instead, the Black population had to wage a combined guerrilla insurgency alongside a peaceful and international “boycott apartheid” movement. In the end, the liberation movement was able to turn the South African regime into such an international pariah that apartheid fell without reciprocal violence against the white population.

While Israel and South Africa are different countries, this example gives us a glimpse into what it would look like to fight for a one state solution for all people “from the river to the sea” to live in freedom and peace.

What about all the violence?

The reality is that there is no getting around the fact that all colonial projects involve violence. But it's the violence of colonization that generates the violence of resistance. As another popular slogan goes, “resistance is justified when people are occupied”.

When thinking about the fear of Palestinian violence, we should interrogate why their resistance gives anyone pause, knowing that they face 75 years of colonization. Especially when, as of this writing, the genocide in Gaza has claimed well over 14,000 Palestinian lives in less than two months.

The resistance of Ukranians to Russian occupation does not give anyone pause. It is taken for granted that they have to repel the occupier by any means necessary. It should not be lost on anyone that there is a racialized component to who is allowed to resist and who is not, even if this is not consciously or deliberately expressed.

The fact is that no one can promise that an anti-colonial movement won’t involve violence because colonialism itself is founded on it. What can be promised is that the only way to break the cycle of violence requires ending colonization in the first place. For those of us living in the US, that means finding ways to end US military and financial aid to Israel, which is what fuels their colonial project.

Doesn’t Israel have a right to exist?

People have a right to exist. Palestinians have a right to exist. Jewish people have a right to exist.

But governments are human constructs, just like laws, gender roles, etc. Throughout history, governments around the world have risen and fallen, through collapse or revolution. There was a time before modern governments. With any luck, there will be a time when all modern governments have withered away.

No government has a “right to exist”, especially not a colonial government. The apartheid government of South Africa, for example, did not have a right to exist. France, famous for its French Revolution of 1789 which overthrew the monarchy of Louis XVI, is now in its fifth republic. In other words, governments come and go.

Even if one were to entertain that governments have a right to exist, we can probably agree that none should have the right to commit genocide or ethnic cleansing. The government of Israel certainly does not have the right to kill over 14,000 people, including 57 journalists, while bombing schools and hospitals, and cutting off access to water and electricity.

A secular, democratic, one-state solution for all peoples could provide that for everyone.

Isn’t anti-Zionism just anti-semitism?

To conflate anti-semitism with anti-Zionism is dangerous. Judaism is an approximately 4,000 year old religion, with no inherent politics to it. Zionism is a 129 year old right-wing political ideology of separatism and colonialism, wrapped in religious language, and embraced by anyone (Jewish or not) that supports the state of Israel.

The danger in conflating the two is that it opens up Palestinians, and the struggle for Palestinian liberation, to racist attack when it should be supported by all anti-racists, anti-colonialists, and progressives.

The other danger is that Zionism itself reinforces anti-semitism. To better understand how, it's helpful to look at the history of the Zionist movement.

Political Zionism is born from the Austrian journalist and theoretician, Theodor Herzl after he documented the 1894 Dreyfus Affair in Paris. According to Herzl’s diary, watching French society spread anti-semitic hate against Captain Alfred Dreyfus caused him to ‘achieve’, “...a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to combat anti-Semitism.” Herzl adopted a politics of separatism that embraced anti-semitism instead of fighting it.

While most of the international Jewish community looked to fight anti-semitism and stay in their home countries, the Zionists accepted the binary that people are either Jewish or anti-semitic. Worse, the Zionist embrace of anti-semitism also caused it to see anti-semites as allies because they shared the same goal: expel Jewish communities around the world and push them into Palestine.

They would go on to collaborate with Russian pogromists like Count Von Plehve and fascist parties like the Nazis to accelerate migration to Palestine. As if this wasn’t twisted enough, Zionists also organized to block Jews from getting refuge outside of Europe during the rise of facism. To quote David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, from a speech in 1938: “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative.”

This alliance with anti-semites continues to this day with Zionists welcoming support from hate-mongers like Donald Trump and even inviting known anti-semite John Hagee to speak at the recent pro-Israel rally in DC. This is not a mistake or confusion on the part of Zionists, but a recognition that they share a common goal of separatism and segregation.

In spite of all this hatefulness, anti-semitism has also always been resisted: by the Jewish community itself and its allies, especially the socialist and anarchist movements. The Dreyfus Affair, which Herzl saw as proof that anti-semitism could not be combatted, was also a call to action for French author Emile Zola. He responded to it by writing the famous article “J’accuse!”, which rallied support for Dreyfus and mobilized the French Left, and eventually led to Dreyfus’ negotiated “pardon” in 1899.

Where is the Palestinian non-violence?

We also shouldn’t forget that Palestinians have been engaged in non-violent protests like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement since 2005, and the non-violent Great March of Return from 2018-2019. In spite of these peaceful protests, the BDS movement has been falsely smeared as being “terrorist” and the peaceful protesters at the Great March of Return were violently attacked by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

This all needs to be kept in mind when politicians disingenuously lament the supposed absence of a peaceful “Palestinian Martin Luther King”.

As Palestinians have pointed out, a much bigger question is, where is the Zionist Martin Luther King? Why is there no peaceful Zionism? The simple fact is that there is no peaceful way to colonize.

Why is the US establishment so committed to Israel?

For the imperial powers, the Middle East has long been important for its essential transportation routes. Additionally, in the 1900s, rich petroleum fields were discovered.

During World War I, the British began to, “foment rebellion in the region to undermine the Turkish war effort”, by making various promises to different groups. At the end of the war, this largely resulted in the establishment of regimes friendly to Britain and France that would keep the Middle Eastern masses from revolting again. With the decline of Britain and France, and the rise of the US empire, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would become the top recipients of US military aid.

US support for Israel (and other authoritarian regimes) is steeped in controlling which imperial powers have access to these transport routes and oil fields, which don’t, and making sure they don’t fall under the democratic control of the masses. In other words, they always looked to avoid The 2011 Arab Spring, and they will do whatever they must to avoid it again.

Israel, as a state that is self-motivated to colonize Palestine, is positioned to both carry out military violence on behalf of the US and police the Middle East on its own initiative. This is why Biden has repeatedly stated that, “if there weren’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” This is also why, after the first month of the war on Gaza, only 34 out of 535 members of congress signed onto the “Ceasefire Now” resolution.

Conclusion

We can’t predict what will happen next. As of this writing, groups like US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), among many others, have been organizing massive demonstrations around the country. There have also been record-breaking mass marches around the world in solidarity with Palestine. But we don’t know what the practical ramifications will be for the immediate prospects of Palestinian liberation.

What we do know is that there is no going back. Just as Occupy mainstreamed politics of class and the 2020 Uprising mainstreamed politics of prison and police abolition, so too has this moment mainstreamed Palestine solidarity. Hopefully, this is only the beginning of our journey into political education on Palestine and into joining the struggle for one, secular, democratic state for all people, from the river to the sea.

Please see the list of resources below to find more books, podcasts, and articles to learn more.

Updated 09/30/24: Re-arranged text for "Doesn’t Israel have a right to exist?".

Updated 10/15/24: Further updates to "Doesn't Israel have a right to exist?" section after sitting with the Ta-Nehisi Coates interview on CBS and the Al Jazeera Plus segment on the impact of the genocide in Gaza on the Israeli economy. It feels like this question, and the one-state solution, are becoming sharper as the genocide drags on and the potential for this becoming a regional war escalates.

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