’From the river to the sea’ returns to campus – Why?

It’s fall, and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is back.

This year, I’m hoping the anger and fear that the phrase provoked last year can be replaced with curiosity and interest.

In 2018, I wrote an essay in the Forward unpacking the history of the phrase. In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the phrase became common in pro-Palestinian protests and a lightning rod in national conversations about free speech.

The American Jewish Committee condemned it as hate speech. U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Detroit-area Democrat who is of Palestinian origin, received a rare Congressional censure for saying it. And Elon Musk banished it from the X platform. 

Yet it continued to be chanted on university campuses, including the University of Arizona, where I teach Palestinian history.

Last fall,  a journalism student at another university who had read my piece wrote to me saying he was arguing with his mother about the meaning and intent behind the phrase. She was a descendant of Holocaust survivors and believed it was antisemitic. He was a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and often chanted it at rallies.

In November, a student group at George Washington University was suspended, in part for projecting these words onto a campus building. This spring, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed an executive order prohibiting protesters at the state’s public universities from chanting it. 

The debate over this phrase  reflects a larger generational divide in how Americans, including American Jews, view this conflict. 

Rather than demonizing young people who call for a free Palestine, or repressing free speech altogether, we should seek to understand why so many people — especially young people — are calling for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” 

Today’s young Americans are more diverse than any previous generation. They take pride in their commitment to tolerance and their engagement in social activism.Their activism tends to be guided by a belief that they have a responsibility to make the world a better place. And since they tend to get their news  from social media, they see and hear directly from Palestinians on the ground.  

As a result, many young people are upset about the ways Israel dominates so many aspects of Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. They witness Israeli forces demolishing Palestinian homes, abusing Palestinians at checkpoints, denying Palestinians access to food, water, and medical treatment, subjecting Palestinians to arbitrary arrests, and imprisoning Palestinians indefinitely without charge or trial. 

And that was before Oct. 7.

Over the past year, they have seen Israeli airstrikes destroy Palestinian homes, schools, infrastructure, and universities. They have watched Palestinian journalists in Gaza relay the horrors around them, risking their lives in the process. They have felt the anguish of Palestinian parents  desperately searching for their children in the rubble of their bombed-out homes. They have heard firsthand accounts from doctors and nurses working under unfathomable conditions in Gaza’s crippled hospitals.

And they watch the death toll continue to climb. Over 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in Israeli attacks, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Including over 16,500 children.

Beyond the statistics, many young Americans also feel a sense of connection with young Gazans. People around the world were horrified as they watched 19-year-old Shaban al-Dalou being burned alive following an Israeli airstrike on a hospital complex in Deir al-Balah. But young people also learned through social media that al-Dalou was a software engineering major who hoped to use his university degree to help his family and his people. It was a dream that resonated.

In other words, both the scale and the intimacy of such horrors help explain why 55% of Americans under 30 say that what is happening in Gaza constitutes a genocide.

To be sure, they also hear Israel’s explanations of its war strategy: that Israel has a right to defend itself, that Hamas militants hide among civilians and operate from under schools, mosques and hospitals. But when they hear Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describe the war as “a clash between barbarism and civilization,” when they see Israeli soldiers flaunting abuses on social media and when they see Israel blocking aid trucks from reaching starving children, these explanations strain credulity. 

Many young Americans are also more likely than their elders to oppose the billions of dollars in military aid that the United States sends to Israel. In part it’s because they don’t want their tax dollars being used to commit human rights abuses. In part it’s because they see an urgent need for more investment here at home. 

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” encapsulates their desire for a region where everyone can live with freedom, dignity, and safety. 

Where do Jewish Israelis fit within this vision? Palestinians are divided on the issue. Recent polls show that for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an end to the occupation, the removal of settlements, and a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines remains the preferred outcome. Last July, all major Palestinian parties (including Hamas) agreed to a political framework that reflects this vision. Others wish to see Muslims, Christians, and Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea living together in equality,  either in a single democratic state, a confederation or some other arrangement.

But the question itself misses the larger point. The phrase is meant to call attention to the fact that Palestinians are not free to live in their homeland with the full safety, security and dignity that they deserve. 

Some people object to the use of this phrase by pointing to the Arabic version, which says, “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab.” As I and others have explained, the Arabic song in which the phrase originally appeared decades ago was a joyous expression for Palestinians to affirm that, no matter how long they were exiled from their homes and no matter how many Arab villages were given Hebrew names, they still belonged to the land, and the land still belonged to them. It was — and is — a retort to the Zionist claim that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land” — the Jewish people. 

Others say the phrase should be banned because it is  used by Hamas, which the U.S., the United Nations and the European Union have  designated a terrorist organization. But when Hamas was founded in 1987, it avoided using the phrase because of its longstanding association with secular nationalism. Only in recent years has Hamas begun adopting the phrase. Labeling it simply as a “Hamas slogan” – without acknowledging its wider use and deeper history –  is a dangerous and racist guilt-by-association tactic used to demonize supporters of Palestinian rights.

As more people learn about the context and meaning of this phrase, calls to ban it have quieted. Meta’s Oversight Board recently ruled that the phrase does not necessarily constitute hate speech. And the Nexus campus guide to identifying antisemitism, written by scholars of Jewish and Israel studies, concluded that context is crucial when evaluating its use. 

Which brings us back to university campuses.  

As the mom of a 14-year-old and 11-year-old, I understand the impulse to protect our children. But a core purpose of college education is to help young adults develop the skills they need to grow into resilient, compassionate adults. Inundating university administrators with coordinated emails to shut down Palestinian perspectives on campus undermines this effort. It sends a message that our children are too weak or too dumb to hear diverse viewpoints and make up their own minds. 

This fall, colleges and universities around the country introduced new rules restricting campus speech and protest.  Administrators hope to avoid a repeat of last year’s protests and encampments. But I am one of those academics concerned that the new policies  suppress students’ First Amendment rights and jeopardize their safety. 

Bernie Steinberg, a longtime former director of Harvard Hillel, put it well when he wrote last December of pro-Palestine activists: “One can disagree with any part of what these activists say, but they must be allowed to speak safely and afforded the respect their morally serious position deserves.”

Looking ahead, we must work together to combat all forms of discrimination, and we can only do so if we learn about each other’s perspectives. The community education center PARCEO offers a range of trainings, including antisemitism training, from a framework of collective liberation. UC Berkeley launched a program that aims to foster meaningful conversations around Israel and Palestine.  My own university encourages students to adopt a mindset of “fearless inquiry,” and to seek out unfamiliar perspectives and worldviews.

A few days after our initial exchange, the journalism student wrote back to tell me that his mom had enjoyed listening to a podcast in which I explained the meaning and history of this phrase. I don’t know if she was persuaded, but I’m glad she listened with curiosity and interest. 

As we enter the second year of this brutal war, we could all do that a bit more.

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