The slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is widely and reasonably understood as a call for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state, carrying antisemitic implications that echo longstanding rejection of Jewish national self-determination.
It refers to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—the full extent of modern Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. In the hands of groups that have long sought Israel’s destruction, it functions as a maximalist demand rather than a call for negotiated equality or a two-state outcome.
A Two-Tier Solution
In many Western professional and progressive environments, expressions of solidarity with Israeli or Jewish victims of Hamas are treated as controversial or politically incorrect, while Palestinian causes often receive reflexive amplification.
I had a recent experience with the raffle for children orphaned on October 7 on the fourth anniversary, which was consistent with this pattern of selective attention. A professional-circle effort that received hundreds of views yet produced no shares, interactions, or ticket sales for victims of a massacre that deliberately targeted civilians, including families and children, illustrates how empathy can be constrained by prevailing political narratives.
The result is not neutral silence; it is a measurable asymmetry in which the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust generates less institutional or social response than other atrocities of comparable scale. That asymmetry tracks the broader cultural success of the “river to the sea” framing and the older currents of hostility it channels.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”
Palestinian nationalist movements, notably the PLO from the 1960s and later Hamas, adopted versions of the phrase. Hamas’s 2017 charter states that it “rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea,” while describing a state extending from the Jordan to the Mediterranean and rejecting the “Zionist entity.” Hamas leaders have repeated the geographic claim explicitly. Organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee describe the slogan as antisemitic because it denies the Jewish right to self-determination in the ancestral homeland and, in practice, has accompanied calls or actions aimed at removing or destroying the Jewish state and its population.
Seventy Democratic lawmakers and other officials have characterized it as a rallying cry for Israel’s destruction and genocide of Jews. While some activists claim it expresses a desire for a single secular democratic state with equal rights, the dominant institutional usage by Hamas and similar groups, combined with their founding documents, charters, and track record of violence, supports the interpretation that it envisions the end of Jewish sovereignty. October 7, 2023, supplied a concrete demonstration of that intent in action.
On that day, Hamas and allied groups launched a coordinated assault that killed roughly 1,200 people (the large majority civilians), wounded thousands, and took about 250 hostages. The attack included systematic massacres at the Nova music festival (hundreds killed), kibbutzim such as Be’eri and Kfar Aza, and other communities. Documented atrocities included the deliberate murder of civilians, sexual violence, torture, burning of people alive, and the taking of hostages, including children and the elderly. Human Rights Watch and UN inquiries found that these acts constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity; the planned targeting of civilians was central, not incidental. It was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. The perpetrators and their supporters framed the operation in terms of reclaiming the land “from the river to the sea.”
– BrandX