behind the slogan “From the river to the sea”, three radically antagonistic political visions

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”: chanted during pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the slogan is also taken up by supporters of a binational state and by far-right Israeli movements.

It’s a slogan that we hear on many campuses around the world in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and which is controversial: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. The river is the Jordan River, which separates the occupied West Bank from Jordan to the east; the sea is the Mediterranean, west of Israel.

Between the two, there is therefore the Jewish State and its colonies, illegal under international law: the West Bank, administered in part by the Palestinian Authority but deprived of part of its territory and still under the control of Israel, and the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas since 2007, and at war for more than seven months. Three spaces, three powers, three religions too and two peoples who share less than 30,000 km².

As is often the case in the region, everyone puts in what they want. For a certain number of Jews, the formula masks the anti-Zionism and even anti-Semitism of the demonstrators: a Palestine “free from the sea to the Jordan” would mean the end of the State of Israel, and would lead to the annihilation of the Jews. No need to remind you that the country was created after the horror of the Shoah and that its inhabitants experienced one of the worst pogroms in their history on October 7.

On the Palestinian side, this slogan was born in the 1960s and symbolized at the time of the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization the idea of ​​a free, secular and democratic state on lands that around 700,000 Arabs were forced to flee during the creation of Israel in 1948. It was then recovered, first by Hamas, which advocates the destruction of Israel, but also by supporters of a single, binational state, where Jews would cohabit and Arabs.

Three political visions at odds with each other and yet based on the same words. To further add a hint of complexity, there are also Jewish supporters of a state that would go from the sea to the Jordan: these are the far-right allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They have a dream and they express it loud and clear: to recolonize Gaza and the biblical lands of what they call Judea Samaria, in other words the occupied West Bank and therefore lay the foundations of a Jewish state which would also expand. … “from the sea to the river”.