Thread by @AbuMrouj

#FromTheRiverToTheSea has a long history as a slogan.

(FWIW, I’m a scholar of political slogans in the Arab world.) 🧵

من النهر إلى البحر، فلسطين ستتحرر
فلسطين عربية من المياه للمياه

According to sources, it emerged in the wake of the 1947 UN partition plan that sought to divide Palestine into two states. In that context, its meaning had to do with Palestinian aspirations to maintain a undivided national homeland between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean

During the Nakba, historic Palestine was in fact divided. When the Palestinian armed struggle began in the 60s-70s, the slogan’s meaning was tied to a desire to restore geographic unity to historical Palestine.

During this same period, an English version of the slogan was composed by Palestine solidarity movements outside. The English version maintains the same prosody and rhymes. Which makes it like other slogans (such as “El pueblo unido…”) which have also thrived even in translation

At the time, the slogan had expulsionist connotations for some factions in their struggle against Israel. In light of the anticolonial struggles of the period, Palestinian freedom fighters came to imagine that Israel could be defeated and expelled, like the French in Algeria

As ugly as this sentiment may seem at first glance, it came in the wake of the Nakba, in which Israel practiced widespread ethnic cleansing against Palestinian communities.

This context is important: for Israel, expulsion of Palestinians has always been an actual government policy; for some Palestinians, expulsion of Israeli settlers has at times been a desire, but never a policy or actuality.

As the Palestinian struggle has changed over the years, so too have Palestinian visions of liberation. Some have been attached to Palestinian liberation within a wider frame of Pan-Arabism, or Islamic renaissance, to take two examples.

Other Palestinians see liberation coming in the form of a secular, bi-national state wherein Palestinians would enjoy the same rights as Jews, the so-called one-state solution. This last vision is predominant at US protests.

Currently, mainstream US figures in politics, entertainment & journalism suddenly assert that this slogan has one, and only one, meaning: namely that it expresses a desire to eliminate Jews from historic Palestine, or perhaps from existence.

Without evidence or argument, they claim it is self-evidently antisemitic.

That’s ludicrous for a number of reasons.

First, it’s bad hermeneutics to insist that a phrase that has changed meaning many times over 75 years can have only one unambiguous meaning.

(Consider how the meaning of words such as “queer” or “Negro” or “settler colonialism” have shifted during the past decades, shifting from positive to negative, or from neutral to normative.)

Slogans grow, go out of fashion, get appropriated, get reclaimed. Their meanings evolve and change depending on who is chanting them in what context and for what purpose.

It’s possible to interpret their meanings, but to do so means you need to engage in an investigation of tone, mood, and the intentions of those singing the slogans.

Which brings me to Saturday’s protest in Washington, DC, in which tens of thousands of people—Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others—chanted this slogan in unison. Most were not aware of the earlier moments of this slogan’s history, and that doesn’t really matter.

More important than this history was the buoyant mood of the motley crowds as we sang. We’d come to condemn genocide in Gaza and American complicity in this crime, but singing about freedom allowed us to transcend the gravity and grief of the moment.

There was joy in the air as people sang—dreaming of freedom seems to do that to people.

I cannot tell you what was in each person’s heart as they sang those words, but neither can any of these anti-Palestine pundits.

I was surrounded by young Jewish activists—and they made it clear that we were not singing to eliminate Jews, but rather to demand an end to US support for Israeli apartheid, and to dream of freedom together, because we know that none of us will be free until Palestine is free.