THE NEW YORK TIMES: The pro-Palestinian rallying cry has become a fixture of protests in the United States and was a focus of the congressional censure of Representative Rashida Tlaib. It has a fraught history.
When House Republicans and a solid bloc of Democrats banded together this week to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, for her statements about the Israel-Gaza war, they homed in on her embrace and defense of one pro-Palestinian slogan they called unacceptable: “from the river to the sea.”
The official congressional rebuke of Ms. Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, said the phrase was “widely recognized as a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel.” The top White House spokeswoman disavowed it from the West Wing, saying that it was “divisive” and that many considered it hurtful and antisemitic.
The phrase, which Ms. Tlaib has defended as “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate” has not only become a flashpoint for dispute in Washington; it has echoed across college campuses and in cities throughout the country in recent weeks as pro-Palestinian activists protest the heavy civilian toll of Israel’s war against Hamas. The slogan has prompted charges of antisemitism and fueled an increasingly bitter debate over the conflict, its root causes and how it should be waged — and what position the United States should be taking as it rages on.
The decades-old phrase has a complicated back story that has led to radically different interpretations by Israelis and Palestinians, and by Americans who support them.
“The reason why this term is so hotly disputed is because it means different things to different people,” said Dov Waxman, a professor of Israel studies at the University of California in Los Angeles, adding that “the conflicting interpretations have kind of grown over time.”
The phrase “from the river to the sea” — or in Arabic, “min al-nahr ila al-bahr” — dates to the dawn of the Palestinian nationalist movement in the early 1960s, about a quarter century before Hamas came into existence. It gained popularity within the Palestine Liberation Organization, or P.L.O., as a call for returning to the borders under British control of Palestine, where Jews and Arabs had both lived before the creation of Israel as a Jewish state in 1948. » | Karoun Demirjian and Liam Stack, Reporting from Washington and New York | Thursday, November 9, 2023
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