Is “From the river to the sea” anti-Semitic?

After reviewing complaints about the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” the Oversight Board of Meta, which owns Facebook, found that the phrase did not break the social media company’s rules on “Hate Speech, Violence and Incitement or Dangerous Organizations and Individuals.” As Christina Grube noted in a WORLD news report, the board reached that finding even though the slogan is found in the charter of Hamas, a terrorist organization devoted to the destruction of the state of Israel. The board said the slogan has multiple meanings, with the majority of board members concluding that even though some people use it to call for the elimination of Israel, others use it as a call for solidarity with and the self-determination of the Palestinian people. A minority on the board found that the default meaning of the phrase glorifies Hamas unless the context makes it clear that it does not. Based on the majority opinion, the phrase is thus allowed on Facebook.

The Anti-Defamation League, a prominent organization that fights anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry and discrimination, vigorously disagreed with Meta’s decision. ADL pointed out that the phrase denies the Jewish right to self-determination and the very existence of the Jewish state by calling for a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea that would require the dismantling of Israel.

The disagreement reveals that the intractability of the current dispute comes down to whether or not a Jewish state should exist in the historically Jewish land of Israel. Western politicians continuously refer to the “two-state solution,” but this term masks the real problem, which is that Hamas and the majority of Palestinian Arabs do not want two states. They want a single state in which Arabs would be a majority. Once that goal is achieved, the Jewish population would be in the same precarious position as the Jewish minorities who used to live in most of the countries of the Muslim-dominated Middle East. Over the last 75 years, these minority populations have been decimated by persecution, which has caused Jews to flee to Israel for refuge. But if that pattern occurs again, this time in Israel, there will be nowhere for the Jews to go. Israel is their only safe haven, and if the Jewish state is destroyed, genocide is sure to follow.

Behind this slogan is the so-called “right of return.” This is the position that asserts that all the descendants of Arabs who left Palestine 75 years ago must return to the land, thus creating an Arab-Muslim majority in Israel. The effect would be the destruction of the Jewish character of Israel. While Israel is unlikely to be conquered in a war due to its military might, it could be destroyed by the return of millions of descendants of Arabs who left in 1948.

We must remember that tens of millions of people, including Jews, were forcibly displaced in the chaos of World War II, yet the Palestinian Arabs claim the right to return and displace the people who now have lived there for generations. Why? Because this is not really about Palestinian Arabs having nowhere to go. Many could go to Egypt, Jordan, or other Arab nations. Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, for example, was one of many Palestinians who were born in Egypt. Or they could go to Jordan, which is an Arab state created out of British Mandate Palestine specifically for Palestinian Arabs. But that would not accomplish the goal of eradicating the only non-Muslim-dominated state in the Middle East, and it would not accomplish the goal of destroying the Jewish state.

The problem is not just Hamas. It is the Palestinian Arab demand for a single, Muslim-dominated state “from the river to the sea.” As the left-wing Israeli Einat Wilf recently said, “Ending Palestinianism as the ideology that negates a sovereign Jewish state in any borders is necessary to end the century-long war.”

The decision of Meta’s Oversight Board to allow the slogan overlooks one crucial fact, namely, that self-determination for the Palestinian Arabs in this case means no self-determination for the Jews. There can be no Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” without the destruction of the only Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people for the past 3,000 years. Chanting “From the river to the sea” means solidarity with those who use terrorism to destroy Israel and commit genocide. To claim the slogan only applies to peaceful attempts to create a two-state solution under the current circumstances is willfully blind at best and overtly anti-Semitic at worst. The Meta Oversight Board failed in its duty, and that failure needs to be called out.