"From the river to the sea"

What it is

The phrase names geography before it names a politics. The river is the Jordan, the sea is the Mediterranean, and the ground between them holds Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. ⁴ Almost everything else about the phrase is argued over.

The territorial claim is older than the English chant. The Palestinian National Charter, as revised by the Palestine National Council in July 1968, declares that "Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit." ² The same document calls the 1947 partition and the establishment of Israel "entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time," and says armed struggle is "the only way to liberate Palestine." ² The PLO, founded in 1964, is credited with putting the river-to-sea formulation into circulation as a slogan for a single state across that territory. ⁸

Nine years after that charter, the same two landmarks turned up on the Israeli side. Likud's original 1977 platform, the year Menachem Begin took the party into government, states: "Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." ¹ The formulation never fully left Israeli politics. The guiding principles Benjamin Netanyahu published on Dec. 28, 2022, a day before his government was sworn in, open with the claim that "The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel." ¹⁰

Hamas uses the words directly. Its Document of General Principles and Policies, released in May 2017, defines Palestine as extending "from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west," and states that the movement "rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea." ³

This overlap is a large part of why the fight over the phrase never resolves. Both national movements have, at various points, described the whole of the land as theirs in writing, using the same two rivers-and-seas shorthand.

Why it still matters

The Anti-Defamation League's position is that the slogan is a call for a Palestinian state covering territory that includes the entirety of Israel, which would mean the dismantling of the Jewish state, and that it functions as an antisemitic denial of Jewish self-determination. ⁴ The ADL published that backgrounder on Oct. 26, 2023, and has kept it updated since. ⁴ For a great many Jews, the sentence supplies that reading on its own. If the land from the river to the sea is to be free, the state currently occupying most of it is the thing being freed from.

The strongest form of the other argument comes from Nimer Sultany, a law lecturer at SOAS, who told Al Jazeera that the phrase expresses a demand for equality among all the people living between the river and the sea, and that what its users want dismantled is a system of legal inequality rather than a population. ⁸ Al Jazeera notes the chant does not rhyme in Arabic, and its current form is largely a product of Western demonstrations. ⁸

Our view, labeled as ours: a slogan whose plainest reading is the end of a country cannot be rescued by insisting you meant something warmer. If the intent really is equal rights for everyone between the river and the sea, there are a hundred ways to say that which do not also appear, word for word, in a Hamas charter. Choosing this one and then objecting when Jews hear it as it reads does not hold up. The same standard runs the other direction. An Israeli platform claiming exclusive sovereignty over the whole territory is also a claim that the several million Palestinians living inside it will not have a state, and pretending otherwise is the same evasion, aimed the other way. ¹¹⁰

Institutions have been forced to rule on the phrase, and they have not agreed.

The U.S. House censured Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Nov. 7, 2023, by a vote of 234 to 188, with 22 Democrats joining and four Republicans opposed. ⁷ The resolution's text calls the phrase "widely recognized as a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel," and says Tlaib "falsely" described it as "an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence." ⁶

Meta's Oversight Board went the other way on Sept. 4, 2024. Reviewing three pieces of content containing the phrase, it upheld the decision to leave all three up, finding the phrase "has multiple meanings" and could not be treated as an inherent call for violence or exclusion without other context. ⁵ A minority of board members dissented, arguing Meta should presume the phrase glorifies a designated organization unless there are clear signals the user rejects Hamas and the Oct. 7 attacks. ⁵

Germany went further than either. A Berlin court on Aug. 6, 2024, fined a 22-year-old woman 600 euros for chanting the slogan at an Oct. 11, 2023, demonstration in Neukölln, holding that in that setting it could only be understood as a denial of Israel's right to exist and an endorsement of the Oct. 7 attack. ⁹ Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had outlawed the slogan in November 2023, and the defendant's lawyer said he would appeal. ⁹

The words you'll hear

The river and the sea. The Jordan River and the Mediterranean, the eastern and western edges of the territory holding Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. ⁴

The 1968 charter. The Palestinian National Charter as revised in July 1968, which defines Palestine by its British Mandate boundaries as an indivisible unit and calls armed struggle the only path to liberating it. ²

Likud's 1977 platform. The founding platform of the party that won that year's election, stating that between the sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty. ¹

The 2017 Hamas document. Hamas's revised statement of principles, which defines Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean and rejects any alternative to liberating it from the river to the sea. ³

"Multiple meanings." The Oversight Board's finding in September 2024 that the phrase carries more than one meaning and cannot be judged apart from the context it appears in. ⁵

Censure. A formal House rebuke of one of its members, short of expulsion. Tlaib received one on Nov. 7, 2023, in part over a video containing the phrase. ⁶⁷