I have an honest question for all those who chant (or who affirm the words), “Palestine must be free!” Or, more fully, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine must be free!” My question is simply this: Where would you like the 7 million Jews currently living in Israel (or, “Palestine” in your words) to go? What is your plan?
As many have pointed out, this chant is not a call for a two-state solution. It is a call for the obliteration of Israel.
Better to chant, “We are full of hate! No more Jewish state!”
Why not spell it out?
After all, if you speak of the Israeli occupation of Palestine since 1948 (or, since 1947) and you claim that Israel as a whole is living on stolen land, you are saying, “No more Jewish state!”
Perhaps this chant would be even more appropriate: “Listen to our brand new line, our land will be Judenrein!” (For those who are not familiar with the German term Judenrein, it means “cleansed of Jews,” as in, “Nazi Germany will be Judenrein!”)
When I posted this same question on X, Fireandice responded accurately: “There is no need for a plan because if they get their way there will be no Jews.”
More fully, Christian apologist David Wood, Ph.D., who specializes in debating Muslims, sarcastically posted: “Those Jews should go back to Isra- . . . Oops. Um. I mean, they should go back to all the Muslim countries they were kicked out of so that . . . Okay, strike that. They should go to all the Western nations where protestors are calling for their extermination!
Exactly!
More chillingly, Leeor Rose said: “They might show their true colours and follow through with what the Mufti planned from the very beginning.” (The post was accompanied by a photo of Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who instigated the massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929, sitting with Adolph Hitler.)
This was affirmed by Todd Hudnall, who wrote: “From my understanding, for many who say this it means the same thing Haman and Hitler intended, annihilation of the Jewish people.”
Yes, Alexander McKnight noted, “In the sea would be their honest answer.” Or, more concisely still, by Cheeky Tommy, “To hell.”
This sounds very much like the sentiments of some of the Arab leaders who emphatically rejected the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan, just as they had previously rejected the Peel Commission’s plan in 1937.
To quote Haj Amin Al-Husseini in 1936, “There is no place in Palestine for two races. The Jews left Palestine 2,000 years ago, let them go to other parts of the world, where there are wide vacant places.”
Eleven years later, on October 11, 1947 and responding to the UN plan, Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, said: “It will be a war of annihilation. It will be a momentous massacre in history that will be talked about like the massacres of the Mongols or the Crusades.”
As explained by Daniel Pipes, summarizing the important book Palestine Betrayed by the respected historian Efraim Karsh, “Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. partition resolution.”
Yes, “Palestine Betrayed reframes today's Arab–Israeli debate by putting it into its proper historical context. Proving that for 90 years the Palestinian political elite has opted to reject ‘the Jewish national revival and [insisted on] the need for its violent destruction,’ Karsh correctly concludes that the conflict will end only when the Palestinians give up on their ‘genocidal hopes.’”
Unfortunately, those genocidal hopes are burning hotter than ever. And Israel, once again engaged in an existential battle with its surrounding enemies, is reminded that it has enemies around the world, all of whom want to see and end to the Jewish state.
Meanwhile, in the UK, London’s Metropolitan Police have ruled that chanting, “From the river to the sea . . .” is not an arrestable offense. Given the trauma this must certainly cause for the UK’s Jewish residents, especially in light of the immense crowds of protesters, numbering as many as 100,000, this is quite disheartening.
It is also quite ironic, given that UK police have arrested street preachers for making LGBTQ+ identified individuals feel uncomfortable because of their religious beliefs. But calling publicly for the extermination of Israel is not arrestable.
One of my American colleagues who does humanitarian work in Israel told me that, for the first time, he has had to block dozens of people at a time for posting antisemitic comments on his social media pages. And, as if to remind us that this wretched disease of irrational Jew-hatred is not going away, one comment on my X feed said this: “Antichrist Jews are not America's responsibility! Do you fools understand that the rabbis want America to fall? They have an interest in bringing down America?”
And lest you think that it’s only Islamic extremists and wacky Jew haters who see no place for a Jewish state, the Wall Street Journal had this to say last year: “Perhaps you thought Israel had long ago established its right to exist as a Jewish state. Guess again. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran want to eliminate Israel as we know it, but who would have thought they’d find allies in Amnesty International?”
Yes, as the Amnesty International report stated in summary, “Israel has established and maintained an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination of the Palestinian population for the benefit of Jewish Israelis—wherever it has exercised control over Palestinians’ lives since 1948.”
Note carefully those words: since 1948. Nation of Israel, there is no place for you!
I’m aware, of course, that there are plenty of peace-loving, fair-minded Christians, Muslims, and Jews who still hope for a two-state solution or the like. And there are people from all backgrounds who grieve over the suffering and death of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians. I grieve alongside each of them.
But they are not the ones chanting, “From the river to the sea,” and those are the people I’m addressing here.
So, to ask again, where would you like the Jewish people to go, despite more than two thousand years of connection to the Land?
On second thought, I’d rather not know. Any answer will not be good.
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