From The River To The Sea, OK For Me But Not For Thee

Netanyahu exposes the twisting of words for the sham it is, but few are calling it out

From time to time, I’ll be talking to my friend Marc Lamont Hill and one of us will just mention the phrase “from the river to the sea.” Knowing smiles, grim and bewildered, are exchanged and we move on.

Marc, of course, was fired from CNN because he used the phrase in a speech at the United Nations where he was calling for equality, freedom, and justice for ALL the people residing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. That absolutely and unequivocally includes Israeli Jews. But, with all the intellectual dishonesty that they could muster, supporters of Israel accused Marc of antisemitism, and CNN severed their relationship with him.

More recently, Rep. Rashida Tlaib was censured by House Republicans and pilloried by members of her own party for using the phrase. As she explained, “From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate. My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.”

There is no evidence, other than bad faith accusations, that either Marc or Rashida had any agenda other than the one she described. But in the world of Israel-Palestine politics, a bad faith accusation, repeated often enough, becomes accepted truth, as long as the accusation is made by defenders of Israel.

On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister made a very clear statement in response to reports that Saudi Arabia and the United States are calling for a “clear pathway” for a Palestinian state. Although he didn’t use the precise “river to the sea” wording (a translation that has been making the social media rounds that translated his words that way was imprecise, and in some parts even inaccurate. It seems to have been circulated initially by the Israeli i24 News, but since deleted), he did say, bluntly, that Israel must maintain control of all the territory west of the Jordan River, which means exactly the same thing.

Unlike Marc and Rashida, however, Netanyahu was quite clear in saying that this meant that Palestinian sovereignty was therefore impossible. In other words, Netanyahu explicitly stated that he intends to maintain, at the very least, the apartheid state and, at worst, to continue his war on the Palestinian people until genocide is complete.

Rashida was censured. Marc lost a valuable gig, not just for himself, but for the public’s opportunity to hear a strong, progressive point of view that is rarely displayed on mainstream media, especially CNN. And Netanyahu?

He gets to continue being one of the most powerful people in the world. True, his days in office appear to be numbered, but that has nothing to do with his proclamation or the lack of reaction to it.

And let’s consider the relative impact. Marc has a voice, to be sure, and Rashida has some influence as a member of Congress. But neither of them has any power to enact their will, for better or worse, in Israel and Palestine. Netanyahu obviously does, Yet the United States, on both the political and social level, gets hysterical over not just Marc and Rashida, but over a few undergraduates on college campuses expressing their support for Palestinian rights. Those students lose job opportunities, their universities’ presidents lose their jobs, and they all, including Marc and Rashida, endure the worst and most vicious harassment and threats.

Meanwhile Netanyahu not only tells the world that he will never relent in his determination to keep the Israeli boot firmly on the Palestinian neck, but also thumbs his nose at the United States, without which, he would be unable to pursue his genocidal goals and we get…crickets.

This goes beyond Netanyahu and America’s endless tolerance for his hubris, corruption, and love of bloodshed. You know, shared values.

It extends through the body politic of both the U.S. and Israel and includes much of the ostensibly liberal communities in both.

For example, Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president and former head of the Labor party, told the audience at the World Economic Forum that no Israeli “in his right mind is willing now to think about what will be the solution of the peace agreements,” and that “Israel lost trust in the peace processes because they see that terror is glorified by our neighbors.” Herzog perhaps missed the many videos Israeli soldiers have been posting online of their mocking Palestinians, showing their unbridled glee at the death and destruction they have been causing. Only such insults to Israeli suffering matter both to him and his American compatriots.

Herzog is also the same man who, at the beginning of Israel’s campaign against the civilian population of Gaza justified it by saying, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.”

It bears repeating that Herzog represents the liberal side of Israel.

Far from such rhetoric being confined to well-known extremists like Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben Gvir (who just yesterday told Israeli troops “You have complete backing from me. When your life is in danger or see a terrorist — even if he does not endanger you — shoot. I have your back.” And for Ben Gvir, every Palestinian is a terrorist), or even the province of the mainstream right wing as represented by Netanyahu, the suggestion that Palestinians deserve the same rights as anyone else, including Israelis, is anathema to a broad swath of Israeli Jewish society. Not universal by any means, but certainly a majority view, especially now.

There is no coded language here. Israeli leaders across its political spectrum are telling us exactly what they are doing.

And yet our time in the U.S. is taken up with phony accusations that a geographical reference to all of what was Palestine under the British Mandate—that is, what is today Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip—is really a secret code for the killing of Jews. It’s a bad faith and obviously false accusation, and future generations will be appalled that it ever had any serious traction.

Netanyahu, in using that very concept for his own, much less noble purposes, basically gave a giant middle finger to Biden. Again. Biden’s response, again, is “thank you, sir, may I have another?”

Meanwhile some of the punditry are speculating that Biden and Democrats are planning to wait until Netanyahu is gone and then press forward with their futile plans for tying reconstruction of Gaza to Israeli-Saudi Arabian normalization. I explored some of that issue here.

But, consistent with their utter lack of understanding of Israel and their even more meager understanding of the rest of the region, the Biden administration again misses the reality of their situation: whomever succeeds Netanyahu might be more willing to pay lip service to Washington in a way Netanyahu doesn’t, but they will still oppose and work hard to undermine a potential Palestinian state, or any other formulation that gives Palestinians freedom in the land of Palestine.

This isn’t new. Even Netanyahu, over the years, has played the game of going along with some performative negotiations that were never intended to reach an agreement while undermining any chance for a Palestinian state with diplomacy, military aggression, and settlement expansion.

But now, the majority of the Israeli public, including many who might support two states in the abstract, will insist on so many limits to Palestinian sovereignty and territory that their demands will be impossible to accommodate. That comes on top of the obvious scars and anger that the current campaign of slaughter will engender and the impossibility of constructing a viable Palestinian state without large-scale evacuations of Israeli settlements. Good luck trying to make that happen after seeing the upheaval in Israeli society in the wake of the Gaza withdrawal in 2005 and the intensification of settler zeal in the intervening years.

Netanyahu has exposed the debate over the phrase “from the river to the sea” for the sham it has always been. You can add other terms, such as “intifada,” that have been willfully twisted by pro-Israel forces to the mix as well. But hypocrisy has never stopped American leaders, from both parties, from maintaining their policies toward Israel and Palestine, regardless of how many Palestinians (and Israelis too) they kill with those policies. Hypocrisy, when it comes to Israel, is completely immune to facts and reality.

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