‘From the River to the Sea’: is the slogan pro-Hamas or ultra-Zionist?
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The British left love chanting. Sometimes softly, as in the lament “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” which was chanted by Labour gatherings when the former Labour leader appeared in front of his faithful, as he led them to two major general election defeats.
As a young activist of the 1968 movement I chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. We shall fight and we shall win.” Kindly Uncle Ho was actually a murdering Stalinist. Millions fled on boats to escape from the gulag of re-education camps Ho’s successors opened in 1975 to imprison anyone with a university degree, who had studied abroad or had administrative competence.
Today the chant du jour is “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free”. It is rhythmic, and is snappy. English poesy and hymns like rhymes. Try translating “From the River to the Sea” into French or German and while perfectly clear it is clunky and without the catchy “sea/free” ending.
The European Left in government in Germany and Spain and in other democracies are not supporting the Hamas or Vladimir Putin demand for a ceasefire. As in all ceasefires, it takes all pressure off combatants and would allow Hamas to rebuild, rearm and plan their next assault on the Middle East’s native Jews.
All European and other Western democracies are urging humanitarian pauses to let in a much increased flow of relief. Sir Keir Starmer is simply standing shoulder to shoulder with the democratic left in Europe in rejecting the Hamas-Putin line that the pressure should come off Hamas with a cease-fire leaving them masters of Gaza and still in possession of scores of elderly or very young Jews as hostages.
A Labour MP has been suspended for using the slogan “From the River to the Sea”, allegedly a form of words hostile to Israel. Yet it is a phrase popular with ultra-Zionists. Israel’s present ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, in her inaugural speech to Israeli diplomats as Bibi Netanyahu’s protogée, appointed as a young Foreign Minister in 2015 told them: “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise for that.”
Hotovely told the ambassadors that “God promised the land of Israel to the Jews,” adding: “We expect as a matter of principle of the international community to recognise Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in their homeland, everywhere.”
In the hard-line rightist Likud party Charter of 1973, the first article reads: “Between the Sea and the River Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Following the Hamas attack, Israeli settlers illegally occupying Arab land on the West Bank have launched violent attacks on Palestinian farmers there. As one of them told a BBC Today reporter last week, his aim is to remove all Palestinians from the “River to the Sea”.
The slogan is the purest expression of ultra Zionist ideology. Students of the tortured history of Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land will know the contortions, reverses and zig-zags of those living on ancestral and historic lands, as well as land bought legally by Jews from Europe a century ago.
But of all the oddities of the chronicle of the ups and downs of the conflict, nothing is stranger than a classic rightist Zionist slogan being turned into a chant expressing the Islamist desire to drive all Jews out of the land of their ancestors.
Denis MacShane is the former Minister of Europe. He is author of “Globalising Hatred. The New Antisemitism” published in 2008 (Weidenfeld).
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