Israeli and Jewish groups view it as a call for Israel’s destruction and that is just for starters, as it is not politically expedient to hear it said at all, not in the US, not the UK, and especially NOT when spoken by a Palestinian member of the US Congress or a British MP.
There are two speeches that will go down in history, and both involve a river, from the River to the Sea, as recently proclaimed by Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian member of Congress, and one by Enoch Powell, River of Blood, and both were likely misrepresented in retrospect.
And historically, they will never be fully addressed for what they were claiming or proclaiming. However, all that is moot now, as what havoc can be inflicted upon the world by using such speeches for the wrong reasons, to stir all the more an already heated up conflagration.
The one thing they have in common was the audacity to tell the truth, especially at a time when nobody in the West wanted to hear it, or as now“to hear any semblance of truth or calls for peace or demographic realities.” Israel wants a unitary state even less than a 2-state solution, as the Palestinians will rapidly outnumber them. Hence, that that explains [apparently] the Zionist desire for genocide, purported by some pundits.
Rashida Tlaib is catching it from all sides, not only for calling out US President Joe Biden over his one-sided policy in the Middle East, but for saying he betrayed his voters to blaming him for endorsing “genocide” by allowing Israel to use terror to fight terror, (paraphrase) and her statements calling for a one-state solution to bring lasting stability and peace to the region.
She has repeated a phrase that has Zionist and not so well-informed Jews stirred up, as they consider it as a “war cry” for the elimination and complete destruction of the Jewish State. But why is there so much fallout associated with just one six-word phrase in the video?
It gets complicated, and the slogan basically calls upon the world to reconsider the very project that became Israel at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population. It calls on the world to have to rethink, relearn and reconsider much of what we have been taught, and what has been accepted as the reality, of the group of people in historic Palestine, dating back at least 100 years.
The slogan has raised the ire of a growing chorus of critics, leading them to close ranks. Furthermore, it has resulted in formal consequences in the Congress: “From the river to the sea”
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”
The slogan generally appears as the first half of the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — referring to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This would encompassthe territory that now takes up the Zionist State of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
It’s a phrase that Jewish watchdogs call anti-Semitic:
The most recent controversy is by some accounts attributed to taking the meaning of “from the Jordan River to the Sea” out of context, and making more of it than was ever intended. It is worth mentioning that the expression dates back to 1964 and what Palestinians used to describe their aspirations under the leadership of Yasser Arafat.
The PLO called for the establishment of a single Palestinian state that would extend from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea to encompass its historic territories.
Even in the British Parliament, which should know the history of Palestine and the mess that was left in the wake of the British walking away from solving the partition of Palestine in 1948 between Jews and Palestinians, when the Labour Party removed MP Andy McDonald for using the phrase “between the river and the sea” in a speech at a pro-Palestinian rally when he said,
“We will not rest until we have justice. Until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea, can live in peaceful liberty.”
Ensuring Firestorms
This expression is like Black Lives Matter but with more historic relevance. “From the river to the sea” seeks to give hope to Palestinians’ national rights as they seek to establish their own state again within what was once theirs, a national homeland and a desire for a unified Palestine to form the basis of an independent state.
It is understood to carry a message that is as strong as the Zionist expression, a Land without a People for a People without a Land, which proved catchier than one based on historic facts. It is worth noting that Hamas, out of trying to be pragmatic, did not use the “river to the sea” slogan out of fear of the reaction that it would bring from the Israelis, and [likely due] to the phrase’s long-standing ties to Palestinian secular nationalism.
Rashida Tlaib, in a recent post on X, formerly Twitter, continues to defend her use of the phrase as being “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, and not death, destruction, or hate.”
She says that her work and advocacy is always centered on justice and dignity for all people, no matter as to faith or their ethnicity. But many are calling her anything but a peace-loving person, claiming that she is then a domestic terrorist who poses a clear and present danger to Israel and the United States.
That is to be seen, and for sure, her choice of words will be used by the Jewish Lobby and Zionist groups to beat back calls for moderation and bringing about a permanent solution, a two-state solution. And too, like Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, it might end her political career and be remembered in the wrong context.
What has happened cannot be taken in isolation, and in the current atmosphere, any meeting to support human rights for Palestinians is soon redefined by pro-Zionist groups into a Hamas Rally!
There is much to be learned, or relearned, in explaining how we got to where we are now, but don’t delay, much is being removed from the Internet, and history being rewritten. Let us not forget that Palestinians are best described in this day as militant Arabs, and any claims to territorial rights to Jerusalem and Palestine are but a thousand years old.
Insanity is the word to describe what is going on!
But the determined leaders of Zionism created a right that was even older, dating to the time of King Solomon and the sacred Wailing Wall, a relic of Solomon’s Temple that still stands, so that it is all in G-d’s hand.
This ignores the fact that the Palestinians have more in common genetically with the ancient Hebrews than most modern European Jews, who are, in fact, the descendants of converts to Judaism, the Ashkenazi of the Khazar Khanate.
Some of these war/revenge mongering Zionist and born again Christians would have made Joseph Goebbels proud with their political spin!
The question that remains is how much blood will the river be forming with?
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
