Current Events, Episode 163

israel at war, EXPLAINED: “From the river to the sea”

November 10, 2023

BLOG VERSION below | PODCAST VERSION HERE

Hamas’ massacre unleashed a worldwide wave of hatred and vilification against Israel and the Jewish People, summed up in the noxious idea of “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” — a call for the destruction of Israel. Leftist ideology, classic antisemitism, and Israel demonization all play a role in this stunning display of moral blindness.

As Hamas’ massacre unfolded on October 7, 33 Harvard University student groups published a statement on what they called “the situation in Palestine.” You may have heard of this. The first line read, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” So while Hamas was executing children and murdering entire families, and while the only violence Israel was at that point committing was against the terrorists inside its own territory, dozens of elite students at Harvard wanted the world to know that the Jews were completely at fault for their own murders. 

The Harvard letter kicked off what has been more than a month of astonishing vilification and demonization of Israel and the Jews. There is no difference right now between those claiming that they are only against Zionism, not Judaism. After all, protesters in Sydney, Australia, didn’t shout “death to Zionism”; they shouted “gas the Jews.” Gas the Jews. In response to the murder of innocent people, many of whom, by the way — and not that it should matter — weren’t Jewish. Muslims, too, were mercilessly slaughtered by Hamas, just for the crime of living inside Israel. 

But the most popular slogan we’re hearing is decidedly less obvious but no less sinister: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Let’s be clear what this is. The river is the Jordan River. The sea is the Mediterranean Sea. In between those two are the West Bank and Israel. This slogan is a call to eliminate Israel, and to cleanse the region of Jews. It’s genocidal. 

I’ve tried to write this episode a number of times since the very first days of the war. Sometimes I feel like there are so many angles to this that it’s just impossible to pick apart without writing a book. Sometimes my anger has just gotten the better of me and I couldn’t write coherently — or, as my wife says, without withering sarcasm that is very off-brand for Jew Oughta Know. 

But it’s hard to take the emotion of out of this. It’s one thing for a few haters to come out of the woodwork. It’s another to see tens of thousands of people compounding the enormous tragedy of October 7 with calls to keep it going, or justifying that it was a legitimate act of so-called resistance, or that, actually it didn’t really happen, or Hamas didn’t do it, or only a few people were killed, not 1,400.

So it’s hard to know what to make of all this and how to put it all together. It’s partly the far-leftist racial ideology that has penetrated so many of our cultural institutions in recent years. It’s part classic Jewish hatred that has defamed and blamed Jews for centuries, insisting that their annihilation is the necessary precondition for peace and justice. And its part an obsessive hatred of Israel that is the product of both those trends. Instead of shocking people into the horrifying realization of what Hamas and its allies are about, the massacre seems to have instead awakened a small but loud and deeply hateful population who are openly thrilled with Hamas’ genocidal ambitions. The problem is that this minority isn’t buried on the fringes of society but in the elite universities, the high schools, the United States Congress, corporations, the arts, and just about everywhere else. As I said about the media a couple episodes ago, it’s not everyone, and it’s not everywhere, but it’s enough that it is impactful. Jews have been attacked from California to France. Everywhere Jewish students are reporting harassment and physical assault. What we need is a whole-society effort to shove this back into Pandora’s Box from which it came. 

We could write a whole book picking this all apart. But let’s do a general overview to help us see through the holes. I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.

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We could spend our entire time here itemizing the outrageousness of it all. Although Hamas’ massacre rallied much of the world to Israel’s side, it also ignited an extraordinary spasm of hatred. One of the clever and insidious ways this movement captures attention is to invert the events of October 7 by casting Israel as the aggressor, the war criminal, the instigator of violence. It’s a direct assault on the massacre that opens space for either dismissing it as inconsequential, or celebrating it as a just act of resistance against Israel. That’s what the Harvard student groups were communicating. 

It’s the hypocrisy that I find most stunning, and the most difficult to deal with. Young women who have been raging against the Supreme Court for striking down Roe v. Wade are demonstrating in favor of raping women to death as an act of resistance. Moms and dads are parading in the streets in support of an organization that executed children in front of their parents. LGBTQ activists are declaring their solidarity with terrorists who murder queer people instead of the one country in the Middle East that embraces them. Human rights activists cheer the slaughter of innocent people as a exhilarating act of decolonization and liberation. And the media that was so quick to condemn Israel for bombing the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza — which Israel didn’t do — haven’t reserved even an ounce of outrage for the fact that Hamas has struck the Barzilai Hospital in Israel three times now.

And, of course, the biggest hypocrisy of all: that those who claim to be “pro-Palestinian” are anything but, as they back a tyrannical state that utterly immiserates the Palestinians. From the river to the sea, Palestine will not be free: the result of the genocidal destruction of Israel and its Jews will not be a society of peace, justice, and equity, but a brutal regime that forever oppresses its own people. 

You’d think that decent people would be stopped in their tracks by rape, kidnapping, and burning people alive. That they would be so stunned by the depravity that they would shy away from even seeming to support Hamas. And so I know the counter-argument here: come on, Jason, a lot of people here, especially younger people, are caught up in the moment; they see something they think is wrong — the plight of the Palestinians — and they want to show their support; they don’t know what “from the river to the sea” means. And just because they are opposed to Israel’s occupation and in support of Palestinian liberation doesn’t mean that they support Hamas, supporting murdering children, or are in favor of genocide.

I think it is important to acknowledge that there are those people out there. I may not agree with them on some things, but I do agree with the fundamental premise that the Palestinian people deserve to live free, in the broadest sense of that concept. Free in their own state, free from Israeli occupation, free from Hamas’ tyranny, free from the Arab countries’ persecution and hatred. I don’t begrudge protestors marching against Israeli policies and in favor of Palestinian freedom. 

But let us be equally honest that this is not what is going on right now. What we’re seeing isn’t about the Palestinians, it’s about Israel. If it was about the Palestinians, it would look a lot different. The statements of solidarity would make clear that Hamas doesn’t speak for the Palestinians. There would be protest signs calling on Hamas to free the hostages, and people wouldn’t be tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children. Protestors would demand Hamas stop hiding behind Palestinian civilians. There would be the recognition that Israel didn’t just wake up in the morning and decide to bomb Gaza, but is responding to an act of war as would every other nation on earth. I could go on. But my point is that even though there are people who really believe themselves to be pro-Palestinian — in the most positive use of that term — by now they have to realize they’ve been co-opted into a nasty demonization effort  that is overwhelmingly focused on its hatred of the Jews and the Jewish State, not on its concern for the Palestinians. These people may not be openly celebrating Hamas’ massacre, but the movement they have aligned themselves with, is. “From the river to the sea” is not a call for coexistence but for eradication. 

There’s much more to say, of course, but I want to move on into the three major streams that I see feeding into this. Each one is dense with history and nuances, but let’s just take a broad look at how leftist ideology, anti-Jewish hatred, and Israel demonization work together to give us this moment.

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The glorification of Hamas, the demonization of Israel, the attacks on Jews — these are mostly coming from the left. The right has its own problems and history of violence and racism, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. But what we’re seeing now is coming from the left, which is bringing its particular ideology into an immensely complicated and tragic conflict.

This ideology goes by many names: wokeism, critical race theory, anti-racism, decolonization, diversity equity and inclusion, the Oppression Olympics — take your pick. At its root this perspective divides the world into two categories: the oppressed and the oppressors. You are either one or the other. But, crucially, it’s not determined by your actions, it’s determined primarily by the racial identity this ideology imposes on you. White is always the oppressor, followed closely by people who might not be white but are “white-adjacent”. The oppressed are always people of color. It’s a formula based on the perceived power of white versus color, in which white is considered to be using its power to oppress the people of color, who are inherently victims, forever consigned to powerlessness and helplessness. 

And so in this worldview, any action taken by white oppressors is, by definition, white supremacy or white nationalism. Any action taken by the oppressed is heroic resistance. The oppressors can never do anything right, and the oppressed can never do anything wrong. It’s a worldview without nuance.

And so while claiming it is opposed to racism, this ideology is actually deeply racist. It judges people solely by their skin tone, and assigns them value based on this perceived attachment to racial category. You are either forever the victimizer or forever the victim. 

And while it claims to be decolonial, it is actually deeply colonial, demanding that the entire world conform to this narrow, unforgiving, racial worldview. It’s privileged American racial theorists imposing their perspective on other cultures whose own views on the matter are never considered.

There is much more to say about this, of course, but you might be able to see where this is going as it intersects the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has been decided that Israel is the ultimate white oppressor state. Remember, facts and history don’t matter, so the fact that the majority of Israel’s population are people from the Middle East and North Africa makes no difference. Neither does the Jewish People’s long history of oppression. Because Israel is powerful, and because some people there hail from Europe, it is white, settler-colonialist, oppressor. And the Palestinians, therefore, are the eternal victims of color. They have no agency, no choice, no dignity of individualism, just the assigned category of the oppressed. Again, never mind that there are 7 million Jews in Israel and 450 million Arabs in the Middle East. Never mind the wars that have been launched to eliminate Israel. Who’s right and who is wrong is based on race. This is the binary. 

This explains how, when Israel kills a Palestinian terrorist, it’s genocide. But when a terrorist rapes an Israeli girl to death, it’s resistance. It’s because the girl cannot possibly be a victim. She is Israeli, Jewish, white, oppressor. The terrorist is a person of color, victim, marginalized, acting against his oppressor: he cannot possibly be in the wrong. Hence the Harvard students’ confidence that Israel is entirely to blame for all the violence against it.

This formula doesn’t just apply to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, of course, an it’s particularly focused on the United States. But the simple binary of oppressed versus oppressor is given a turbo boost by another pernicious ideology: Jewish hatred.

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There are a million things to say about the very long history of Jewish hatred and how we got here. I want to focus in on one specific thing that explains a lot about what we’re talking about. That is the blood libel. This is an accusation that emerged in the Christian world in medieval times. It holds that Jews murder Christians, especially children, to use their blood in religious rituals, such as the making of matzah on Passover. It has origins in the ancient pagan world but was picked up by the church in medieval times as a way to attack Judaism and the Jews. Sure enough, around Passover, a Christian child would go missing, or would be found dead, or the whole thing would just be made up, and that would be the excuse for Christians to descend on the local Jewish community, raining down violence and murder and destruction. The blood libel has persisted all the way through the twentieth century, and still pops up occasionally in Arab countries and Russia. 

But there’s a problem with the blood libel in the West. It doesn’t make any sense to our ears. We are highly secular societies, averse to superstition, believers in reason, science, and logic. The idea that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in matzah strikes us as totally absurd and obviously anti-Jewish. 

So like all good conspiracy theories, the blood libel adapted. It changed itself to appeal precisely to the leftist ideology we’ve discussed. Rather than accusing Jews of murdering Christian children to use their blood for religious purposes, the blood libel now says that the Israeli army murders Palestinian children to satisfy Israel's bloodlust for power. It’s not about the magical superstition of religion now, its about political domination. The oppressed versus the oppressor. And just like the original blood libel, it can’t be unproven. Just as every missing Christian child whose unknown fate was proof of a Jewish plot, so, too, now, is every dead Palestinian child yet another example of Israel’s bloodthirsty drive for power. 

The new blood libel is further customized to adopt the racial language of the left. It’s not just Palestinian children whom Israel targets: it’s also that the Israeli police train white American cops how to kill black children. It’s classic antisemitism updated for the modern era. Christian children really did sometimes disappear. Jews really did bake matzah. Palestinian children really do die in war. Israel really does have a police exchange program with the United States. Just enough pebbles of truth for the conspirator to make connections where none exist. It’s how antisemitism sustained itself for centuries, and how it now unfolds in Israel. 

The brilliance of the updated blood libel is that it enables the accuser to espouse their Jewish hatred under the cover of criticizing Israel. “I have nothing against Jews, just against Israeli aggression.” It allows a plausible excuse for violence, a justification to dismiss Jewish suffering, and a work-around for having to confront the implications of the October 7 massacre. Whenever those Jews get teary-eyed about their murdered and kidnapped children, just pivot to the blood libel. It’s how Israel still gets blamed for bombing the hospital in Gaza: the blood libel says that even if it was a terrorist rocket that hit the hospital, it’s still Israel’s fault that such a thing occurred. It’s how Hamas’ raping and murdering is celebrating as an act of comeuppance for the society that has been feasting on Palestinian blood. It’s another brilliant inversion: Hamas is the one that sacrifices Palestinian children to maintain its power, and yet it is Israel who gets tagged with that crime.

And so what we have here is classic antisemitism imprinted onto modern Israel. What used to be Christian children and matzah is now Palestinian children and Israeli state power. Both require a view of Jews as wicked vampires, their murderously evil nature driving their white supremacy and colonialism. And just as Christians found their excuse to ransack Jewish communities, so now does Hamas and its fellow travelers find their own justification. The age-old war against the Jews continues, with Israel now the locus.

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The famous Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, described the crossover from criticizing Israel to outright antisemitism as meeting the “3 D” criteria: demonization, double standard, and delegitimization. Calling Israel a Nazi state, that is, tagging Jews with the label of their murderers, is demonization. Declaring that Israel alone amongst the world’s nations doesn’t have a right to exist, is delegitimization. And then there’s double standard, in which alone is singled out for condemnation while other countries doing the same thing or worse are given a pass. This has become the classic motif of the supposedly-pro-Palestine movement. 

I’ve never seen a single pro-Palestinian protest against Lebanon. In that country, Muslim Palestinians are prohibited from obtaining citizenship even after decades, cannot own property, are restricted in what kinds of work they can do, are denied mandatory work-permits, and their communities are often banned from bringing in building materials. Oh and Lebanon built a massive concrete wall around the largest Palestinian refugee camp in order to impose a blockade. Silence from the pro-Palestinians.

I’ve never seen a single pro-Palestinian protest against Syria. That dictatorship has murdered hundreds of thousands of Muslims the last twelve years, amongst them thousands of Palestinians whose towns were subjected to air strikes, indiscriminate bombing, and direct targeting by the Syrian military. Hospitals, schools, and neighborhoods were mercilessly destroyed without regard for civilians. Indeed, in which killing civilians was precisely the point, in order to intimidate a population the Syrian dictator considered in rebellion against him. There were no signs denouncing Syria, no chants about Palestinian freedom, no declarations against Syrian genocide. Silence. 

The pro-Palestinian movement isn’t directed towards Palestinian human rights, it’s directed against Israel. And it’s important to point this out. It’s not whataboutism, or distraction from criticism of the Israeli government, because that is not what’s going on here. What we’re seeing is an obsessive vilification of Israel, which is why the pro-Palestinian movement’s first instinct on October 7 was to blame Israel. I saw a post from a British high school teacher who posted his shock at how supposedly-liberal people ignore the kidnappings, the ruthless murder of teenagers at a music festival, the beheadings, burnings, and rapes, and then blame Israel for it all. People who claim to support women, gay rights, racial equality, freedom of speech, and human rights demonize Israel and proclaims their support for Hamas’ vision of Palestine “from the river to the sea”: a vision that murderously excludes all those things. 

And so you take the racial ideology of the left, the updated blood libel of classic antisemitism, and the unrelenting demonization of Israel, and you begin to see how the last month has unfolded the way it has. It’s a worldview that cannot make space for atrocities against Jews; that has to willfully ignore Hamas’ human shields; that insists that the threat of genocide against the Jews — “from the river to the sea” — is actually a call for peace and justice. 

We should all be concerned about innocent Palestinians who are right now suffering terribly for Hamas’ crimes. But they are not whom this movement is about. Holding Israel entirely responsible for the horrific violence against it, while calling for a free Palestine from the river to the sea, is the same age-old justification for genocide that Jews have experienced for centuries, dressed up in new language that uses words like Israel and Zionism and Palestinian children. But it is, as it ever was, about the Jews.

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I really struggled with this episode because there was so much I wanted to dive into, and for the sake of simplicity a lot was left on the cutting room floor. So maybe I’ll do a follow-up at some point. I do have thoughts beyond the doom and gloom: that is, what we as a society can do about this, and I think there are concrete things, some of which are already happening. For starters we can just say no. We can all refuse to buy into this childish binary ideology of oppressed vs. oppressor, and dismiss those who insist on enforcing this worldview onto what we know is a very different, and very complex, conflict on the other side of the world.

We can also, as a society, take action against those who go beyond free speech to threaten or cause actual violence against Jews. Harvard University — and Columbia and Cornell and UC Berkeley and all the rest — needs to expel students who commit assault and violent intimidation. And companies are entirely within their rights to pull job offers from students who espouse support for genocide — they are not required to hire racists and Jew-haters, and should not. And we’re also seeing campaigns from major donors to pull their funding from universities which are supporting the Hamas protestors over their threatened Jewish students. The House of Representatives was correct in censuring Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who claimed that her use of “from the river to the sea” was actually “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.” It’s an outright lie, she knows it, and the House was right to call her out for it. 

So there is lots of room for pushback. We all have to collectively decide we aren’t going to accept the ideology of the extreme left, the blood libels, the demonization of Israel and the double standards. You don’t have to listen to people who are espousing these viewpoints, and you can feel free to call them out. We need to put up our own wall of resistance to the intolerance, hatred, and violence of the extremists who want to use this conflict for their own narcissistic purposes, and not to make the world a better place.

So much more to say. I still have several topics in my queue, so more episodes coming soon. As always I’m at jewoughtaknow.com and jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. If your community or organization is looking for a guest speaker to come talk about this, hit me up at that email, jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening everyone, Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish People live.

© Jason Harris 2023