“From the river to the sea” is a political slogan that refers geographically to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which currently includes the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a common call to help pro-Palestinian activists, especially student activists on college campuses. It calls for the establishment of a State of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing the State of Israel.
It is also a rallying cry for freedom fighters and their sympathizers, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to Hamas, which called for Israel’s destruction in its original governing charter in 1988 and was responsible for the October 7, 2023 terror attack.
Pro-Israeli media and people called this slogan anti-Semitic, however, the Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer argued that those who saw genocidal ambition in the phrase, or indeed an unambiguous desire for the destruction of Israel, did so due to their own Islamophobia.
It was instead, he argued, merely a way to express a desire for a state in which “Palestinians can live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominated by others nor dominating them”.
