JNS) Anyone who has watched the news, scrolled through social media or spent time on an American college campus since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, knows the chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” To the Western ear, the English slogan is lyrical and emotive. But the version chanted in Arabic is a far different sentence with a far different intent.
In Arabic, the line is closer to “Palestine will be Arab.” The two chants are not synonymous. Palestine will be Arab does not mean equality or pluralism. It means replacement. A “free” Palestine in many English-language accounts becomes, in Arabic usage, a Palestine that is Arabized—a polity from which Jews are excluded. That is not anti-colonial rhetoric. It is a call for recolonization.
This inversion is invisible to many campus activists and far-left politicians who repeat the English refrain. It is not invisible to those who understand the region’s layered history. The land critics call “Palestine” was never part of the Arabian Peninsula. Its original peoples were Canaanite, Israelite, Phoenician, Aramaean—the ancient fabric of the Levant. Arabs arrived later, by conquest.
The first great wave of Arab imperialism and colonialism, beginning in the seventh century, reshaped the Near East far more thoroughly than many European empires ever did. It erased languages, customs and faiths that had flourished for millennia; Arabized Egypt and Syria, Persia and North Africa; and replaced local polities with a single political-religious order.
...The chant isn’t new. Its Arabic ancestor—Min al-ma ila al-ma, Filastin Arabiyya—means “From the water to the water: Palestine will be Arab.” In other words, it means no Jews from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. (Ed note: A somewhat long, but very interesting article.) (Read More)
