“From the river to the sea, Israel will be free.”
OK, that’s not the way in which it’s purported to go, is it? However at this second of warfare and mass loss of life, this proposition is price reflecting on: Palestine can’t be free with out Israel – or not less than the Israelis – being free. True freedom between the river and the ocean can solely be achieved by breaking free from the chains of settler-colonialism but in addition the slim bounds of the nation-state.
Earlier than I clarify additional, let me get into the present debate over the slogan “river to the sea”.
When most Israelis, and little question a big variety of Palestinians, hear the phrase “river to the sea,” they think about it in exclusivist phrases. This isn’t stunning.
The zero-sum understanding of the nation-state – a selected territory below the unique management of 1 nationwide neighborhood, has been the determinative communal identification for not less than 4 centuries. Its logic is so simple as it’s violent: if this territory belongs to my group, it can not belong to yours.
Not each nation’s identification and politics are primarily based on this logic, however many are. Even nations with an extended custom of intercommunal tolerance can quickly veer in the direction of chauvinism.
The dynamics are even clearer in settler-colonial societies, the place the settler neighborhood has to beat the territory and subdue or expel the Indigenous inhabitants with a view to construct its personal society. Genocide is as a rule a core expertise of this course of.
Israel is, in fact, the quintessential settler-colonial society; but additionally it is one whose maximalist impulse has but to be realised. Palestinians haven’t been lowered to a manageably small minority who might be given formal political rights after which ignored, repressed and extracted with out significant resistance – as was the destiny of Indigenous Individuals and Australians.
Given the violence inherent to colonialism, Indigenous resistance has naturally been imagined by settler societies because the mirror picture of their eliminationist impulses and insurance policies: We would like them gone and can commit no matter violence is important to realize that aim, so they need to need and would do the identical. Not surprisingly, when resistance does take the type of mass violence, as occurred on October 7, that creativeness is powerfully bolstered.
On this context, when most Zionist Israelis and Israel supporters hear the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, they hear “a genocidal call to violence to destroy the state of Israel and its people to replace it with a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”. The truth that some Palestinians, notably Hamas, have leaned arduous right into a violently exclusivist connotation of the phrase solely serves to strengthen the concept.
However Hamas has by no means represented most Palestinians, regardless of the concerted efforts of the motion and successive Israeli governments (for very completely different causes) to raise its standing. Its reputation in, if not management over, Gaza had waned considerably earlier than the October 7 assault.
Into this deeply dysfunctional combine enters Consultant Rashida Tlaib, presently the one Palestinian American member of the US Congress. Alongside together with her colleague Ilhan Omar and infrequently different members of “The Squad”, she has been the one nationwide political voice advocating unhesitatingly for Palestinian rights.
For the overwhelming majority of her congressional colleagues and most who describe themselves as “pro-Israel”, Tlaib’s use of the “river to the sea” slogan completely marked her as an enemy of Israel. This was why, on November 6, she was formally censured by the Home of Representatives.
After all, Palestinians usually are not the one ones advocating a “river-to-sea” discourse. It has roughly been the official coverage of the Israeli state since 1967, when it occupied the West Financial institution, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Since then, each Israeli authorities has pushed for the growth of unlawful Israeli settlements within the occupied territories, rendering the two-state answer an impossibility properly earlier than the Oslo peace course of started.
Throughout the Israeli political area, from the far-right to the liberal left, the concept of sharing the land with the Palestinians as equals was by no means on the desk.
The issue Israel has confronted – like different settler-colonial powers – has been that Indigenous populations not often if ever go mild into that good night time. Revisionist Zionism founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky wouldn’t have disagreed with Tlaib’s argument within the instant aftermath of the Hamas assault, that the “suffocating, dehumanising conditions” of everlasting occupation inevitably “lead to resistance”.
Precisely a century in the past, in his 1923 manifesto, The Iron Wall, he advocated overwhelming Jewish energy to show Palestine from the river to the ocean right into a Jewish ethnostate exactly due to the inevitability of Palestinian resistance.
No matter whose facet one is on, so long as the understanding of the “river-to-sea” discourse is filtered via the prism of the inherently colonial nation-state, one’s creativeness of different potentialities shall be extremely constrained. And a much more expansive creativeness is exactly what’s most desperately wanted at this time, not solely to ascertain freedom, justice and peace for all of the inhabitants of Palestine/Israel within the midst of the current horror, however to deal with humanity’s myriad existential issues, during which the Israeli occupation is deeply embedded.
In that regard, Tlaib’s argument – echoed by innumerable Palestinian activists and their allies, together with many Jews – that “from the River to the Sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate” represents a radically post-nationalist creativeness of the long run in Palestine and Israel. Actually, it’s one which Palestinians on the entrance traces of the occupation, joined by Israeli and worldwide solidarity activists, have been placing into apply, nonetheless tentatively and towards overwhelming pressure, for many years, as anybody who’s engaged in solidarity work within the occupied territories will attest.
To share a communal meal in Nabi Saleh or Bil’in, Atwani or the Jordan Valley after a day spent planting or harvesting olive bushes, strolling youngsters to high school, dealing with off towards Israeli settlers, bulldozers or tear gasoline – and now to battle each day collectively within the US and throughout the West, is to repeat an expertise frequent to the Freedom Riders, the multi-racial African Nationwide Congress, and others who struggled for freedom.
Intercommunal solidarity and joint motion in the direction of a standard future had been central to all these struggles, as they pushed for imagining potentialities for sharing land, sources and energy that beforehand appeared naïve, far-fetched and even harmful.
Daily, increasingly more Jews and others be part of Palestinians in inflicting exactly the form of “good trouble” that beforehand helped finish – nonetheless imperfectly – apartheid in America and South Africa, and formal colonial rule throughout the International South. There’s a rising consciousness, notably amongst younger individuals, that the stakes of Gaza prolong past Palestine and Israel, representing the entrance traces of a battle for the long run, for the potential of humanity not being engulfed by rising violence and inequality as we veer in the direction of ever extra lethal threats to our collective survival.
For these nonetheless trapped inside binary identities and safely ensconced in an more and more psychopathic world capitalist system, a free Palestine from the river to the ocean – certainly, a very free, equal and sustainable world – stays an unthinkable proposition.
However as the most recent wave of violence confirms, Israel can’t be free till Palestine is free, and the worth of that freedom is actual decolonisation. This implies the creation of a political order, no matter its identify or type, during which all individuals residing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are accorded the identical elementary rights and freedoms.
Within the face of the horrors of Gaza, we needs to be working to encourage actual decolonisation not simply in Israel/Palestine, however globally, earlier than the violence engulfs us all.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
