The brilliance of the slogan “From the river to the sea,” is that it allows protesters to call for dismantling the State of Israel, and then insist that they have articulated nothing more than “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.”

Or at least that’s how Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D) describes the hateful chant.

Even if Tlaib’s argument doesn’t carry the day, it does a very effective job of persuading uninformed observers that the meaning of the slogan is disputed — and that it’s a perfectly acceptable phrase to use.

The latest authority to validate this artifice is Facebook, which used its Oversight Board to adjudicate the issue.

Last month, its board issued a decision stating that “From the river to the sea” does not violate the platform’s rules governing hate speech or violence and incitement.

The fundamental premise of the decision is that the phrase has “multiple meanings,” and is “often used as a political call for solidarity, equal rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people.”

The Oversight Board should have known better.

In May, the board announced that it was taking up the case and invited the submission of written comments from all quarters. The board received 2,142 comments, most of which simply take a side, yet dozens of civil society organizations submitted polished opinions.

Defenders of the slogan included the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Human Rights Watch, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Organizations on the other side included the World Jewish Congress (WJC), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), and my own organization, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

The FDD submission, which I co-authored with my colleague Ahmad Sharawi, sought to pre-emptively dismantle the claim that the meaning of the phrase is in the eye of the beholder. Rather, the phrase originated as a call for the use of force to replace Israel with a Palestinian state. We also emphasized that, in its original Arabic form, the phrase explicitly calls for Arab supremacy.

Footage from this past spring shows protesters at Harvard and MIT chanting “Min al-mayah lil-mayah, Falastin arabiyah” — literally, “From the water [the Jordan River] to the water [the Mediterranean Sea], Palestine is Arab.”

Yet in English, what follows “From the river to the sea” is invariably “Palestine will be free.” Influential media outlets have devoted considerable space to parsing this slogan, generally noting its use by Hamas and other advocates of violence, then retreating to the comfortable relativism of the view that its meaning is uncertain or disputed.

The FDD brief also explained that the effort to reframe the slogan as a call for justice began 20 years ago in a bid to sanitize it for use on campus. The earliest dispute for which there is a solid documentary record took place at Rutgers in 2003, when Jewish students challenged protesters who unfurled a banner bearing the slogan in the university’s student center.

Protest leader Charlotte Kates told The New Jersey Jewish News that the slogan “is about liberation” and “doesn’t have to do with kicking anybody out.”

In a separate interview with The New York Times, she refused to condemn suicide bombings and said  that all of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean should be returned to Palestinians. Kates would go on to become a career activist; Canadian police arrested her earlier this year on hate crime charges for leading a Vancouver crowd in chants of “Long live October 7.”

In their submissions to Facebook, the slogan’s defenders do not just ignore its history as a call to dismantle Israel by force of arms. Rather, they insist it is actually an expression of a desire for a “Palestinians and Israelis to live together in a single state with equal rights for all,” as CAIR would have it.

Yet CAIR is an unlikely advocate of co-existence. In November, its national executive director, Nihad Awad, declared that on October 7, “I was happy to see people breaking the siege” of Gaza and denied Israel has a right of self-defense.

Even the Biden White House, amid its scramble for Arab-American votes in Michigan and other swing states, felt compelled to denounce Awad’s comments as antisemitic.

In its brief, AMP described the slogan “as a call for liberation from all forms of oppression and as a call for equality for all.”

This rings hollow when coming from a group which issued a statement on October 7 that did not even mention Hamas, while asserting that the “unfolding crisis in Gaza” had been “precipitated by increased Israeli aggression.”

Strangely, AMP even claimed, regarding “From the river to the sea,” that “Critique of this slogan has only emerged after October 7,” demonstrating the critics’ disingenuity. A more accurate description of the situation would be that CAIR, AMP, and their fellow travelers are simply gaslighting Facebook.

To be sure, the slogan’s defenders also include genuine civil libertarians, like those at FIRE. Yet their scant knowledge of history leads them into error.

FIRE acknowledges that the slogan’s association with Hamas has led to some “to hear it as a call for genocide and ethnic cleansing,” but “the phrase predates Hamas and holds different meanings depending on who is using it.” Human Rights Watch also notes the tie to Hamas while crediting the good intentions of those who use the phrase to “demand that Palestinians, wherever they live, including in Israel, be free.”

As numerous Jewish community organizations pointed out in their submissions, the interpretation of the slogan as innocuous depends on ignoring its plain, direct meaning.

If one insists that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea constitute an entity known as Palestine, then one must dismantle the entity known as Israel. Given that Israelis prefer their country continue to exist, it requires a good measure of ingenuity to claim that its dismantling would occur through peaceful means, especially given the actual conduct of those who sought to initiate the dismantling on October 7 or previous occasions.

Still, even if one grants that “From the river to the sea” is inherently offensive, one might argue that Facebook should allow offensive speech, hewing closely to the First Amendment.

Yet Facebook’s community standards warn it will not tolerate “content that threatens people.”

The platform’s policy on hate speech prohibits “calls for exclusion or segregation” as well as “statements advocating or calling for harm.” There is even a ban on “aspirational or conditional statements” advocating “Political exclusion, which means denying the right to political participation.” This seems to fit a slogan whose aspiration is to terminate a political entity against the will of its people.

Of course, one should not be surprised when intellectual and moral consistency prove to be less important to a major corporation than remaining in the good graces of progressive opinion. That, too, is a part of how free markets operate. So those who understand the history and meaning of “From the river to the sea” should focus on making their case in the marketplace of ideas ,despite the prospect of an uphill battle.

David Adesnik is a senior fellow and director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

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