World News

So you say

Interesting way to start, considering I linked three articles.

The history of the phrase has no bearing on the current use of the phrase. Kind of like when Biden said "I am a zionist." It meant something totally different when he was coming up than it does today.

The articles covered both historical and modern usage. Zionism is the same ideology as when it started, in fact that has become only more obvious since this genocide started.

• https://www.rahs-open-lid.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Masalha-Nur-Expulsion-of-the-Palestinians_-The-Concept-of-_Transfer_-in-Zionist-Political-Thought-1882-1948-Institute-for-Palestine-Studies-2012.pdf

• https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/14/israeli-historian-ilan-pappe-this-is-the-last-phase-of-zionism

• https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-database-with-500-instances-of-israeli-incitement-to-genocide-continuously-updated/

I'll quote from each article, including the two you linked, as they all support the reality that it is an emancipatory slogan.

Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine-Israel program at the Arab Center Washington D.C., has written extensively about the meaning of the slogan before and since Hamas's attacks on Oct. 7, which led to Israel's current bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

"It's an expression of Palestinian nationalism and it's an expression of a demand for Palestinian freedom or self-determination," said Waxman. "I think Palestinian self-determination need not come at the expense of Jewish self-determination. Nor do I think Palestinian freedom has to be considered a threat to Jewish rights."

• https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/from-the-river-to-the-sea-palestine-1.7033881

Simply put, the majority of Palestinians who use this phrase do so because they believe that, in 10 short words, it sums up their personal ties, their national rights and their vision for the land they call Palestine. And while attempts to police the slogan’s use may come from a place of genuine concern, there is a risk that tarring the slogan as antisemitic – and therefore beyond the pale – taps into a longer history of attempts to silence Palestinian voices.

• https://theconversation.com/from-the-river-to-the-sea-a-palestinian-historian-explores-the-meaning-and-intent-of-scrutinized-slogan-217491

The use of the phrase “from the river to the sea” has come under particular scrutiny in the last three months. When Palestinians, or anyone on the left, has used the phrase to demand a free Palestine—as in the popular chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—those on the right have disingenuously argued that it is calling for the death of all Jewish people in Israel.

• https://newrepublic.com/post/178243/benjamin-netanyahu-literally-says-from-the-river-to-the-sea

In 2021, 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”.

• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/from-the-river-to-the-sea-where-does-the-slogan-come-from-and-what-does-it-mean-israel-palestine

Preventing any possibility of a Palestinian state has always been Israel’s policy, one that the settlement building in the Occupied Territories is meant to ensure. This policy has been intensified under Benjamin Netanyahu, who in January 2024 publicly vowed to resist any attempt to create a Palestinian state and to maintain Israeli control from the river to the sea.

It is often maintained that the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ expresses a genocidal and antisemitic intention. But this is generally not the case. On the contrary, the slogan has historically been used to articulate a wide variety of political strategies for Palestinian liberation

Denying such demands seems as self-evident to most Israeli Jews as the air they breathe. It is this denial that has led to the dehumanization of Palestinians and has culminated in the genocidal mood that is prevailing in Israeli Jewish society today and in the assault taking place now in Gaza. This should be viewed as the real problem and not the legitimate chant of ‘from the river to the sea: Palestine will be free’.

• https://revdem.ceu.edu/2024/03/27/from-the-river-to-the-sea-one-slogan-many-meanings/

In Israel, Haaretz journalist Ravit Hecht wrote that the slogan is a call ‘for ethnic cleansing, similar to the one that took place in the Gaza ‘envelope’ [on October 7]… It’s not about a return to the 1967 borders or a cessation of the occupation, but the annihilation of the Jewish national home and the expulsion of Jews from this place.’"

Ravit Hecht is a zionist. Having a liberal leaning on a fascist ideology doesn't make it any less fascist. It's to the surprise of no one that zionist propaganda is deliberately used to de-legitimize the emancipatory slogan, used by the ones they oppress and ethnically cleanse, and project the mentality of genocide which Zionists are doing as we speak.

From Revit Hecht, among many other racist remarks such as Palestinians being a 'murderous and barbaric culture':

Hamas did what it did in the most horrific manner one could imagine. The organization’s defenders preach this, covering it with pseudo-intellectual blather and a specious discourse about human rights. If human rights interested them, they would enthusiastically support Israel’s war against Hamas, an organization that primarily oppresses its own people.

Anyone denying the right of a nation to defend itself after an attack, the cruelty of which can not be expressed in words, with the people who perpetrated it vowing to repeat it at the first opportunity; anyone who fails to distinguish between the way the IDF conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and the way Hamas treated its victims, is collaborating with an antisemitic attack. Sometimes it’s because such a person is himself or herself antisemitic, even if they are Jewish.

• https://archive.is/ELVsL

the people on the opposite side of that statement hear it very, very differently.

The other side being Zionists, who purposely de-legitimize and project the zionist ideology of ethnic cleansing onto the emancipatory slogan of the people they oppress and ethnically cleanse. You're only proving the point myself, SmilingSolaris, and everyone down voting your responses.