Is the slogan “From the river to the sea” antisemitic? Some Americans think it’s a political argument about how the land that is now Israel should be governed, with no religious implications.
But the best interpreter of this phrase is its principal promoter: Hamas. And in September 2021, Hamas hosted a conference titled “Promise of the Hereafter, Post-Liberation Palestine” to work out exactly how this territory would be ruled and specifically what would happen to the more than 7 million Jews who live there.
The conference’s proceedings can be seen on the Middle East Media Research Institute’s website. MEMRI also includes the summation of the day’s events, which addresses the question of how Jews—both those living in Israel and those elsewhere in the world who have supported the Jewish state—would be dealt with. The answers are very clear; you can read them yourself.
The answer, says the event organizers, is as follows. “In dealing with the Jewish settlers on Palestinian land, there must be a distinction in attitude towards [the following]: a fighter who must be killed; a [Jew] who is fleeing and can be left alone or be prosecuted for his crimes in the judicial arena; and a peaceful individual who gives himself up and can be [either] integrated or given time to leave. This is an issue that requires deep deliberation and a display of the humanism that has always characterized Islam.”
Let us unpack this.
First, all Jews who fought in support of Israel will be killed. All of them. Depending on whether that includes only active-duty members of the Israel Defense Forces or also reservists, this means that either hundreds of thousands or millions of Jews would immediately be executed when “Palestine” becomes “free” between “the river and the sea.”
Second, some other Jews who did not fight in support of Israel might be allowed to leave unless they’ve committed some other unspecified “crimes.”
A third group would be offered the right to give themselves up and be “integrated” into Palestine. The conference did not specify how this would work or what the rights of such people would be. We know from the 1988 Hamas Charter that any non-Muslims living under Muslim rule would be permitted to do so only “under the wing of Islam.”
And there is a fourth group.
“Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry should be retained [in Palestine] for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty, while we paid the price for all this in humiliation, poverty, sickness, deprivation, killing and arrests,” the concluding statement of the conference states.
These “educated” people will not be permitted to leave and will be forced to work. There is a name for this: They will be slaves.
So when “Palestine” is “free” from “the river to the sea,” Jews will face one of four fates: execution, exile, submission or slavery.
All Jews in Israel will receive one of these four treatments. These are their options because they are Jews.
Supporters of Israel outside the country will also be hunted down.
As the Promise of the Hereafter conference document states, “The minute ‘Israel’ collapses, the interim government’s security apparatuses must put their hands on the data regarding the agents of the occupation in Palestine, in the region and [throughout] the world, and [discover] the names of the recruiters, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the country and abroad. This is invaluable information that must not be lost, [for] using this information we can purge Palestine and the Arab and Islamic homeland of the hypocrite scum that spread corruption in the land. This important information will enable us to pursue the fleeing criminals who massacred our people.”
This is the true goal of a “Free Palestine” under Hamas that thousands of ignorant American college students, and evil American college professors and others, are out in the streets chanting for.
This is also the true meaning of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Never allow anyone to believe that this chant is not Jew-hatred.