Words matter. That is the purported principle behind a national campaign by pro-Israel organizations to censor, punish and even criminalize protests on American college campuses demanding a cease-fire to Israel’s unrestrained assault on 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. University administrators have obliged with draconian restrictions that effectively deny their own students the ability to speak out against what the International Court of Justice has described as Israel’s “plausible” violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza.
Pro-Israel advocates often point to the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which has been chanted by students at campus protests against the war in Gaza, claiming it fuels antisemitism against Jewish students. Not only do they refuse to acknowledge the students’ desire for freedom and security for both Palestinians and Israelis, but organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Brandeis Center and the Deborah Project that are suing universities fail to mention the Israeli government’s own official version of “from the river to the sea”—free of Palestinians. As the Likud Party’s original platform stated in 1977, “Judea and Samaria”—also known as the West Bank—”will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
In alleging antisemitism on college campuses, pro-Israeli groups point to the 1950s and 1960s when the Palestinian Liberation Organization rejected an Israeli state. However, that was long before the PLO and most Palestinians accepted the two-state solution in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Many students born into the post-Oslo reality, thus, understand the phrase “from the river to the sea” to mean freedom, security and dignity for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israeli Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. To the young people still protesting on college campuses, Israel’s indefinite settlement growth in the West Bank, unchecked Israeli settler violence and systematic demolition of universities, hospitals and vital civil infrastructure in Gaza go against the human rights principles that animate their chants for peace.
Read the full article in DAWN’s Democracy in Exile Journal here.
