A chant often taken up at the many pro-Palestine rallies currently taking place around the world is getting increasing attention.
You will often hear lusty renditions of "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!" at any rally in support of Palestine and Palestinian rights. The river in question is the Jordan, and the sea is the Mediterranean. It has been used at least since the 1960s, and is seen by Palestinians and their supporters as an expression of their demand for equal rights for Palestinians within the borders of Israel and the occupied territories, a plea for self-determination. There is no consensus on whether this should be within a single secular Palestinian state, or as part of a two-state solution, but it is pretty clearly a call for freedom, not domination.
The way I see it, a quick perusal of the border maps of Israel and Palestine (see below) is enough to show that Palestine wants to revert to the UN-promised borders of 1947, which did pretty much stretch from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, but still left Israel with a substantial homeland to populate. Instead, after various local wars, Palestine ended up today with the much smaller territory that can be seen in the second map below. They would like to get back to what was promised.
However, Israel and the Jewish diaspora worldwide seem to automatically interpret the chant - for reasons that I confess I don't entirely understand - as a call to completely destroy Israel and its people, and characterize it as hate speech with genocidal intent. As the Toronto-based Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs puts it, the chant calls for "death to all Jewish people in Israel, Canada and everywhere", which surely takes reading between the lines to a whole new level.
This is partly, to be fair, because Hamas (a terrorist organization that DOES seek to destroy Israel) has recently incorporated it into its own charter. Adding to the confusion, though, Jews themselves have often employed the phrase "from the river to the sea" in their own propaganda and at public rallies, and Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party uses the phrase in its founding charter, as a way of saying that it does not actually recognize Gaza or the West Bank.
Either way, the phrase has certainly become a contentious and loaded one during the current Israel-Hamas conflict. This came to a head in Canada a couple of days ago when Wesam Cooley (aka Wesam Khaled) was arrested by Calgary police after a pro-Palestinian rally there for using "an antisemitic phrase", despite earlier assurances by the police that his words would not result in his arrest, that day at least.
The police did not explicitly confirm that the antisemitic phrase in question was the "from the river to the sea" one, but they did say that it was used repeatedly, and that the crowd was encouraged to follow along, so it seems very likely.
Interestingly, Cooley was initially charged with a standard crime (causing a public disturbance) and then a hate motivation was appended to it, presumably because only a handful of charges of advocating genocide or willfully promoting hatred have ever been brought before the courts on Canada, and police need their provincial attorney-general to sign off on such charges.
Be that as it may, it will be interesting to see how this charge progresses, or even whether it is retracted as an error as many legal experts believe. Several lawyers professors have confirmed that Cooley's words and actions do not meet the threshold for hate speech, or even for causing a disturbance. So, it will be interesting to see whether the charges turn out to have been trumped up and politically-motivated, especially given that the Calgary protesters were told that by police that the Alberta government is considering classifying the chant as a form of hate speech.
It may be the first explicit move in Canada to crack down on the political free speech of pro-Palestinian protesters, echoing similar restrictions in some European cities and countries.
UPDATE
Unsurprisingly, the charges against Mr. Cooley have been stayed by the Alberta Crown prosecutors before a trial could even be held, on the grounds that it could not be legally supported.
I, and many others, could have told Calgary Police Services that before they went to the trouble of arresting the guy. Toronto Police Services, for example, have already had their lawyers review the same situation and provincial legal experts are unanimous in their view that such a chant does not meet the threshold of constituting hate speech.
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