Don’t be fooled. ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ means only one thing | Opinion

The Herald recently published an online op-ed that tries, by twisting words beyond recognition, to gaslight us into accepting a call for Jewish extermination.

We weren’t fooled.

The phrase “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is not, as Maha Nassar would have us believe, “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence.” Far from it.

“From the river to the sea” is both a call for genocide and a lie. It’s a call for genocide because a Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea would require the elimination of the 9 million people living in the country between those two borders —the Jewish State of Israel.

And the chant isn’t new. It’s just a rephrasing of Hamas’ hateful charter, which “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” and which, to effectuate that end, implores all Muslims to “fight [the] Jews and kill them.”

Palestinian activists wisely recognized that “Kill the Jews” doesn’t have the same ring to it. So, they’ve repackaged it into something slightly more sanitized — a slogan that might sound more geographical than genocidal. But don’t be misled. Recently, Ghazi Hamad, Hamas’ spokesman, told Lebanese TV that Israel must be wiped off the map. When the reporter asked whether this meant the complete annihilation of Israel’s people, Hamad replied: “Yes, of course.”

Like Nassar, the Nazis also deployed euphemism to obscure their intentions. Nazi political theory touted the Völkisch movement—which, on its face, advocated only “Blood and Soil”: the notion that German land should be populated by German blood. We know how that turned out. “From the river to the sea” — the promise that “Palestinian” lands should be populated by “Palestinian” blood—is just “Blood and Soil” repackaged for the 21st century.

The Palestinian liberation”movement has long been tied to Naziism. The grand mufti of Jerusalem — the original Yasser Arafat — explicitly allied himself with the Nazis during World War II. He even went to Germany to meet (and ingratiate himself with) Adolf Hitler. Nassar wisely kept this Palestinian history out of her op-ed. And, lest anyone think the Palestinian connection to Naziism is a thing of the past, in recent weeks, Israeli soldiers have found in the belongings of Hamas terrorists marked-up copies of “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s seminal work on the destruction of the Jews.

Nassar’s claim that the phrase represents a call for “freedom” and “human rights” ignores reality. The Palestinians of Gaza have been free of Israeli occupation since 2005 — when Israel fully withdrew from Gaza. Instead of seeking freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, Gazans overwhelmingly elected Hamas, a terrorist organization, which promptly killed off the opposition, Fatah, squelched human rights (including women’s rights) and promised to exterminate their Jewish neighbors.

Nassar’s claim that the phrase embodies the promise of a Palestinian return to their ancestral homeland fares no better. Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel. That’s why, when you follow the march of Christ through the Via Dolorosa, you’re tracing the footsteps of a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, a city you can still visit today in Israel. That’s why, when you visit Rome, you can still see — on the façade of the Arch of Titus — Roman legionnaires carrying Jewish artifacts back to Rome from the rubble of a destroyed Jewish temple in a defeated Jewish kingdom. That’s why, in 132 A.D., the resurrected Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem minted silver coins engraved with the Hebrew phrase: “Year One for the Redemption of Israel.”

These events — and countless others — took place on Jewish land in hundreds of years before there was even such a thing as Islam. If Jews don’t belong in Israel, they don’t belong anywhere. That, of course, is what Hamas really wants — and it’s what “From the river to the sea” really means.

We can pretend that words don’t mean what we think they mean. But, when someone promises to kill you, you’d do well to believe him.

Roy K. Altman is a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida. The views expressed in this op-ed are the author’s alone and not offered in his capacity as a judge. They do not represent the views of the federal judiciary.