Let me show you something.
It’s a map of the places we now call variously Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, along with a bit of the places we now call Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
It’s a map from 1947. It’s a map made by people proposing to partition what had been there into new states.
The orange parts, referred to as “Arab State”, have two teeny-weeny connectors between their three main parts, and a tiny dot at Jaffa, near to Tel Aviv. It is a map built to ensure that the two states being imagined have territories which stretch from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.
The supposed wisdom of Versailles, pushed most famously by Woodrow Wilson, was that the old European empires needed to be partitioned into ethnostates that were based on a single language and culture, though in the end that principle of “self-determination” was only followed so far. The opposing wisdom of decolonization after Yalta in World War II was to accept the very much not single-language, single-culture boundaries that colonizers made for the administration of their empires in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and to accept the new multi-lingual, multi-ethnic empires formed within the Communist world in Europe and Asia from the Bolshevik Revolution onwards into the closing of World War II and the dawning of the Cold War. In an older time, the treaty of Westphalia standardized among its European combatants some of the concepts that modern international law associates with statehood, and some of Napoleon’s administrative moves in the aftermath of his conquests did the same.
And in all of that making and breaking of boundaries, administrations, communities and aspirations, one frequent point of discussion and negotiation has been over the prospects of states or territories with no access to either an ocean or a river of sufficient depth and size to permit some travel and shipping along its course, most ideally to an ocean, even if that access passes through the intervening territory of another sovereignty.
To take the point down to the most intimate of scales, imagine you are looking at a property for purchase which has no access to any road in the area, and is surrounded by properties owned by other private owners who will not grant any easements for access. That is a property which by definition is valueless unless you are prepare to travel to it by helicopter and have all construction materials and goods delivered similarly. The post-1945 world order recognized this same problem for land-locked states by asserting that such states should have a legal right to ocean access through intervening sovereign territories, a right which is roughly as reliable as many other principles of international law, which is to say not very much.1 It is effectively up to most land-locked nations, about a quarter of the world’s present countries, to wrangle functional bilateral agreements with neighbors about transport corridors.
The principle of access was based on a recognition that in the absence of a secure agreement, a land-locked nation choose territorial aggression out of desperation. If transport networks to and from such a place are well-developed and there’s no threat to access, it’s not a big deal. Switzerland is not in danger of attacking Italy in order to create a transit corridor to Genoa. Moreover, airplanes keep the citizens of land-locked countries from being completely confined to their territories, regardless of the functionality of their ground or river-based transport agreements.
There have been other forms of land tenure in world history under which this kind of threat scarcely existed, in which territories worked by or inhabited by families, groups or communities were understood always to be porous to travel and transport, where no one claimed exclusive and absolute ownership of or power over land. We don’t live in that world.
The makers of the map I started with were well aware they did not live in that kind of world, and moreover, that they were creating two states who would come to life in antagonistic relation to one another, even if they did not necessarily envision the actual magnitude of dispossession, violence and war that unfolded after, which shadows the entire world to this day. They did want from the beginning to draw states which could imaginably thrive as separate entities.
Even if you knew nothing of the complicated history of Zionism, of the Balfour Declaration, of the Mandate and the creation of Israel, of the Nakba, of the Arab-Israeli Wars, of the first and second intifadas, of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and steadfastly refused to read the news of what has happened in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023, I think you would look at the map of 1947 and scratch your head at its strangeness. Why not simply partition neatly? A north and a south, one to each side, equal in its square mileage?
But boundaries in the post-1945 world often make little sense in those terms. I often point out to students that the borders of Senegal and Gambia seem untenable and bizarre, creating as they do a region of southern Senegal that is almost cut off from the rest of the nation and a country that is little more than the banks of a river for hundreds of miles.2 Prowl over global maps and you will spot many such nations. The world rightfully scorned apartheid South Africa’s ridiculous attempts to create “homelands”, but the independent nation of Lesotho has many of the same issues that those delusional territories have. It’s just that its creation was a part of an earlier history. There are nations which are too big, nations that are too small, nations which thread a long corridor or strip, which curve and dodge when they should simply be a solid block.
In the case of the “Arab state” and the “Jewish state” of 1947, the map-makers were trying to deal with human beings where they already were, with competing visions of needs and histories, with existing military and social mobilizations which were going to do what they wanted regardless of the lines on the map, and with differing basic estimations of land value based both on labor already invested and on potential for future productivity. Making a simple north-and-south would have set tens of thousands of people in motion to new places. Although, in the end, that happened anyway, and without any of the abstract but improbable fairness that a history-blind division into two equal halves might have allowed.
We live now in a moment where many people assert that to speak of a Palestine that is free “from the river to the sea” means, always and by definition, calling for the genocide of Israelis. Advocates of Palestinian sovereignty or rights note that the phrase falls equally lightly off the tongues of right-wing Israeli politicians, and contend that its intent is equally hostile towards Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, as Saul Takahashi points out in a recent review of an anthology titled From the River to the Sea.3 Takahashi and the contributors to that volume observe, with no genocidal intent, that either of the prevailing frameworks for imagining a long-term resolution to the Israel-Palestine situation without genocide or murderously violent expulsion of one group of existing residents—must in some sense be “from the river to the sea”.
By that what I would mean—for I agree with the generality of their point—is that if the 1947 map is now as remote in possibility as an unexpected rebirth of the Livonian Confederation, any two-state solution must be definition involve a redrawing of the map and relocation of some existing communities of people to their new state, and in such a redrawing it would seem wise to imagine both of the new nations as having access to the Mediterranean, two states both stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Which in turn means at least somebody will be in motion, even if in the least disruptive case somehow that access is just a thin corridor from the existing West Bank, with some kind of neutral ‘crossing’ for the parts of Israel that would otherwise be sundered from one another.
The only other solution is a one-state solution, where all peoples live in a territory that secures the rights of all within its borders.
Those who argue that Israel must be a Jewish-ruled state by definition argue that only such a state can secure the safety of Jews worldwide. I do not stand against the aspiration for such safety, but I am impatient with any who think that contemporary Israel is the accomplishment of that aspiration for all time to come. Its safety stands on the knife’s edge of a global hegemon’s provision of economic and military aid, and has been secured more and more by a combination of brutal military repression, intensifying religious extremism and deals with neighboring authoritarian rulers who show no particular commitment to peace or justice as a political ethos. Jews are at least as safe as minority residents of large pluralistic liberal democracies elsewhere, which is perhaps to say, not very safe at all in the sense that the embrace of or mere toleration of religious, ethnic and cultural diversity in those states is now precarious as well. Looking into the future from the standpoint of this present, it is impossible to imagine that Israel as presently constituted will ever be safely at peace, ever be able to have a military which is no more than a surety against unforeseen threat, ever be able to say in a satisfied and resolved way, “The Jewish people are safe because of this country.”
So perhaps if we sense in the declarations, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “from the river to the sea, Israel will permit no challenge to its security”, the whiff of violent expulsion and genocidal intent, that is because neither two states nor one state seems anywhere as remotely possible as the blandished imagination of international relations experts and diplomats who believe in treaties and negotiations and ten-step plans between rationalized nation-states might hope. But even if those do not seem like options, “from the river to the sea” can mean things that live powerfully only in the mind and the memory, that are not calls to do anything. As Rachel Havrelock points out, the Jordan River has mythic and imaginative resonance for many people imagining nation, community and home, both Israeli and Palestinian, both present in those territories and those far away.4
I grew up in California. I’ve never recognized myself in some of what people who’ve only seen it in popular culture think about it, but other places that are in some sense unreal have resonant meaning to me as part of that “home” that I will likely never live in again. (I’d gladly retire to many parts of the state, but there’s this thing called money that’s likely to be a problem.) I might find myself incensed or sad or worried if some parts of that home were threatened with change. There might be lines on maps, bordering places, that would figure strongly in those feelings. But I could also think of the places that make me feel something without envisioning any urgent response or any aspiration to act. I would rather there be the desolate ruins of Marineland than an ultra-expensive Trump-owned golf course and resort at the southern edge of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, for example. But I could walk Marineland in fond memory and unfulfilled desire without that rising to a call for a wrecking ball to tear down the resort.
And what people say, they sometimes say in imitation. I’m not convinced that some of the American students chanting the river-to-sea slogan are thinking of anything in particular except the transgressive thrill of its provocation and the moral simplicity of its call for freedom. There are no maps in the chant, and no real bodies or communities either. That might be substantive vacuity or unworthy trust in parties elsewhere who have provided the template for the chant, but much of the time it’s not conscious malevolence or intentional threat to anyone immediately or distantly involved.
Ah, but what of those parties elsewhere? Certainly there are people in Israel who dream of a land from river to sea that is empty of Palestinians or Arabs, though perhaps not empty of guest workers from Thailand, Sri Lanka and Malawi, and whose dreams are converging on actual schemes of forced migration, dispossession, and violent threat. Certainly there are Palestinians—among them the members of Hamas—who have made their view that the land they regard as theirs must be emptied of Israelis by whatever means possible, who reject absolutely the right of Jewish communities to inhabit that territory in safety and freedom.
If a slogan can reference or hint at a project of violent ethnonationalism, doesn’t it always mean those things? Or doesn’t it always mean that someone who doesn’t wish to say anything of the sort should avoid ever repeating the slogan, to avoid confusion?
Well, I hate to be one of those academics, but it depends. Only that’s not just an academic point. Think of all the songs, all the sayings, all the lines of poetry, all the proverbs, that have some quality of reference to dispossession, violence, and suffering if you choose to think about it for a minute. I quite like “America the Beautiful”, but there’s not much said in the song about the process by which the United States came to stretch from sea to shining sea and there’s quite a bit said about God sanctioning that process. Nobody ever gets to the third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner” but there’s an invocation of slavery that is at the least unsettling. Every American political candidate ever has genuflected at the idea of a shining city on the hill without ever going into the particulars of where that comes from. All of us, in our time and our way, choose to look past some of what is referenced or obscured in the language and culture we use in everyday life and in service to making social and political connections.
Even more to the point, all slogans, mantras, and mottos are by nature and design easy to remember, use, iterate, re-purpose and thus are also easily turned on their head or subverted by people who oppose one or more meanings of the slogan, to be what some people have called a snowclone, a phrase that is “quoted and misquoted”, in an “entirely open array of different variants”.5 “Black Lives Matter” almost instantly summoned “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter”, for example.
And that example is instructive. Some people for whom “Black Lives Matter” was an important call to action took to objecting to anyone saying “All Lives Matter” in response, insisting that this response was always and invariably racist, much as some people insist “From the river to the sea” is always a call for expulsion and murder. But that was a response that arose over time, because the first answer to someone saying “All Lives Matter” was to observe, often with some asperity or exasperation, that the point of “Black Lives Matter” was precisely that all lives matter. If the core principle is all lives matter, went the response, then you have to respond differentially when some lives are more imminently threatened than other lives. But over time, as hearts were hardened and the rejoinders to Black Lives Matter became more and more transparently ill-intentioned, the patience to have a conversation about the relationship between Black lives and all lives in that way evaporated.
I understand why any patience with chanting about the freedom of Palestine evaporated for some people on the morning of October 8th. But then I also understand why for some people patience for countenancing the state of Israel as the exclusive sovereignty allowed to exist where the map of 1947 imagined two states, equal and free, evaporated through a series of events from the Nakba onward.
The first problem with the phrase “from the river to the sea” is really its second part: neither Israel nor Palestine in their present or presently imagined states is or would be free by mere fact of the defense or creation of a conventional kind of territorial sovereignty. If there is anything that we should have learned in the 20th Century, it is that nationalist political movements and parties like Hamas (or Likud) rarely intend nor defend “freedom” for the populations in the territories that they rule or aspire to rule. On October the 6th, the state of Israel was still reeling over the attempt of half its citizens and residents to threaten the rights and freedoms of the other half; if on some future October morning, a government controlled by people like Hamas ruled over a state called Palestine, they would not only threaten the freedom of neighbors but almost certainly some of their own population.
There can’t be any progress towards making any territory, any community, any people free in the lands on that map without some basic change. Sovereignty for people who feel they are a nation is the initial condition of a freedom they may make or may fail in the years to follow. There are two peoples who really feel that way there on that map both now and then, and for them to pursue the hope of freedom, they will both need a home that is theirs which goes from river to sea. That pursuit is not a thought in the minds of some who chant the slogan, certainly, and some who chant it may have no real thought other than conforming to the performative norms of a politics being assembled by others all around them. But to focus on the slogan—or to pre-emptively insist on what it must mean, can only mean—and not on what it could mean, on its potential truths and contradictory commandments, is at the least impoverished, and more frequently dishonest and manipulative.
Nothing good can happen without being willing to re-imagine both what we hear in other people’s calls to action, other people’s cries of pain, and without insisting, in whatever language comes to mind, that a better future for all can only be found on a map that has yet to be drawn, in a geography that increasingly many are too bitter to imagine.
See Uprety, Kishor. The Transit Regime for Landlocked States : International Law and Development Perspectives. World Bank, 2006.
See Mark Deets’ 2023 A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in Senegal for at least one of the cartographically-fueled consequences of these border.
Takahashi, Saul J. (2020) Review Essay: From the River to the Sea, Edited by Mandy Turner, Middle East Critique, 29:4, 451-457, DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2020.1826736
Rachel Havrelock (2007) My Home is Over Jordan: River as Border in Israeli and Palestinian National Mythology, National Identities, 9:2, 105-126, DOI: 10.1080/14608940701333720
This term was actually new to me when I started writing this—the Wikipedia entry and the Language Log conversation it cites is really useful.
You key sentence is this: "Jews are at least as safe as minority residents of large pluralistic liberal democracies elsewhere, which is perhaps to say, not very safe at all in the sense that the embrace of or mere toleration of religious, ethnic and cultural diversity in those states is now precarious as well".
If that was indeed true, the contours of this debate would be very different. But many Jewish people have reason to believe they are uniquely vulnerable in a way that other ethnic minorities are not. It is difficult to imagine France herding Algerians into concentration camps, to be exterminated by gas, with the aim of the total extermination of the Algerian identity, and yet within living memory French police have done just that to Jewish people.