Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 82: 'From the River to the Sea' - Lost in Translation?

Episode Date: January 25, 2026

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East. Our current question: 'From the River to the Sea' - Lost in Translation?If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live. If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠. Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Okay, on to the next question in our series of answering the questions from the Internet. I was skeptical about this. It turned out to be a fantastic idea. People are finding it useful. I hope you find this useful. What does from the river to the sea mean? What river, what sea? And what's wrong with saying it? I frankly don't know who you are. I don't know if this person is pro-Israel and wants me to just explain why this is problematic from an Israeli point of view, or if this person is someone who wants to chant it in the next protest and really tries to, wants to understand why the heck so many Jews are so upset by it in their milieu over in New York.

I don't know who you are. Maybe that's the beauty of the internet. From the river to the sea, the very simplest sense refers to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And the idea is the old sense of the land of Israel, what the land of Israel is, those boundaries. So you have a river and you have a sea. and in between the river and the sea are two peoples, one Jewish, one Arab.

And what happens between those two peoples, between the river and the sea, it's been the big question, for a century. And when people say from the river to the sea today, they generally are saying, Palestine will be free right after. The argument is it isn't enough to talk about two states. it isn't enough to talk about a Palestinian state in the West Bank in Gaza and a division into two people's, right, two states for two nations, and the Palestinians need to rule themselves, and the Jews need to rule themselves, and everybody lives together in happiness and harmony

because somebody put a border between them, right? That's not the concept. The concept is that is all wrong. What, in fact, needs to happen, is that from the river to the sea, this entire land, which they call Palestine, which the Jews call the land of Israel, that is a debate, by the way, that goes back roughly to millennia, what to call the land.

And at various times it's called different things, and at various times it has different boundaries. But that whole entire totality of the land needs to be one thing called Palestine, which is free. A peace-loving social justice warrior on the American progressive model will tell you. What they're saying is that it needs to be a civic democracy where everyone, everyone in the land has a vote, and everything is handled the way it's handled in America. No recognition of ethnicity. Everybody's an individual, and everything is run as a civic democracy without any ethnic content. I don't know what to say to these people. America is the most radical version of civic democracy there has ever been, and it's extraordinarily beautiful.

And if the whole world could run like America, that might be a better world. It might. I genuinely say that. I don't know. America has certainly made a good case for its way of doing things for the last 250 years. Most of the democracies on earth are democracies because the Americans proved it was possible. And so if an American comes to the world and says, hey, let's do a way with nations, let's do away with the ethnic content of nations. You can just have a big civic democracy where everybody's committed to the idea of freedom, the ideas enshrined in a constitution. And that is a nation, a nation founded on an idea. And let's do that. I take it seriously because the Americans actually did that.

I don't take it so seriously coming from Palestinian activists or activists for the Palestinian cause. And the reason for that is that is not anything Palestinians want. Palestinians have ever said or Palestinians are willing to actually do on the ground. That is a fiction sold to foreigners by certain diaspora Palestinians running a propaganda campaign. What do I mean? The Palestinians have written a constitution for their state. They declared statehood in 1988, Yasser Arafat did in Tunis. Their statehood was recognized in 2012 as an observer state at the UN.

And in the constitutional text of that state, you can look this up, it is an Arab state. It has an ethnic identification. And in that constitutional definition of the state, it is a state based on Muslim ideas and Muslim law. And Sharia law is a source of legislation. And in fact, that state will have religious courts, just like every Middle Eastern state that was ever an Ottoman system that inherited the Ottoman militant system, including Lebanon, including Iraq, including Syria,

including Israel. And so the Palestine that they're fighting for has declared itself, and only ever declared itself. No Palestinian faction has ever said anything different about what this state will be. And in fact, there have been protests multiple times that I have seen. So this has to happen a lot,

because I don't carefully follow all the protests, in which the English sign said, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. And the Arabic sign next to it said, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab. And the actual phrase in Arabic is more often from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab, channeling, by the way, an Arabist idea,

a pan-Arab idea from the Nasr days, in which all Arabs are united and the great problem of Israel was that it's a crime committed against the Arab nation as a whole, and therefore all the Arabs have to unite and attack Israel. That's basically the foundation of the 67 war, of Nasser's alliance that he built with Syria and with Jordan, to attack the Israelis in 67. And its language borrowed from there. You know the difference between from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,

and from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab? It's not about civic democracy. It's about the Jews losing a state. And this is core. This is core to what's happening. What do you mean when you say Palestine should be free? Because if what you mean is the Palestinians need to live an independent, happy life separate from Israeli military rule, then a great many people agree with you. By the way, a great many Israelis agree with you.

Certainly in principle, even if they don't know how to get there. But if what you're actually saying is we're going to pretend to demand independence, We don't actually care about independence. We care that Israel dies. We care that Israel doesn't exist because Israel is a great insult and affront, whether it's to Islam or it's to Arabism or it's to progressive ideals and values and theories of history.

Israel must die. And if that means refusing two states, and if that means refusing Palestinian independence, and if that means holding Palestinians in perpetual victimhood and not allowing them in Lebanon for 77 years to get citizenship or even own real estate, which for generations they were not allowed to do in Lebanon. If that means oppressing Palestinians actively

to retain their refugee status, unlike any other refugee group in the world, where the goal is to end their refugee status by integrating them somewhere. The important point has nothing to do with Palestinian suffering. They can suffer for all time. The only thing that matters is the destruction of Israel because it is an insult to my theory of the world.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free is code. But it's not code that everyone who yells it understands. But it's always code. It is code for something else. And that something else is most of the time the destruction of Israel. That is most of the time what it is referring to. Not civic democracy, which you'd have to convince Palestinians to want that, before you could convince the Jews to want that,

because they're not at your back when you're making that demand in their name. Then if you literally just ask ordinary Palestinians about it in the streets of Jerusalem, for example, try it. They're going to tell you that has nothing to do with them. And if it's not actually something Palestinians are demanding or want for themselves, then it's about you talking to yourself in the mirror about your own moral emotions. From the river to the sea is from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. It is about the argument that it isn't enough to end military rule, even in Israel existing with full rights for its own Arab citizens

is not good enough and the idea of a Jewish state has to end.