Comment by pcthrowaway
2 years ago
My (current, possibly misinformed) understanding is that "from the river to the sea" refers to a Palestinian state that stretches from the west bank to Gaza. Under the current reality, I don't see how this would be accomplished without a mass genocide of (Jewish) Israelis.
I'm open to the suggestion that (some?) people chanting this hope for this to be accomplished without violence, but speakers at such events have also glorified the actions of Hamas on October 7th.
For what it's worth, I don't support the actions of Israel, or the occupation of West bank and Gaza. I support a free Palestine in the sense that West Bank / Gaza should be left alone. There's a good chance that without the blockade, those territories would better arm themselves and it would result in a war which would impact Israel much more significantly as West Bank + Gaza would likely move to reclaim Israeli land. But at this point I don't see an alternative without Israel continuing its egregious human rights violations and genocide of the Palestinian people.
Kind of a shit situation all around.
There is a well-established solution to conflict, called democracy. People fight it out in ballots and legislatures; they resolve differences by the universal rules (apply to everyone) in indepedent tribunals (courts; they all are guaranteed human rights.
It doesn't work beautifully or easily or perfectly, but it keeps a lid on things generally. Our recent abandonment of it is awful, and serves only the warmongers, hateful, and power-hungry - the people who benefit from the absence of things like universal human rights.
The well established solution called democracy generally concludes that people should be allowed to continue living in separate jurisdictions rather than being consolidated into one territory between "river and sea" for reasons of history and religious symbolism though.
As it happens, the Palestinians are slightly outnumbered in the area between the river and the sea, which means that when it crops up in the Hamas charter it's difficult to imagine that democracy is how they would seek to maintain control over the region, even ignoring recent history (And yeah, the same question marks about how exactly they would stay in power applies to all the Palestinian and Israeli groups before them that defined the "river and the sea" as the territories they thought their brethren should assume control of, as they pointedly focused on the idea of historical unity rather than self determination)
I'm sure there are people who sincerely believe in the position that a single state solution with some form of democracy would be best for the region and a moderating influence but I don't think they overlap much with the river sea border slogan people...
Yes, I didn't mean a one-state democracy (though I see how it could be interpreted that way). I agree about a two-state solution.
> As it happens, the Palestinians are slightly outnumbered in the area between the river and the sea, which means that when it crops up in the Hamas charter it's difficult to imagine that democracy is how they would seek to maintain control over the region
It's long been a basic assumption of experts that Palestinian's higher population growth would result in them having a much larger population in Israel than Jews. That's been a reason and incentive for the two-state solution: Israeli Jews would not want to be a minority in the 'Jewish state'.
The fact that the Israeli right wing has abandoned the two-state solution raises the question of what they intend. Clearly they don't intend being a minority; what other plan do they have?
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That democracy evaporated very quickly in Gaza.
So an essential solution hasn't worked everywhere every time. Should we abandon it? Should the founders of the US quit after the Articles of Confederation didn't work out? Later after the Civil War?
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I am going to answer this as honestly as possible, but this is a personal interpretation (like everything in this hn thread), it doesn’t refer to a free Palestinian state as much as it does to the people. When Israel is inherently setup as a country for Jewish people, that does indeed call for the abolition of the state of Israel as is, but to me that is like saying fighting against apartheid in South Africa was calling for a genocide of whites. It could have been if they would have fought for the need of having an apartheid state, but it wasn’t necessary.
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