OPINION: Genocide For Me But Not For Thee?

Joel Swanson | Religion Dispatches
24 minutes ago
6 min read

Hillel International posted a map that says everything they won't say out loud.

Hillel International’s Yom Ha’atzmaut map depicting Israel as stretching from the river to the sea. Credit: Hillel International/Facebook — Hillel International’s *Yom Ha’atzmaut* map depicting Israel as stretching *from the river to the sea. Credit: Hillel International/Facebook*

Last week, Hillel International, the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, celebrated Israel’s Independence Day (Yom Ha’atzmaut) by posting an illustrated map of Israel—which is not, in itself, unusual. What was unusual was the map they chose: one that depicts Gaza and the West Bank as part of Israel, territories that the vast majority of the world’s governments, international law, and even many Israelis do not recognize as part of the sovereign State of Israel.

Let that image sit for a moment, because Hillel certainly wants you to sit with a different image—one they’ve been deploying relentlessly on college campuses for the past several years.

At a November 2024 “Stand Together” rally in Washington, D.C., Hillel student leader Shani Menna brought the crowd to its feet with the organization’s signature move: “They chant, ‘From the river to the sea,’” she said. “And I ask, ‘You mean the genocide of the Jewish people?’”

Indeed, Hillel and its allies at the Anti-Defamation League have devoted a significant amount of institutional energy (and resources) to convincing the public that the phrase From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free is a genocidal call for the elimination of both Jews and the State of Israel.

That’s a serious charge. So let’s take it seriously. And then let’s look at the map Hillel posted.

The phrase From the river to the sea, which has a genuinely complicated history, refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the entirety of what was once Mandatory Palestine, and what is today Israel—plus the occupied Palestinian territories. The precise origin of the phrase is disputed among scholars, but it appears to have circulated in Arabic-language protest culture since at least the late 1980s, during the First Intifada.

Although the widespread efforts to demonize the phrase are wildly out of step with its common usage, people who feel threatened by it aren’t always doing so in response to heavy-handed campaigns. It was, after all, adopted in various forms by Hamas, which incorporated related language into its 2017 revised charter. In addition, as Georgetown professor Elliott Colla writes:

“Especially for older generations of Jews, the slogan conjures up the deeply problematic language of the Palestinian National Charters of 1964 and 1968, which stipulated that Jews would have to renounce their collective right to self-determination if they wished to remain in a future state of Palestine.”

These associations are real, and they do matter.

Still, there’s no evidence that, as commonly used by activists, the phrase is a thinly-veiled call for the killing or expulsion of Jews. Some argue that, because a single state affording equal rights to Palestinians and Jews would mark the end of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state, it is de facto antisemitic.

But as Shaul Magid and Seth Sanders convincingly argue, if anti-Zionism is viewed as inherently antisemitic, huge parts of Jewish intellectual history would be ruled out of bounds.

In the United States, many supporters of Palestinian rights who use this phrase state explicitly that they mean a democratic, secular, single state with equal rights for all citizens—which was, in fact, proposed by Arab delegations in 1946. Some undoubtedly mean something darker, although in any movement this size you’re bound to find some expressions of violence, including among pro-Israel counterprotesters at UCLA, who resorted to actual violence in their masked attack on a pro-Palestine encampment.

Those who maintain that the phrase is genocidal have to reckon with the fact that the same geographic framework appeared in Likud’s own founding party platform of 1977, which stated: “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” As recently as January 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the same concept, stating that, “in the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area from the river to the sea.”

And for Israel it isn’t merely aspirational. The expansion of Israeli settlements across the West Bank has been widely understood, including by Israeli legal scholars, as a project aimed at permanent Israeli control over the entire territory. From the river to the sea, in other words, describes a single-state reality that multiple parties on multiple sides have championed—although only one side envisions a democratic secular state with equal rights for all citizens.

While the phrase is genuinely contested, genuinely charged, and its meaning deeply reliant on context, Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor Amos Goldberg and University of Massachusetts Jewish Studies professor Alon Confino conclude that:

“[The genocidal mood… in Israeli Jewish society today and… the assault taking place now in Gaza] should be viewed as the real problem and not the legitimate chant of ‘from the river to the sea: Palestine will be free’.”

None of this erases the legitimate fear that many Jewish people feel when they hear it. The history of persecution, expulsion, and murder that Jewish communities have faced is very real. The horror of October 7, 2023, is not ancient history. The anxiety that some Jews feel about a slogan associated with groups that have openly called for their destruction is understandable and deserves acknowledgment. Anti-Jewish hatred is real, it is rising, and a group like Hillel certainly has a responsibility to raise awareness about antisemitism.

Which makes what Hillel did with that map so dangerous.

If Hillel perceives a single state of Palestine between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River as an act of genocide against Jews, then what is a single state of Israel between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River?

Hillel’s Yom Ha’atzmaut image didn’t depict Israel within its internationally recognized pre-1967 borders—or even within its current de facto borders. It showed Israel absorbing Gaza and the West Bank entirely; a map of Greater Israel, of Israeli sovereignty from the river to the sea.

By Hillel’s own logic, the map they put out is a call for the elimination of Palestinian national existence. It is the erasure, in a single image, of Palestinian political aspirations, demographic reality, and human rights. If we’re going to say that envisioning one state is genocidal when Palestinians propose it, intellectual honesty requires us to say the same when Jewish organizations propose it.

What makes this all the more jarring is that one of these two societies is facing what almost every major international and Israeli human rights organization considers to be a genocide—and it’s not Israel. If we’re going to subject one claim of river to the sea to more scrutiny than the other, it should not be that of pro-Palestine protesters, but the claims of the country that not only currently governs all of the territory between the river and the sea, but has also killed at least 75,000 Palestinians during its war on Gaza.

Israel currently controls, to varying degrees, the lives of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank. They cannot vote in Israeli elections, cannot move freely on the roads that connect their communities, and live under a legal regime that applies different laws to them than to Israeli settlers living in the same territory.

B’Tselem, Israel’s most respected human rights organization, has concluded that this constitutes a system of apartheid—not because of a comparison to South Africa made in bad faith, but because it meets the definition: one ethnic group systematically dominating another through law, force, and institutionalized inequality. And, as with the designation of genocide, that conclusion isn’t fringe; it’s been reached by Amnesty International, by Human Rights Watch, and by senior Israeli jurists (among other NGOs and influential figures, both in Israel and across the globe).

Mathematically speaking, there are approximately equal numbers of Jews and Palestinians living between the (Jordan) river and the (Mediterranean) sea. If Israel wishes to maintain a Jewish voting majority and still call itself a democracy, it cannot permanently govern the West Bank. Israel essentially has three options:

Grant West Bank Palestinians full citizenship and voting rights and watch the Jewish majority it prizes evaporate;
Withdraw from the West Bank and allow the establishment of a Palestinian state; or
Continue the current arrangement, which is, by any honest accounting, apartheid.

These are the only options. Celebrating a map that includes the West Bank as part of Israel without confronting this arithmetic is simply denial (not to mention, according to their own logic, genocidal).

While the ADL’s data are marred by the organization’s dubious methodology, it’s still clear that antisemitism is on the rise. Jewish students deserve to be safe on their campuses, and to celebrate their heritage, their Zionism, and their connection to the state of Israel without abuse or harassment. None of that is in dispute here.

What is in dispute is whether an organization that accuses campus pro-Palestine protesters of genocide against Jews can then practice Palestinian erasure openly, as Hillel did with its Independence Day graphic. Or the conviction that from the river to the sea is genocidal when Palestinians say it, but merely celebratory when Hillel draws it. There is simply no honest route to this destination.