A protester carries a sign that reads, "From the river to the sea." at a Pro-Palestinian rally in Columbus Ohio. Photo by Paul Becker/Becker1999 via Wikipedia and reused under Creative Commons license CC BY-2.0.
Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program (@IEthics) at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are her own.
Among phrases frequently heard at recent student protests against Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza, one has now become the subject of a request for public comments from Meta’s Oversight Board. The Oversight Board is an external body set up by Facebook’s parent company with the aim of “providing an independent check on Meta’s content moderation, making binding decisions on the most challenging content issues”—according to the group’s web page. While the board’s independence has been questioned by critics, the group argues that it delivers “policy recommendations that push Meta to improve its rules… and treat all users fairly.”
In a recent announcement, the board invites public comments that address, among other aspects, “[t]he origin and current uses of the phrase: From the river to the sea.”
Various versions of the phrase have been used by right-wing Israeli politicians, by leaders of Hamas, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah, by the PLO, by activists, academics, and, especially over the last few months, by protesters on college campuses. There are likely quite a few, both among student protesters and among people who reported the use of the phrase as a violation of Meta’s Community Standards, who would be surprised by aspects of its history or current usage.
Some people view the phrase as a call for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state—and associate it with the related statements made in the past in various Middle Eastern countries about “pushing the Jews into the sea.” Others argue that they see it and intend it as a call for freedom and equality for all people in both Israel and the Palestinian territories—or a call for a single state solution, rather than the two-state solution that has often been proposed as the way to achieve peace in the region.
What are the implications of that variety of views?
If the immediate, key goal of the campus protests is to push for an end to the killing in Gaza, and the longer-term goal is to find a way to reach peace in the region for all of the people living there, this phrase—however well intended when uttered—is counterproductive. The truly difficult, complicated thing required is communication among people who deeply disagree about the right thing to do and the means to achieve it. A phrase that will be uttered by some as an aspiration to freedom and fairness for all but heard by some as denying their right to exist, shuts down such communication.
In the current context, charged with fear, trauma, and anger, communication requires courage, patience, and compassion. It also requires a willingness to learn, which in turn implies an awareness that one’s perspectives might be wrong or overly simplistic, based on incomplete information.
In an essay titled “Ethics and Virtue,” Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer argue that:
[a]t the heart of the virtue approach to ethics is the idea of ‘community’. A person's character traits are not developed in isolation, but within and by the communities to which he or she belongs… The virtue approach urges us to pay attention to the contours of our communities and the habits of character they encourage and instill.
In the academic community, some of the habits of character encouraged are intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and the kind of productive arguments that aim to lead to new knowledge, deeper understanding. Some protests at universities have encouraged students in those directions. Some, however, have not. Some have focused on presenting only one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and described that as educational. Even if undertaken with the best of intentions, with the goal to help innocent Palestinians who are being killed or suffering in vast numbers, such efforts are a kind of propaganda. And propaganda can be efficient, at publicizing a cause, for example, or stressing a point of view—but not at bringing warring sides together or finding solutions to conflicts.
In fact, it often helps people cement their pre-existing views, or develop simplistic notions—on both sides of the conflict—when what’s needed is the awareness of complexity and a need to learn more, including things that will make one deeply uncomfortable about one’s own positions.
There are some who do use the “river to the sea” phrase as a demand for the destruction of Israel—while others have used it as shorthand for the notion that Israel should encompass all that territory. In contrast, two groups that haven’t used the phrase, and are left mostly unmentioned in campus conversations, are pro-ceasefire protesters in Israel and anti-Hamas protesters in Gaza.
One of the values that U.S. college campuses, as well as Meta’s Oversight Board, are charged with protecting is that of freedom of expression. Neither should therefore attempt to ban the use of the phrase “from the river to the sea,” but both could do more to educate about its impact.
One thing that Facebook has done, in the past, is append labels to certain posts (rather than blocking them or limiting their reach)—for example, it applied such labels to posts about voting in the U.S. in 2020, and tested additional labels as additions to pages in 2021 (designating certain posts as coming from “public officials,” or satirical sources). What if it were to append a label to posts containing the phrase? Something along the lines of “The meaning of this saying is contested; read more about its history and use,” with a link to the informative Wikipedia page about this, or to a resource that Meta itself could develop based on responses to its public request for research on the topic? That would create an opportunity, perhaps prompting some people to reconsider their own understanding of the phrase, and how it impacts their communication with those who use it.
The ethical questions about protests and freedom of expression are deeply important, but they are overshadowed by the urgency of the circumstances on the ground in Gaza, in Israel, and in the West Bank. Despite metaphorical claims, U.S. college students are not in fact “on the frontlines”; for the sake of the people who are, effective protests require prudence, too—from all of the parties involved.