Of course "from the river to the sea" always meant ethnic cleansing of Jews

Last week, Youssef Munayyer wrote a piece in Jewish Currents claiming that the Palestinian expression "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is not at all antisemitic, and not a call fo rethnic cleansing of Jews, and is only a yearning for a state where Jews are treated equally with Arabs. It is, as he quotes, “part of a larger call to see a secular democratic state established in all of historic Palestine.”

This is gaslighting on a massive scale.

Saddam Hussein was explicit when he said, "Palestine is Arab and must be liberated from the river to the sea and all the Zionists who emigrated to the land of Palestine must leave."

Shiite scholar M. Da'ud wrote about the Muslim messianic Mahdi:

Google Books references to the phrase before 1990 are mostly snippets, but they are very clear that the phrase means ethnic cleansing of Jews. 

From Record of the Arab World: Yearbook of Arab and Israeli Politics (1970):

From a 1970 Egyptian radio broadcast, captured by the CIA:

Or from the 1980 Near East/North Africa Report - Issue 2130 - Page 12:

INTER - ARAB AFFAIRS TRIPOLI REPORTS RESULTS OF PALESTINIAN CONFERENCE LD291504 Tripoli Domestic ... of keeping the Palestinian revolution ablaze until all the territories of Palestine -- from the river to the sea -- are liberated .

Hamas leaders have used the term - and they are quite explicit in their desire to replace all of Israel with an Islamist state where Jews do not have equal rights.

Hell, even Osama Bin Laden used the term, and I don' tthink even Munayyer would pretend that he meant equal rights for Jews. 

Even this past month, when Palestinian Arabic media reports on Israeli objections to the phrase, they never say that the meaning of the phrase is any different than what Israel says it is. Only in English do we see such apologetics.

No one, when speaking to an Arab audience, even pretends that the phrase means anything but ethnic cleansing of Jews.

And even far socialist media understands this, as this November 2012 Workers Liberty article shows:

Everyone knows that the phrase is indeed a call to ethnic cleansing Jews from the region and the full replacement of Israel with a Muslim/Arab state. 

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