“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”: An anti-Semitic Hamas slogan that warrants police action, according to UK’s Secretary of State for Education Nadhim Zahawi. A “call to destroy Israel,” say pro-Israel groups.But to Palestinians and their supporters, the accusations are politically motivated and unjust. The chant has existed long before Hamas was established and in fact, is as old as the Palestinian struggle against Zionism.It is present in several Palestinian folklore and revolutionary songs and has multiple Arabic derivations, most common of which are: min el-maiyeh lel mayieh (from the water to the water – the wording of which refers to the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan).The phrase is deeply cultural and closely related to the formation of Palestinian identity and peoplehood – it emphasises the connection to the land, calls for decolonisation, freedom, and an end to the apartheid regime in Palestine, replaced with a unitary civic state with equal rights for everyone.But in Palestine, as the controversy around the chant indicates, it is hard to separate culture from the political sphere within which it operates. Because this sphere is over-dominant and overarching, it has produced equally dominant cultural expressions and artefacts to challenge the occurring power structure.Especially visible among these cultural expressions is chanting.
He then goes on to describe how incredibly important chanting is to Palestinian culture.
I could not verify the expression "min el-maiyeh lel mayieh" as being used before the "river to the sea" chant. I'm no expert, but if it was true, I would expect to see it somewhere on the Web in that context (the closest I could find was Arabic textbooks describing the water cycle with a variant of this.)
But the most interesting piece of this revisionist article is that it ignores other antisemitic chants that have been heard at anti-Israel rallies for decades.
The most famous is, of course, "Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud" or "Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning". It is a call to genocide of Jews as Mohammed massacred them in Khaybar.
There are also chants of "Itbach al-Yahud" - slaughter the Jews - heard in rallies, which pre-dates Israel.
Once we are talking history, "Al Yahud Kelabna," - "The Jews are our dogs" - has been an Arab and Palestinian Arab chant for over a century.
This wonderful Palestinian tradition of chanting, so movingly described as an essential part of Palestinian culture by Moussa, has spawned an equally inspiring tradition of antisemitic chants in English:
"Long live the intifada"
"There is only one solution - intifada revolution"
"Hey hey, ho ho, Zionists have got to go"
“With fire and blood, we will liberate Palestine!”
And the popular European chant, "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas"
For some reason, this article that rhapsodizes about the importance of chants to Palestinian culture, which argues that they are completely innocuous and misunderstood by the racist West, completely missed these other examples of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian chants. Must have been an oversight.
