Sahar Aziz is Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University Law School and author of The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom. She is also a board member at DAWN.
Words matter. That is the purported principle behind a national campaign by pro-Israel organizations to censor, punish and even criminalize protests on American college campuses demanding a cease-fire to Israel's unrestrained assault on 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza. University administrators have obliged with draconian restrictions that effectively deny their own students the ability to speak out against what the International Court of Justice has described as Israel's "plausible" violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza.
Pro-Israel advocates often point to the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," which has been chanted by students at campus protests against the war in Gaza, claiming it fuels antisemitism against Jewish students. Not only do they refuse to acknowledge the students' desire for freedom and security for both Palestinians and Israelis, but organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Brandeis Center and the Deborah Project that are suing universities fail to mention the Israeli government's own official version of "from the river to the sea"—free of Palestinians. As the Likud Party's original platform stated in 1977, "Judea and Samaria"—also known as the West Bank—"will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there will only be Israeli sovereignty."
In alleging antisemitism on college campuses, pro-Israeli groups point to the 1950s and 1960s when the Palestinian Liberation Organization rejected an Israeli state. However, that was long before the PLO and most Palestinians accepted the two-state solution in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Many students born into the post-Oslo reality, thus, understand the phrase "from the river to the sea" to mean freedom, security and dignity for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israeli Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. To the young people still protesting on college campuses, Israel's indefinite settlement growth in the West Bank, unchecked Israeli settler violence and systematic demolition of universities, hospitals and vital civil infrastructure in Gaza go against the human rights principles that animate their chants for peace.
As the Likud Party's original platform stated in 1977, "Judea and Samaria"—also known as the West Bank—"will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there will only be Israeli sovereignty."
- Sahar Aziz
In stark contrast, and reflecting the willful ignorance of university administrators, the Israeli officials who proclaim the same phrase want war in order to create a land without Palestinians from the river to the sea. This amounts to official government policy, as articulated by various Israeli leaders for years, and explains Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government's dehumanizing and annihilationist rhetoric about Palestinians in Gaza, which the ICJ also suggested could equal public incitement to commit genocide.
Three weeks after the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, Netanyahu bellowed in Hebrew, "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible," referencing the first Book of Samuel. He quoted some of the most violent verses of the Old Testament, when God commands King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, one of ancient Israel's rival nations: "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
At that time, the Israeli military was killing over 350 Palestinians per week in its carpet-bombing of Gaza. It had destroyed the only power plant in Gaza, while completely blocking the entry of food into the besieged strip. Eleven months later, Israel has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians in a campaign of collective punishment.
A month later, in December 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated his desire to trigger an exodus of Palestinians out of Gaza in order to replace them with Israeli Jews. "We will not allow a situation in which two million people live there," Smotrich told Israel's Army Radio. "If there are 100,000 to 200,000 Arabs living in Gaza, the discussion about the day after will be completely different."
These sentiments cannot be dismissed as mere emotional responses to the October 7 attacks. Based on the statements of Israeli officials over the past decade, a vision of no Palestinians "from the river to the sea" is Israeli state policy.
In 2016, Uri Ariel, the minister of agriculture at the time, explicitly stated: "Between the river and the sea will only be the State of Israel. There are not two states west of the Jordan. And the Temple Mount is ours!" In 2015, Haim Katz, then the minister of welfare and now the minister of tourism, was equally blunt. "The land of Israel is whole," he said. "There is no Palestine." The same year, Tzipi Hotovely, then the deputy foreign minister and now the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, declared: "This land is ours. All of it is ours."
These views were encapsulated in Israel's 2018 "nation-state" law, which exclusively defines the state on ethnic Jewish terms, reflecting an official view of Jewish supremacy between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The year that law passed, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: "We must continue to keep Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley under [Israeli] control and to strengthen settlements in those areas." In the days after October 7, Gallant notoriously announced Israel's "complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed." His words were cited in the ICJ's genocide case against Israel, in particular his declaration that, "We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly."
On American college campuses, the only words permitted to be spoken are those supporting Israel's state policy to drive out Palestinians and deny them their rights "from the river to the sea."
- Sahar Aziz
The list of statements goes on. In 2020, Nir Barkat, the minister of economy and industry, wrote on Twitter: "We will not give up the application of sovereignty, and now more than ever we need to expand the construction in Judea and Samaria, in order to send a clear message to the whole world that we will continue to stand for our historical right to the land," clearly referring to the entire territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
In 2022, when Israel's current government was sworn in, led by Netanyahu in a coalition with several far-right parties, it published a list of guiding principles and policies that included the commitment that "the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel—in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria."
This Israeli government is hardly an outlier in its view. Consider the previous government, a coalition led by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett as rotating prime minister. Bennett, in 2022, explicitly rejected any possibility for a Palestinian state or Palestinian national rights between the Jordan and Mediterranean. "You have to say things as they are: there is no room for another state between the sea and the Jordan," he said, explaining that it was "because of our right to the land."
Just four months before October 7, in July 2023, Minister of Justice Yariv Lavin echoed that call. "The entire Land of Israel will be ours, as it should be," he said in a speech to the Knesset. "We will do it out of a deep belief in our historical right to this land."
Such ethnonationalist thinking by Israeli government officials explains the motives behind the Israeli military's genocidal campaign in Gaza—to kill, starve or forcibly displace 2.4 million Palestinians from what Israeli leaders clearly only see as the Land of Israel.
So, yes, words do matter, especially when they are backed by a powerful military engaged in a war of collective punishment in Gaza. And, as Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi noted, when the full power of the United States is also "supporting the core policies of Israel's government that over the past few decades has acted ceaselessly to ensure that 'between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."' Yet on American college campuses, the only words permitted to be spoken are those supporting Israel's state policy to drive out Palestinians and deny them their rights "from the river to the sea."
