The Reasoning Behind “River to the Sea”

The Reasoning Behind “River to the Sea”

May 21, 2024

A Personal Perspective on The Gaza Genocide, and why it is so concerning.

I have been following the Palestine situation for a long time. I wrote about it back when the Israelis were still occupying Lebanon. I got some snarky responses back then.

The Gaza genocidal conflict is the most important event going on in the world right now. It seems like it is being fought all over the world. There are protests, boycotts, and embargoes of everything Israeli going on all over the world.

Conflict is accelerating all over the world, as more people rebel against attempts to victimize or eliminate them. Now the French are doing something bad to the New Caledonians. But none of these could flare up into world war.

With Gaza, it is like the whole world has suddenly begun a revolt, not against Israel, but the whole Atlanticist hegemony for whom Israel is some kind of pet project. The intensity of the suppression of AntiZionism, within the “western” nations, surprises almost everyone. Like everywhere else in the Atlantisphere, Canada is being affected.

Thus, I can do no else but follow it and write about it. I have said enough about the historical causes behind the Gaza genocide, the strategies being played out, and the potential outcomes. Here I am going to look at it from a more personal perspective.

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I am also going to examine the cry; “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be Free”.

If there is any one thing which drives crazy all Zionists and their core of die hard sympathizers outside Israel, it is this chant, slogan, credo, axiom. It perfectly sums up the issues at play in the Palestine conflict, and the solution. Thus there is a huge effort to prevent it being uttered.

It is dishonestly interpreted as a demand to kill all Jewish Israelis between the river and the sea. Many people are foolish enough or cowardly enough to give in to this bullying. Or, really stupid enough to accept that interpretation.

I have a collection of message t-shirts. I would have liked to have added the “river to sea” shirt to it, but the company which was printing them was chickened. I have had to be content with a ‘free Palestine’ design with the Palestine flag.

This is half the message. The more important half is “river to sea”. That is, from the Jordan river to the mediterranean coast. Also, from Sinai to Lebanon.

The Palestinians need to be free to travel all across their homeland, from the river to the sea. That means there needs to be a Palestinian state throughout that area. This means the Israeli state must disappear.

This does not entail Jewish Israelis disappearing from Palestine. Ideally, they would be free to stay, or to go if they are able. Realistically, life would become more complicated for Israelis under a Palestinian state.

A lot of real estate which was seized without compensation over the past 76 years will have to go back to its rightful owners. Considering what Israeli Zionists have done in that time, it would be asking a lot for all Palestinians to be totally forgiving. I cannot speak for Palestinians, but if I were one, I would never accept those who had adopted the Zionism mentality ever living next to me.

Thus there is a serious concern about the safety of Israeli Jews after the dissolution of an Israeli state, during the transition to a Palestinian one. While Jews in and outside Israel have reason to be concerned, it is a problem they created for themselves. I would ask them how they thought this adventure was finally going to end.

So people, even in Canada, far removed from the conflict, but who have emotional commitments to Israel, will be upset by the chant. Their reactions are more fierce because they are finally starting to lose the propaganda war. People are seeing what the Zionist state has really been about all along.

These people are in danger of having to admit it to themselves. I have already found that this is very traumatic to many Zionist supporters. I am baffled at how many of them there are in Canada.

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I seem to have lost one long standing friendship over the Gaza war. This person is of Anglo Saxon and Christian heritage, with no relation to Judaism or Israel at all. Yet at one time in her life she visited Israel, stayed briefly in a Kibbutz, and got bitten by the Zionism bug.

Yes, give people a free holiday and they become fanatic supporters of your ethno-religious military state. It is amazing how effective this has been for the Zionists; well worth the investment.

It does not work on everybody. A relative of mine passed through Israel during her world backpack tour and was not impressed. She would relate years afterward what total shits she found most Israelis to be.

What annoyed her was being constantly propagandized at. The message was that there was nothing there until we Israelis came, just desert, and we built everything. It was clear to my relative that most of what she saw had clearly been there a very long time before the state of Israel came along. It was only the people who had originally been there who were not present.

She was not pleased when she and her friends found themselves being stoned when they wandered into the neighbourhood of some religious sect. This was for having their arms bare. The local police seemed uninterested in winding these people down.

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So far, my “Free Palestine” t-shirt has not gotten me into any trouble. I often sit in a parkette near my home, which is a good place to watch the world walk by. In warm weather I am usually wearing one or other of my message t-shirts.

I get occasional responses about them, almost always positive. The only vaguely negative reaction I have ever got was a grumble about my Russian “operation Z” number from a couple of years back. ‘Free Palestine’ has got me some fist pumps and “right on”s.

I was not even, at the time, being a walking advertisement for Freeing Palestine, when I got my only seriously negative reaction about it. I occasionally run into this cranky old man who cashiers at the local grocery. He should have retired some time ago.

He really likes to talk, has some really strange opinions, and gets upset rather easily. He often misunderstands what people are saying to him. He can be a problem.

He had bagged up my pita and hommus. I was headed for the door. Suddenly he explodes with; “Why are all these Palestine people coming over here and radicalizing our university students?”

The whole store turned to stare at him. I just kept going out the door.

By the way, I thank middle eastern people for inventing pita bread and hommus. It is a more practical alternative to peanut butter sandwiches.

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My zoom icon got me into some minor “trouble”. However, one could ask whether something which happens on the net or on zoom really happens at all. No one is going to fly out of the computer screen at me with a staple gun or a bat.

I have taken to using the “River to Sea” logo as a zoom avatar, just to see what the reaction would be. I had already decided that whoever objects aggressively to it is not someone I want to deal with anyway. If someone asks me politely to remove it, I will.

My local community association still holds its monthly meetings online. I was once a delegate to their meetings, before covid and zoom. I still occasionally attend, but I find less reason to. There are now better ways of learning what is going on in the community.

I am increasingly unimpressed with the neighborhood association. It is really just a self selected group which does not represent the community at all. Worse, they are almost all boomers with a boomer mentality.

I think the problem is similar with most other neighborhood associations in Toronto. This is a problem with government in this city, of which I have much to say. I will do a blog post on it when it comes to the top of my list of topics which need a good blogging from me.

One of the big wheels in the association now is a woman I know is Jewish and a big advocate of things Zionist. I watched the proceedings to the end without participating or being interfered with. It was not until I had clicked off that I noticed a couple of snarky e-mails sent to me near the start of the meeting.

I was supposed to take down my zoom image. They did not like my racist and anti semite blah de blah bah haha. I sent back a brief message telling them exactly where to go with that.

A few days later I got another message saying that the board had “discussed” me, oh, dear! They were not too clear on what they had come up with regarding poor little me, but the issue had now become that they do not allow “political symbols”. I gave them no answer.

Instead I sent a copy of the correspondence off to the city councillor and the local legislator, who occasionally grace the association’s public meetings with their presence. My city councillor wears a hijab and has in the past been subjected to harassment for that. The gist of my message was that, while it is likely impossible to do anything about these dipsticks, it is time to stop encouraging them. I c.c.ed this to the board with, again, no comment.

Really, whoever sees the occupation and genocide merely as a political issue is shit. This is something which should be above and beyond politics. Reaction to symbols of the Palestinian cause are highly revealing of character.

That is what the “Keffiya” controversy in the Ontario legislature is at least partly about. It all began back at the start of The War, when Sarah Jama, a black, Muslim, wheel chair bound member of the legislature, was ejected from the NDP caucus for making public statements. The reasoning at that time was disgusting; it put the rest of the caucus in physical danger.

The Deepers have now learned which way the wind blows over this, and they are trying to save face with their constituency. So when Jama was recently ordered to leave the chamber for violating the screw head conservative government’s rule against Keffiyas, they began getting performative. As Sarah was wheeled out by the master at arms with all pomp and ceremony, the party leader and one other member popped their own Keffiyas on and trotted out after her. Of course, they soon after repocketed the scarves and returned.

Another obnoxious ‘progressive’ politician, Elizabeth May of the Federal Green Party, was a couple of years ago a rabid supporter of Israel. She ran into conflict with the party membership over it. Now she is denouncing the Gaza genocide and has even been seen wearing the Keffiya.

In the middle east, the Keffiya is usually worn by men, as a head dress and not as a scarf. It is not a religious symbol but seems to have been a cultural and political symbol for some time in Palestine.

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Other than write blog posts like this for the enlightenment of my massive readership, and piss off screw heads by using and wearing symbols, all I can do about the Gaza situation is watch it over various media. People say news about it is hard to find. The Zionist thought police are doing everything to cut it off.

In fact, it is almost too easy to find out what is going on in Gaza. It is said, and it is true, that the internet has made it impossible to suppress The Truth. It always gets through. Alas, it is still true that people do not necessarily want to know the truth.

Propagandists and counterpropagandists still have to work to create narratives and followings on the various platforms. Contrary to the common perception, it has historically been the secret services of Atlanticist governments who have been experts at this. Now, in many cases, real revolutionary movements are able to create destabilization.

This is not due only to the internet, but to the electronic revolution behind it. It is easier to create networks to coordinate dissemination of prepared narratives and to fund them. Even with limited funding, it takes much less resources to create content.

The Palestinian cause has mastered the art of internet propaganda and organizing social movements. They are beating the Zionists and the Atlanticist organizations behind them, despite having much less resources. At the bottom are some good information sources.

One reason for this success is the Palestinian diaspora in the Atlantic countries. Eight hundred thousand people of Palestinian heritage now live in these lands. Forty thousand are in Canada. They are among the more capable and successful of immigrants to this country.

The Zionists, on the other hand, are defeating themselves. The isolation and indoctrination of Israeli society has created a morally retarded culture. Israelis do not seem to care how ugly they look to outsiders.

Israelis do not seem able to accept any limits. They expect outsiders to believe whatever they say. But we are supposed to ignore how they talk among themselves.

Thus their politicians howl for the extermination of the “human animals” of Gaza. Israeli soldiers brag on social media about killing children, describing it in great detail. They video themselves looting Gazan homes, riding around on children’s toys, and even posing in Gazan women’s clothes.

The Gazans, on the other hand, do not gloat about the Israeli prisoners they have taken, or the soldiers they have killed. They produce excellent video of their soldiers in action. Yet they always cut out the actual death of their enemies, ending it just before the rocket or the sniper’s bullet arrives.

What is really amazing, given the behaviour of Israelis, is that the Gazan soldiers do not seem to fire on their enemies when they are running away. They do not fire on medical evacuations.

This makes one even sicker at heart when one considers what the Gazans have had to do to draw the world’s attention to their plight. They have had to fling the burned, shredded, rotting corpses of their children into the face of the world.

But it is working. The image of Israel before the world has been irrecoverably destroyed. No government on earth even pretends neutrality in the conflict, let alone supports Israel, without facing great public anger.

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Israel is now defeated in all ways; diplomatically, economically, and militarily. It is headed for collapse, no matter what its patrons in the west do to try to prop it up.

However, this does not help the Gazans much. The question is, can they survive until the Israelis are unable to maintain the siege. Or, until the military alliance against Israel becomes able to force an end to it.

This would actually not require much. It would not be too hard to create an air and sea blockade of Israel, or force a sea route into Gaza for aid. The American and NATO militaries would not be able to do much about it.

The first thing to understand about this conflict is that the Israeli ruling elite is not merely making rhetoric. They seriously want to eliminate Palestinians from the land between the river and the sea. They will starve the Gazans to death if they have time. If they get away with that they will start in with the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

There is little chance that a change in government in Israel will end the war. Netanyahu’s political opponents are just as supportive of ethnic cleansing as he is. The street unrest against his government has to do with his domestic policies, economic problems, are partly about his refusal to negotiate about hostages, and not at all about ending the war.

Two thirds of Israelis think their army is not using enough force in Gaza. An amazing ninety percent think they are winning the war.

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So now I come back to “From the River to the Sea”. There will be no peace there while the state of Israel persists. It is a danger not only to the Palestinians, but to the countries around it, and to the entire world.

The two state solution is a state of delusion. The great majority of Israelis will not entertain the idea of a viable Palestinian state. They believe God granted the land to them and only to them.

When the military balance changes so that the Israelis must recognize the Palestinian state, there will still be no basis for peace. One state will still control external access for trade and communication, and most water resources, and the best land.

There can only be one government between the River and the Sea. The Palestinians are the majority in that space. It must be their government.

The present Israeli settlers may be granted minority rights, but given their attitudes and behaviour, it is unlikely they will accept it. They will keep trying to regain dominance.

No one can predict how this matter will finally be resolved. But the people of Palestine need their country back. The Israelis will either live within a Palestinian majority state or live elsewhere.

Where the Israelis would go is a problem. No country really wants to accept as immigrants a people who have decided they are the chosen of God and can do as they please to lesser people. Even the Jews of other countries have finally, mostly, become disgusted with them.

But this is the Israeli Zionist Jew’s own problem to resolve. They are the result of the biggest, longest, and most calamitous social engineering experiment of all time.

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I did not use the “River to Sea” logo as the feature image for this article. Instead I used a piece of artwork which may be even more damaging to the Zionist narrative.

Here is a girl in traditional Palestinian dress, standing with a dreamy expression among young olive trees. It is that key in her hand which really makes the picture. You can guess what it symbolizes.

Information Sources

Electronic Intifada

The Cradle

Hindustan Times

Al Jazeera