"From the river to the sea" (; ) is a political slogan that refers to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – an area historically known as Palestine, which was formerly ruled by the British as Mandatory Palestine, and which today encompasses Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The phrase and its variations have been used both by Palestinians and Israelis to mean that the area should consist of one state, rather than two or three.
In the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) used it to call for what they saw as a "decolonized" state encompassing the entirety of Mandatory Palestine. By 1969, after several revisions, the PLO used the phrase to call for a one-state solution, that would mean "one democratic secular state that would supersede the ethno-religious state of Israel".
Many pro-Palestinian activists describe the phrase as a call for peace, equality, and an end to Israeli apartheid and military rule over Palestine, while many pro-Israel groups and others interpret it as a call for the dissolution or destruction of Israel and have described it as antisemitic. Frequently, at pro-Palestine protests around the world, it has appeared as a chant or rallying cry. Hamas used the phrase in its 2017 charter; some supporters of Israel and other critics have cited its use by such Palestinian militant groups to say that it advocates for not only the dismantling of Israel, but the removal or extermination of its Jewish population. Based on these characterizations of the phrase as antisemitic or inciting violence, some countries have considered criminalizing its use. In other cases, courts and authorities have found that the phrase can fall within protected freedom of expression, depending on context, intent, and how it is used.
An early Zionist slogan envisaged statehood extending over the two banks of the Jordan river, and when that vision proved impractical, it was substituted by the idea of a Greater Israel, an entity conceived as extending from the Jordan to the sea. (Citing David Kimche.) The phrase has also been used by Israeli politicians. The 1977 election manifesto of the right-wing Israeli Likud party said: "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." Similar wording, such as referring to the area "west of the Jordan river", has also been used in the 2020s by other Israeli politicians, including Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 18 January 2024.
Historical usage
The precise origins of the phrase are disputed. According to the American historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the phrase "began as a Zionist slogan signifying the boundaries of Eretz Israel." The Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov notes that Zionist usage of such language predates the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and began with the Revisionist movement of Zionism led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, which spoke of establishing a Jewish state in all of Palestine and had a song, "The East Bank of the Jordan", which includes: "The Jordan has two banks; this one is ours, and the other one too," suggesting a Jewish state extending even beyond the Jordan River. In 1977, the concept appeared in an election manifesto of the Israeli political party Likud, which stated that "between the sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty". The current ideology of the Israeli government is rooted in Revisionist Zionism, which sought the entire territory of Mandatory Palestine.
The Middle East scholar Elliott Colla, writing in Mondoweiss, says that the relevant historical context for understanding "from the river to the sea" is the history of partition and fragmentation in Palestine, along with Israeli appropriation and annexation of Palestinian lands. In his opinion, these include: the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine, which proposed to divide the land between the river and the sea; the 1948 Nakba, in which that plan materialized; the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza; the Oslo Accords, that (in his view) fragmented the West Bank into Palestinian enclaves (that he describes as "an archipelago of Bantustans surrounded by Israeli settlements, bases, and checkpoints"); and the Israeli separation wall first erected after the Second Intifada.
Another element of historical context is given by Maha Nassar from University of Arizona. According to her, the phrase "from the river to the sea" was used by Palestinians even before 1967, and expressed then the hope of the Palestinians free themselves not only from the rule of Israel, but also from the rule of Jordan in the West Bank and from the rule of Egypt in the Gaza Strip.
The origins of Palestinian usage of this phrase are unclear. Kelley writes that the phrase was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the mid-1960s; while Elliott Colla notes that "it is unclear when and where the slogan "from the river to the sea," first emerged within Palestinian protest culture." In November 2023, Colla wrote that he had not encountered the phrase — in either Standard nor Levantine Arabic — in Palestinian revolutionary media of the 1960s and 1970s and noted that "the phrase appears nowhere in the Palestinian National Charters of 1964 or 1968, nor in the Hamas Charter of 1988."
The 1964 charter of the PLO's Palestinian National Council called for "the recovery of the usurped homeland in its entirety". The 1964 charter stated that "Jews who are of Palestinian origin shall be considered Palestinians if they are willing to live peacefully and loyally in Palestine", specifically defining "Palestinian" as those who had "normally resided in Palestine until 1947". In the 1968 revision, the charter was further revised, stating that "Jews who had resided normally in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion" would be considered Palestinian. In the 1969 revision, the PLO promised equal citizenship to all Jews, including those who had recently immigrated, if they renounced Zionism. Thus by 1969, according to Kelley, the PLO used the phrase "free Palestine from the river to the sea" to mean a single democratic secular state that would replace Israel.
In 1979, the phrase was invoked by delegates attending the Palestine Congress of North America.
Colla notes that activists of the First Intifada (1987–1993) "remember hearing variations of the phrase in Arabic from the late 1980s onwards" and that the phrases have been documented in graffiti from the period in works such as Saleh Abd al-Jawad's "" (1991) and Julie Peteet's "The Writing on the Walls: The Graffiti of the Intifada" (1996).
The phrase appeared in a 2021 B'Tselem report entitled "A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid" that described Israel's de facto rule over the territory from the river to the sea, through its occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip, as a regime of apartheid.
Variations The different versions of the slogan that developed over the time emphasize different aspects of the Palestinian struggle. The version (, "from the river to the sea / Palestine will be free") has a focus on liberation and freedom. The version (, "from the water to the water / Palestine is Arab") has an Arab nationalist sentiment, and the version (, "from the water to the water / Palestine is Islamic") has Islamic or Islamist sentiment. According to Colla, the latter two versions have been used in the graffiti of the late 1980s, the period of the First Intifada. Colla says the rhyming "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"—the translation of —is the version that has circulated among English speakers expressing solidarity with Palestine since at least the 1990s.
Similar formulations have been used by Zionists and Israelis. Omer Bartov notes the song "The East Bank of the Jordan" (1929) by the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940) used the formulation (, "the Jordan has two banks; this one is ours, and the other one too"). The Likud Party used the formulation (, "between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty").
Usage
Use by Palestinian militant groups Hamas, as part of its revised 2017 charter, rejected "any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea", referring to all areas of former Mandatory Palestine and by extension, the end of Jewish sovereignty in the region. The same document's call for "full and complete liberation.. from the river to the sea" has been cited by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and Israeli officials as evidence that Hamas continues to reject the existence of a Jewish state in any part of the territory.
However, in the sentence immediately following the first mentioned, it accepts "the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus." Many scholars see Hamas' acceptance of the 1967 borders as a tacit acceptance of another entity on the other side.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad declared that "from the river to the sea [Palestine] is an Arab Islamic land that [it] is legally forbidden from abandoning any inch of, and the Israeli presence in Palestine is a null existence, which is forbidden by law to recognize. Islamists have used a version "Palestine is Islamic from the river to the sea".
Similar sayings by the Israeli right The phrase was also used by the Israeli ruling Likud party as part of their 1977 election manifesto which stated "Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." Likud party leader and prime minister Menachem Begin said that "Judea and Samaria are an inseparable part of Israel's sovereignty". Most recently this has been stated by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Similar wording has also been used more recently by other Israeli politicians, such as Gideon Sa'ar and also Uri Ariel of The Jewish Home. In 2014 Ariel said, "Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there will be only one state, which is Israel." Similar wording has also been used more recently by other Israeli politicians.
Use internationally
Among the materials recovered by American forces during the killing of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was a speech addressed to the American people, in which bin Laden proposed economic and security guarantees in exchange for a "roadmap that returns the Palestine land to us, all of it, from the sea to the river, it is an Islamic land not subject to being traded or granted to any party."
On 27 September 2008, Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah stated at a rally "Palestine, from the sea to the river, is the property of Arabs and Palestinians and no one has the right to give up even a single grain of earth or one stone, because every grain of the land is holy. The entire land must be returned to its rightful owners." Former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, in 2023, used the phrase, saying "The only solution is a Palestinian state from the river to the sea", meaning that the only solution to the conflict would be a Palestinian state encompassing all of Israel and the Palestinian territories. In 2003, then–Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, during a speech commemorating the anniversary of the Iraqi Army's establishment, referred to the Palestinian people and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, stating "Long live Palestine, free and Arab, from the sea to the river".