By Micha Danzig, JNS
It is the oldest song in the region: Blame the Jews, and demand their removal.
Anyone who has watched the news, scrolled through social media or spent time on an American college campus since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, knows the chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” To the Western ear, the English slogan is lyrical and emotive. But the version chanted in Arabic is a far different sentence with a far different intent.
In Arabic, the line is closer to “Palestine will be Arab.” The two chants are not synonymous.
Palestine will be Arab does not mean equality or pluralism. It means replacement. A “free” Palestine in many English-language accounts becomes, in Arabic usage, a Palestine that is Arabized—a polity from which Jews are excluded. That is not anti-colonial rhetoric. It is a call for recolonization.
This inversion is invisible to many campus activists and far-left politicians who repeat the English refrain. It is not invisible to those who understand the region’s layered history. The land critics call “Palestine” was never part of the Arabian Peninsula. Its original peoples were Canaanite, Israelite, Phoenician, Aramaean—the ancient fabric of the Levant. Arabs arrived later, by conquest.
The first great wave of Arab imperialism and colonialism, beginning in the seventh century, reshaped the Near East far more thoroughly than many European empires ever did. It erased languages, customs and faiths that had flourished for millennia; Arabized Egypt and Syria, Persia and North Africa; and replaced local polities with a single political-religious order.
Without those conquests, Egyptians would still be largely Coptic, speaking a continuation of their ancient tongue. Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians and Libyans would identify first as Amazigh. Iraq’s deeper identities would recall Assyria and Babylon. Syria and Lebanon would still echo with Aramaic and Phoenician words. Iran and Kurdistan would remain shaped by pre-Islamic Persian and Median traditions. Arab conquest remade the map, renamed populations and erased histories.
And yet, the one people in the region who reversed that process, who revived an ancient language and rebuilt an ancestral homeland, are accused of being colonizers. The Jews are not the colonists of the Middle East but its most successful indigenous survivors. Hebrew is the only ancient Near Eastern tongue spoken today as a mother tongue by millions. That revival is restoration, not colonialization.
That is why the Arabic form of the chant is revelatory. In English, Palestine will be free sounds noble. Who opposes freedom? But the Arabic original tells a bluntly different story. Palestine will be Arab is a statement of replacement—of ethnic and ideological exclusivity. Where many in the West hear liberation, the slogan’s original speakers generally mean eradication. In much of the Middle East outside Israel, autocracy prevails, dissent is dangerous, and ideological conformity is enforced. The chant for “freedom” thus functions, in practice, as a chant for ethnic and political conformity.
Translate the slogan back into its real meaning, and the moral inversion becomes plain. Parisians or Neapolitans who believe they are protesting imperialism are, in fact, demanding the continuation of an older Arab colonial project; the same imperial impulse that erased native identities across the Middle East and North Africa. Israel’s existence exposes that history. It reminds the region and the world that for centuries, Arabs were among the most successful colonialists in history. That is why, after several failed wars to destroy the State of Israel, opponents pivoted and labeled Zionism as “settler-colonialism” and made the indigenous into the invader.
The same doublethink distorts Western discourse. Activists chant “decolonize” while waving flags evocative of empires that once stretched from Spain to India. They call Israel a “white European project” while ignoring that most Israeli Jews descend from refugees of European and Arab lands—people who were driven from their homes between the 1930s and 1960s, and whose property was seized, their cultures erased. The only home they could return to was the one place the Jewish people had always called home.
The chant isn’t new. Its Arabic ancestor—Min al-ma ila al-ma, Filastin Arabiyya—means “From the water to the water: Palestine will be Arab.” In other words, it means no Jews from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
In English, the slogan is softened for Western ears; in Arabic, it is blunt and candid. That linguistic laundering has long been central to the propaganda war against Israel. The Palestinian national movement won broad popular traction only after 1948—not because a distinct national identity suddenly appeared, but because denying Jewish sovereignty became its rallying cry.
Likewise, there was no widespread demand for an independent Arab “Palestine” while the West Bank and Gaza were governed by Jordan and Egypt. In significant part, the modern Palestinian movement was constructed not to build a state but to delegitimize, and ultimately destroy, one: Israel.
We must call this inversion what it is. The Arab conquests were the great colonizing force of the Middle East, and their modern heirs, from Ba’athists to Hamas, still pursue versions of that project. They oppose Jewish equality and self-determination on every square meter of the region. They suppress the region’s remaining minorities—Kurds, Amazigh, Yazidis, Chaldeans—and deny their claims to self-rule. For Israel’s enemies, Zionism’s crime is not being colonial; it is that it succeeded where other such projects failed: It revived a people and language in the very place the empire tried to bury them.
So, the next time you hear “from the river to the sea,” listen with this in mind. In English, it may masquerade as freedom; in Arabic, it reveals a plan for erasure. It is not decolonization; it is recolonization by another name. It is not a cry for coexistence; it is a call for exclusion. The slogan is not new; it is the oldest song in the region. Blame the Jews. And then demand their removal.
History keeps receipts, and language can be a moral X-ray. Listen to it carefully.
