The guild, which represents employees of the San Francisco Community College District, says those who deem the slogan anti-Semitic are silencing pro-Palestinian activists
An American Federation of Teachers guild sent out a statement this week to its members in which it defended the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free”—which calls for the destruction of Israel and expulsion of Jews from the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea—as a “rallying cry for peace.” The guild also claimed that describing the statement as anti-Semitic means “silencing pro-Palestinian activists.”
The Oct. 21 email, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, contained a statement from the Social Justice Committee of AFT Guild 1931, which represents employees of the San Diego Community College District. The committee wrote that the phrase “From the River to the Sea” represents a “call for peace, equality, and a single, inclusive state where all people have equal rights.”
The committee criticized “some figures in society”—including virtually all leading Jewish civil rights groups—who have “come to misidentify the slogan as hate speech, label its usage as antisemitic, or misinterpret the phrase as a call for genocide.”
The Anti-Defamation League describes the phrase as an “antisemitic slogan” that has “long been used by anti-Israel voices, including supporters of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the PFLP, which seek Israel’s destruction through violent means.”
The American Jewish Committee says the slogan “can be used to call for the elimination of the State of Israel and/or ethnic cleansing of Jews living there, to be replaced with Palestinian control over the entire territory.”
The phrase originated in the 1960s, when it “became the signature phrase of the Palestine Liberation Organization to indicate the replacement of the State of Israel with a State of Palestine extending ‘from the river to the sea,’ including the expulsion of Jews who entered the land after 1947,” according to the AJC.
The commonly used Arabic-language version of the slogan translates to “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Arab.”
AFT Guild 1931’s Social Justice Committee said the “River to the Sea” chant has been “used as a call for liberation from 75 years of military occupation by Israel” and is a “rallying cry for peace, freedom from oppression, and the right to self-determination.”
The group also argued that criticizing the phrase as anti-Semitic has the “devastating impact of curbing free speech and silencing pro-Palestinian activists.”
“By interpreting the phrase as hate speech, antisemitism, or a call for genocide, we disregard the way the slogan has been used in movements for Palestinian liberation,” the statement reads.
The committee claimed the slogan has “been used by both Palestinian and Israeli groups,” but did not offer an example of Israeli groups using it. The statement notes that Israeli political party Likud used the phrase “between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty” in its 1977 campaign platform, but fails to add that the statement represented the status quo of Israeli territorial control at the time rather than a call for the destruction of a state.
The committee went on to accuse Israel of “genocide” and claim that the Jewish state is a “modern-day form of colonization in the Middle East funded by the American government.” It also asked members who “feel like District administrators have censored you or infringed on your first amendment [sic] rights to free speech and academic freedom” to contact the guild for support.
Neither AFT Guild 1931 nor the national organization responded to Free Beacon requests for comment.
The news follows increasingly frequent reports of anti-Semitism within teachers’ unions. Earlier this year, the National Education Association erased any reference to Jews from the Holocaust remembrance section of its annual handbook and said it would educate members on how Israel was founded through “forced, violent displacement and dispossession,” the Free Beacon reported.
The NEA’s decision to do so led the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to open an investigation into the union.
