Who decides what language is anti-Semitic?
What community are you joining when you chant 'From the river to the sea'?
[TL;DR - I don’t think everyone who endorses ‘from the river to the sea’ is being anti-Semitic, but everyone who is anti-Semitic will endorse ‘from the river to the sea’. If you chant this phrase, this is the community you are aligning yourself with, regardless of your own intentions.]
Journalist Julia Ioffe recently tweeted
I am sympathetic to this sentiment. We have lived through the last decade of the Black community telling whites that Black peole have the only say in what is racist toward them. There is a growing list of microaggressions that most white people would find innocuous that can be used to end a conversation or send a wave of vitriol towards someone on social media.
Now when we have a phrase like ‘from the river to the sea’ that the vast majority of Jews describe as anti-Semitic because it calls for the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the current state of Israel, many of the same people who declare ownership over what constitutes anti-Black language now say this is not anti-Semitic and Jews have no say in this.
As a social scientist, I agree that at its root, deciding whether ‘from the river to the sea’ is anti-Semitic is a thorny issue. I think people can reasonably come down on different sides of the issue. But what you cannot do, is come down on the side of “microaggressions are racist because Black people say so” and simultaneously say “Jews do not get the last word on whether ‘from the river to the sea’ is anti-Semitic”. There are few things that disrupt our ability to get along in a society more than the hypocrisy of having different rules for one’s own group than for everyone else.
In the end, I believe whether ‘from the river to the sea’ should be classified as anti-Semitic comes down to statistics. Ultimately, whether you choose to use that phrase (and others like it) should be informed by the company you’ll be keeping by doing so.
Two worlds
Here is a thought experiment for you. Imagine ‘from the river to the sea’ was only ever used to suggest that Jews and Palestinians ought to be able to live together peacefully and as equals in a single nation covering the current state of Israel and the Palestinian territories, with all people having full rights and protections under the law, and neither group feeling persecuted or marginalized. If this was the only usage of the phrase, would you believe this phrase was anti-Semitic? I wouldn’t. I don’t think it sounds like a plausible solution, but if there was a path for this to occur, I would be all for it and I suspect most people would be as well. Many U.S. college students complete this chant with the rhyme ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and report that for them this means the kind of shared governance, peaceful one state solution described above. If we take them at their word, this does not sound infused with anti-Semitic intentions.
Now imagine ‘from the river to the sea’ was only ever used to suggest that Jews ought to be removed from Israel by force so that the land covering the current state of Israel and the Palestinian territories was only inhabited and controlled by Palestinians. This would be unambiguously anti-Semitic, right? Calling for the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the region has to be anti-Semitic if anything is, right? There are people who use the phrase with exactly this sentiment. When campus protesters chant the phrase in Arabic, they also complete the chant with an unambiguous rhyme: “من المية للمية فلسطين عربية” (phonetically: min el-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falastin arabieh) which translates to ‘from water to water, Palestine will be Arab’ which comes from the First Intifada in the 1980s where Palestinians called for the elimination of Jews from Israel. Similarly, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad use the phrase along with other text, unambiguously calling for the elimination of all Jews from the current state of Israel. One cannot help but wonder if some American students like the fact that ‘from the river to the sea’ can be privately understood as calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel, while being able to hide behind the public defense that they are only calling for a unified state where Jews and Palestinians live in harmony.
‘That is so gay’
Does the intention matter when a person chants ‘from the river to the sea’? It does, but so does the statistical distribution of intentions used by others when saying the same thing. I described two worlds above and it matters which world is closer to the truth. If our own intentions do not align with the common usage of a phrase, that is a problem for us as a speaker. Let me give you a real example from my own life, one that is quite embarrassing to me.
I grew up in South Jersey in the 1970s. Like most 10-year-old boys I knew, I used the phrase “you are so gay” interchangeably with the phrases “you are such a loser” or “you are so lame”. I can’t speak for my fellow 10-year-olds, but for me, I never had any mental link between the word ‘gay’ in “you are so gay” and ‘gay’ referring to homosexuality. I’m not sure I even knew the word had the second meaning at that age but I do know I had nothing but positive associations with being gay. My mom was an artist in Philadelphia and one of her best friends was gay. He was one of my favorite people on the planet. He was super fun and cool and really nice to me. We are still in touch 40+ years later. I knew his sexual orientation so if I had any stereotypes of gay men, it was that they were awesome. I can guarantee that when I said “you are so gay” to another 10-year-old boy, I was not comparing them to a homosexual man. I was trying to belittle that 10-year-old, not associate him with a group I held in high esteem.
At some point over the next decade, I became aware that the ‘gay’ in “that is so gay” was typically meant to be a derogatory comparison to homosexual men – that others thought negatively about homosexual men and so they were denigrating a person by making this comparison. Here comes the really embarrassing part for me. I continued to use the phrase at this point. I defended myself by stating that my intention matters when I say “that is so gay” and for me, I didn’t intend anything related to homosexuality. If I don’t mean it as a slur against a particular sexual orientation, I should be allowed to say it, right?
Speakers and Listeners
I pride myself on being a reasonably effective communicator and being effective means anticipating how your words will be heard by listeners. My goal is to get ideas from my head to yours. If I say “you are so gay” when the idea in my head is something like “that is a lame thing to do”, then I am failing in my communication because what most people will hear is something related to homosexuality and my apparently negative view of this group. The job of a speaker is to anticipate the listener’s mental state upon hearing you. Someone finally got me to realize that when I say that phrase, it doesn’t matter what my intention is if all people hear is a derogatory slur. I suspect you can figure out that I no longer use this or a variety of other phrases that were hurtful to those who heard them. I am sorry I ever used them.
That all said, in a civil society both speakers and listeners have jobs. Every conversation is an extraordinary human act of attempting to move invisible ideas back and forth between multiple minds. If a speaker’s job is to anticipate how the listener will interpret their words, the listener’s job is to discern the speaker’s true intention – the thoughts that led them to say what they said. Back when I said “that is so gay”, a listener who did not interpret me as making a slur related to sexual orientation would have been doing a better job interpreting what I was trying to communicate at that point. And in so understanding, they could then say to me “I know you don’t mean anything derogatory by that, but this is what other people are probably hearing when you say this”.
The rise of people identifying more with their race or ethnicity more than with their society or culture as a whole has facilitated many failures of listening. Various groups, including Jews, simply declare that certain words or phrases unambiguously have certain meanings. This is a power grab in order to control the moral narrative of others’ words. But doing this is also a way to eliminate the job of a listener – to try to understand the speaker’s actual thoughts, not just their words. This approach promotes communication failures, while laying all the blame on the speaker. Not listening to understand is an easy way to reinforce our existing divisions within society. And while I try not to do this, I am absolutely guilty of this from time to time. Unrecognized assumptions in how we process the world is what allows us to navigate the world with some efficiency. But the stereotype-based assumptions of what it means when any member of group X says “Y” is just lazy.
Statistics and anti-Semitism
I said at the beginning of this post that I was sympathetic to Ioffe’s tweet. I meant this in two ways. First, ‘from the river to the sea’ feels anti-Semitic to me. But as we have established, that could just be me being a bad listener and not understanding the intentions of those saying it. My feeling it does not make it true. Second, Ioffe was calling for consistency – don’t be a hypocrite. If you believe that other groups get to define what is racist towards them, then so do Jews.
But we can reverse things and say that no group should have unilateral control over language. The meaning of language is co-created. The meaning of a word or phrase is determined by how it is typically used and its context. This doesn’t mean there is no racist language, but rather it is the statistical distribution of an entire society’s intention and usage that matters.
Given this perspective, ‘from the river to the sea’, cannot be definitively declared as anti-Semitic if lots of people use these phrases with different meanings. But regardless, a first step would be a statistical approach using computational linguistics to examine what other language occurs in proximity to the phrase in question. If 80% of the time, the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ was used in the same paragraph as language about Jews having no right to live in the region and should all ‘go home to Poland’, this would make a good case for ‘from the river to the sea’ having strong anti-Semitic connotations. If instead, 80% of the time, the phrase was used in the same paragraph as language about Palestinians having a right to live in a free and safe society, alongside Jews, this would suggest the phrase is not anti-Semitic. This analysis, which someone should actually do, also raises the possibility that the same language used in two different cultures might differ with respect to whether a phrase is anti-Semitic. For instance, it is possible that ‘from the river to the sea’ is anti-Semitic based on its usage in the Middle East, but not based on its usage in the U.S.
The friends you keep
The last thing to think about here is who you are linguistically getting into bed with when you use a word or phrase. Consider the slogan ‘#AllLivesMatter’ that was part of a backlash against ‘#BlackLivesMatter’. All Lives Matter was frequently seen as a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Some who have endorsed All Lives Matter could reasonably argue they are not racist against Blacks but instead reject the premise defining Black Lives Matter, that Blacks receive differential treatment from the police than whites do and then point out prominent Blacks who themselves oppose Black Lives Matter. Similarly, some chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ will argue they are not racist against Jews but instead reject the premise defining Zionism, that Israel is a legitimate state, and will point out there are Jews who themselves are anti-Zionist who chant this slogan. I accept that some people can honestly believe these claims when they say them and not have any racist/anti-Semitic intentions when they say these words.
But your words connect you to a community of speakers. For instance, empirical evidence shows that people who endorse All Lives Matter, show higher levels of anti-Black associations in an implicit attitude test (IAT). This kind of result does not mean that everyone who chants this has anti-Black associations, but rather that those who chant this are more likely to have these associations. Thus, anyone chanting All Lives Matter with innocent intentions needs to be aware that they are co-chanting it with lots of folks, who whether they admit it or not, do have anti-Black associations. The community of speakers chanting All Lives Matter is on average more anti-Black than those who do not chanting it. By chanting it, you are aligning yourself, perhaps unwittingly, with that racist community.
To my knowledge, no one has run an IAT to see if people who endorse ‘from the river to the sea’ also have higher levels of anti-Semitism on average, but I would be shocked if they did not. I don’t think everyone who endorses ‘from the river to the sea’ is anti-Semitic, but I do believe that everyone who is anti-Semitic will endorse ‘from the river to the sea’.
Assuming this is the case, if you are chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ please remember two things. First, millions of Jews will hear this as anti-Semitic towards them. If that is what you want them to hear, then your usage is overtly anti-Semitic. But you can stand by your innocent non-anti-Semitic intentions, just as for years I continued to use the phrase ‘that is so gay’ because I knew in my heart it was not a sexual slur for me. That is your choice. But also know that when you chant ‘from the river to the sea’ you are probably co-chanting it with every anti-Semitic person in America. That is the community of speakers you are aligning with.
Is that what you want to be adding your voice to?
P.S. Nothing in this post is meant to suggest that criticisms of specific policies of Israel are anti-Semitic. While I am not in a position to evaluate all of the evidence, I think it is entirely possible that the Israeli government has engaged in war crimes. Countless conflicts between countries and internally within countries have involved war crimes. Just look at the wikipedia page on war crimes. It goes on and on. But the punishment for a war crime is never the dissolution of a legitimate sovereign state. Russia is clearly committing war crimes in Ukraine and no one is calling for the dissolution of Russia.