Meta’s ‘from the river to the sea’ decision legitimizes hate speech

The recent decision by Meta’s oversight board legitimizing the slogan “from the river to the sea” is shameful and dangerous. How can calls for the eradication of one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be interpreted and justified as innocent declarations of solidarity with the other? 

Meta’s oversight board failed to analyze this slogan in its context. The full version of this catchphrase is “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free,” which is to say freed from the existence of the State of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

This slogan is overwhelmingly used in the context of expressing hatred toward Israel and rejecting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. It is a prevalent rallying cry for action to destroy Israel, not for peace, security and co-existence with it. 

“From the river to the sea” is typically used by Palestinian terrorist organizations and their sympathizers. Hamas’s 2017 charter rejects “any alternative to the complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”  

How can Meta’s oversight board base such an important decision on the examination of three individual cases without looking into the broader context, as characterized by hundreds of thousands of malicious uses of this phrase? 

How has Meta dealt with these numerous cases and complaints relating to them? Has it taken or does it intend to take any measures to distinguish between malicious and innocent usages? Has it ever found any such usage as illegitimate?     

Let’s remove the masks and be honest. Why has this phrase flourished immediately after the heinous Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7? How many of those sharing this call recognize Israel’s right to exist? 

Mere hours after the Hamas murderous terror attack against Israel — the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — American Jews across the U.S. were already subjected to an unprecedented wave of antisemitic hate crimes. 

The Anti-Defamation League recorded 89 incidents of antisemitism only from Oct. 7 to 8, 2023, a 585 percent increase compared to the organization’s recorded data from the same period in 2022. Equally alarming, from Oct. 7 to the end of 2023 — just three months — included more acts of antisemitism “than in any full year on record.” 

In this fraught environment, the slogan “from the river to the sea” and the like have become an integral part of the scenery and increasingly dangerous.  

History teaches us that words lead to actions. The U.S. Congress, in its bipartisan resolution H. Res. 883, correctly noted that this rallying cry (which it defined as antisemitic) “could promote violence against the State of Israel and the Jewish community globally.”  

While we of course respect the right to free expression as outlined in the First Amendment, it is not without limitations. It is obvious from all of the above that this call cannot be disassociated from violence or threats thereof. 

Meta should therefore reverse its unfortunate decision. It is time to wake up and de-legitimize this poisonous slogan.

Michael Herzog is the Israeli ambassador to the United States.