To many Palestinians and their supporters, “min an-nahr ila al-bahr,” “from the river to the sea,” is still a call for a peaceful land — though not always with the aim of a single, secular state. The slogan does not conjure “a specific political platform,” Nassar said. Instead, it is a call for an “imagined future of peace and freedom.”
It’s “a call to end the occupation” by Israel, she said, and a “call for an ability to return” to areas from which Palestinians fled or were expelled. The internationally recognized “right of return” to land and home, held by refugees including many Palestinians, has long been a key point of dispute in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the only Palestinian American member of Congress, was censured in November for her remarks about the conflict, including a video she posted on social media of protesters chanting the slogan. Tlaib, in a post on X, defended the phrase as “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”
The slogan is “a demand for democratic coexistence between Jews and Arabs,” the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said in a statement defending Tlaib.