From the River to the Sea, “Palestine” Will Be… Muslim?

A case study in shibboleths

A shibboleth, ironically, has its roots in Judeo-Christian scripture. In the Book of Judges, it was a password at a river crossing—the men of Gilead asked travelers to say “shibboleth,” and their enemies from Ephraim, unable to pronounce the “sh” sound, said “sibboleth” instead. The mispronunciation gave them away. In modern usage, a shibboleth doesn’t have to be a mispronounced word—it can be any word, phrase, or fundamental that reveals more than the speaker intends: an agenda hiding inside a slogan.

You’ve heard the chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Almost no one asks the question that, to me, functions as a shibboleth: why does it rhyme in English?

The underlying geographic claim (min il-mayye la-l-mayye), “From the water to the water”—is old, entering use through the PLO in the 1960s, long before English-speaking campus crowds ever chanted it. But the last four words and the version that spread through London, Washington, and Rome, especially after October 2023, is a specifically English-language construction. Translate it into French or German and the geography survives, but the music doesn’t—the “sea/free” rhyme that makes it chantable, shareable, and memorable is an artifact of English phonetics, built for an audience that doesn’t speak Arabic and has never heard the original.

And “free” is doing more work in English than a simple translation would suggest. I put the question directly to Khaled Abu Toameh—the veteran Israeli Arab Muslim (and technically Palestinian though he doesn’t subscribe to the moniker) journalist who has covered Palestinian affairs for nearly four decades, formerly of NBC News and The Jerusalem Post—during a recent trip to the region. His answer was direct: “That is not what they are saying. They are saying: from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Muslim (and in some cases: ‘…will be Arab’).” In Arabic, that formulation is “من النهر إلى البحر، فلسطين ستكون إسلامية”—“from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Islamic”—or, in the other version Toameh referenced, “فلسطين ستكون عربية,” meaning “Palestine will be Arab.” 

This is supported by the fact that terrorist and other attacks are not just killing Jews but are targeting other non-Muslims in the region. The attacks on October 7 (and attacks before, and since) included the Druze, who came out of Shia Islam but do not identify as Muslim. Bedouins (Sunni Muslims) were also killed in the October 7 attacks.

That substitution matters enormously. “Free” is a word with singular, sacred weight in the Western political imagination—it summons the American Revolution, civil rights, every liberation movement about which the West has ever told itself a righteous story. It’s a word Western crowds are primed to chant without asking a single follow-up question. “Muslim” is a different claim entirely—not a claim about liberty, but about religious governance over the land in question. Swap one word for the other and the chant stops being a plea for freedom and becomes a statement of intent. That distinction is exactly what a Western audience, chanting a rhyme in a language they don’t speak, has no way to catch. We have to ask ourselves the uncomfortable question: Who is that for? Who is that version of the chant created for?

That’s the shibboleth. Not that the underlying geography is fabricated—it isn’t. But that the version doing the work on Western streets and Western campuses was built for people who can’t check it against the original. Ask the marcher what the phrase means in the language in which it was born, and most can’t tell you. They know the rhyme. They don’t know the referent.

And the referent matters, because it isn’t really about “freedom” in the sense a Western listener hears that word. There are three separate conflicts being flattened into one chant: a religious war over sacred land, a political war over sovereignty and governance, and a territorial war over borders. Collapsing all three into a four-word rhyme is exactly what makes the chant effective as propaganda—it lets the listener supply their own meaning while the speaker’s actual claim goes untranslated and unexamined. Which is the point, and exactly how propaganda works.

It’s also worth knowing that this geography has been claimed by more than one side. Likud’s own 1977 political platform used the mirror-image formulation in Hebrew—“between the sea and the Jordan”—to stake its own claim to the same land, under a different political project entirely. The shape of the phrase isn’t unique to one ideology. What’s unique is which version gets a rhyme, a hashtag, and a crowd of people who’ve never set foot in Gaza or the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), chanting it on a Saturday afternoon in a language its original authors didn’t speak.

There’s a deeper irony underneath all of this: the word “Palestine” itself long predates any Palestinian political movement, and its history is not what most people assume. The name traces to the Philistines, an ancient people who occupied a small stretch of the coast and vanished as a distinct group over a thousand years before the current conflict began. Herodotus used a version of the name in the 5th century B.C.E., but it became politically significant in 135 C.E., when the Roman emperor Hadrian, having just crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt, deliberately renamed the province of Judea “Syria-Palaestina”—using the name of a historically hostile people as an act of erasure, to sever the land’s name from its Jewish identity. That renamed designation is the one on top of which Yasser Arafat and the PLO later built a modern political movement, formalizing it in the 1960s into the singular national and religious identity it’s now presumed to be.

But “Palestinian” was never, historically, a religious or ethnic category—it’s a political one, and a recent one. Druze, Bedouins, and Israeli Muslim Arabs live in the same land, share ancestry and, in many cases, language with those who identify as Palestinian—and many of them are loyal citizens of Israel, not participants in the Palestinian national project at all. The chant, the flag, the movement: all of it rests on a 20th century political identity, built on a name a Roman emperor chose to erase the Jewish people from their own land, now presented to Western audiences as ancient, singular, and beyond question.

“West Bank” is itself a case study in the same phenomenon. The name didn’t exist before 1950. It was coined by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan after its army occupied the territory during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence—an annexation recognized by exactly two governments in the entire world, Britain and Pakistan, and rejected by everyone else, including every Arab state. Jordan’s name for the land wasn’t descriptive of the land itself; it was descriptive of the land’s position relative to Amman—the west bank of the Jordan River, as opposed to Jordan’s own east bank. 

In Israel, “Judea and Samaria” is not some fringe political label for the same territory. It is standard terminology, including in official usage, and the Knesset has moved in recent years to replace “West Bank” with “Judea and Samaria.” 

The region had carried other names for thousands of years before that: Judea, after the Kingdom of Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem; Samaria, after the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel. Josephus wrote about Judea and Samaria in the first century. The Mishnah legislated for them in the second. Byzantine administrators governed them under those names in the fifth. Even the British Mandate’s own 1937 and 1947 partition plans, and the U.N.’s 1947 Partition Resolution, used them. An ancient, continuously attested name was replaced, less than eighty years ago, by a term that only makes sense if you’re standing in Amman—and almost no one saying “West Bank” today knows that’s the vantage point they’ve inherited. 

Calling ancient Jerusalem’s highlands (which would be more accurately described as East Jerusalem) the “West Bank” would be like calling the entire Hudson Valley “New Jersey’s East Side” and Hoboken the “West Bank” of Manhattan.

None of this requires being anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, or anti-Palestinian to notice. It requires noticing that a slogan built for you, in your language, engineered for your ear, is doing something different than informing you. It’s recruiting you—to a side of a binary that doesn’t actually exist, in a conflict far more complicated than four words can hold.