From the River to the Sea, We Demand Democracy
When a ceasefire isn't enough
We believe in a just peace for Palestine, and for the world.
Imperialism is the enemy of peace, just or otherwise. For decades the imperialist decree has been “order, not peace.” Henry Kissinger, the key statesman responsible for the U.S.-led order in the Middle East, “believed peace was neither an achievable nor even a desirable objective in the Middle East.” For Kissinger and other imperialists, an unresolved conflict frozen indefinitely (whether by a “peace process” or “humanitarian pause” or “ceasefire”) is better than a peaceful political resolution, as such a fundamental shift could potentially disrupt imperial hierarchy. We see this imperial logic play out from Palestine to Korea to Ireland. Our demands must no longer remain contained by the parameters of imperialist interests.
What we call the Middle East was divided by imperial partition in the aftermath of World War I. Time and again imperialist powers have thwarted the transformational aspirations of the masses in the Middle East by subjecting the people to brutal religious clericalism and secular police states. Perpetual imperial repression requires reliable enforcers, Israel being one of them. This imperial bargain cannot hold, and Israel’s pro-imperial servility has it irretrievably hurdling toward “geopolitical suicide.”
Israel controls the West Bank, Gaza, and all other lands from the river to the sea as an “Israeli Sparta beholden to American power,” as Norman Finkelstein once wrote. Israel rules on the basis of the formal legal exclusion of its non-Jewish residents, who are formally denied equality before the law and are forcibly contained in ghettos.
From the river to the sea, we demand democracy.
The two-state solution is an abdication of liberation as a goal and constitutive principle of the Palestinian movement. The two-state solution is the formal concession to imperial partition of the land and apartheid governance of the people. When we declare Free Palestine, we seek a secular democratic state from the river to the sea, where all residents are fully incorporated into the society without regard to religion and ethnicity. Palestinian liberation is not just for the Palestinians – it’s for Jewish people, too. It’s for us all.
We oppose apartheid governance, imperial partition, and the imposition of ghettoism anywhere in the world. We have the same aspirations for liberation in the United States, as we live in a land where millions of our fellow residents are excluded from citizenship and exploited in the shadows. There is a George Floyd killed by police in this country nearly every day. Religious authority is increasingly the basis of public power in the United States. Just last month, the newly elected Speaker of the House and aspiring theocrat, Rep. Mike Johnson, declared in his initial remarks as speaker:
“I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear. That God is the one that raises up those in authority… What is our creed? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ Not born equal. Created equal.”
We refuse to submit to a vision of the U.S. as a Christian state, just as we reject Israel’s claims to be a Jewish state. We reject religious statehood as a matter of principle, whatever its religious content.
We do not believe that society should be ruled on the basis of religious authority in general, and we specifically reject the notion that ethnoreligious statehood – the Jewish state – is necessary to secure the physical safety of Jewish people. By demanding a Free Palestine, from the river to the sea, we call for a democratic secular state of religious and ethnic pluralism for all, not for the eradication of Jewish people.
We believe that Jewish cultures are a constitutive element of our shared society, and we are radically committed to the right of Jewish peoples and faith to exist side by side with everyone else. Jewish people have the right to live anywhere in the world as fully emancipated and incorporated constituents within the polities in which they reside. We call for an end to religious supremacy and sectarian exclusion.
It is entirely antisemitic to believe that Jewish people cannot or should not be fully incorporated into the polities in which they reside. “A horse that is born in a cowshed is far from being a cow. A Jew who was born in Germany does not thereby become a German; he is still a Jew,” German statesman Hermann Ahlwardt spewed this cruel barbarism in 1895. The idea that Jews belong in Israel is Ahlwardt’s 1895 antisemitism rearticulated in 2023 geopolitical terms.
We understand the urgency that people feel as they desperately seek to pressure the belligerent sponsors of Israeli apartheid to stop this most recent iteration of mass killing. Yet, while a ceasefire has been in place over the past couple of days, imperial business has continued as usual. Joe Biden has sought to lift existing restrictions on Israel’s access to stockpiled weapons, while Israeli officials have planned the further ghettoization of displaced Palestinians. The imperialists can accept a ceasefire, as they have so many times before in Palestine and other conflicts, but they cannot countenance political transformation against their order.
From the river to the sea, we demand democracy – these are fighting words, an invocation of revolution against the imperialists. From the river to the sea does not belong to the Israeli apartheid state, nor does it reside with those who seek to replace Israel with some other sectarian authority. From the river to the sea is a beacon to all those who are discarded, particularly the other apartheid states that rely on externalized peoples and disposable migrant laborers. It is a guiding light for us all.
The liberation of the Palestinian people can only take place as part of a broader radical rupture in the region and the world. We must break the hold of imperialist frameworks, and call a new world order into being that is predicated on the full incorporation of all people, everywhere.