"From the river to the sea"

‘From The River To The Sea’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means , por Maha Nassar:

Over the weekend, scholar and social justice activist Marc Lamont Hill apologized for ending his recent remarks at United Nations by calling for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” His apology came after three days of furious online attacks and criticism from many people who felt deeply hurt by his remarks.

Critics have pointed to Hamas’s use of this phrase to claim that Hill was either deliberately parroting a Hamas line that calls for Israel’s elimination, or at the very least ignorantly repeating a deeply offensive and triggering phrase.

Yet lost in all these discussions is any acknowledgement of what this phrase actually means — and has meant — to Palestinians of all political stripes and convictions. As a Palestinian American and a scholar of Palestinian history, I’m concerned by the lack of interest in how this phrase is understood by the people who invoke it.(...)

That’s how the call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” gained traction in the 1960s. It was part of a larger call to see a secular democratic state established in all of historic Palestine. Palestinians hoped their state would be free from oppression of all sorts, from Israeli as well as from Arab regimes.

Não estou certo que as pessoas não percebam o que quer dizer "from the river to the sea" - na verdade, o que a autora descreve (um Estado único em toda a Palestina, do rio Jordão ao Mar Mediterrâneo) parece-me ser exatamente aquilo em que estão a pensar as pessoas que dizem que os palestinianos querem "destruir Israel".