There is something seductive about the chant “Free Palestine.” It is short, rhythmic, and adorned with the sheen of justice. It dances well on protest placards and hashtags, effortlessly slipping from the mouths of diplomats and demonstrators alike. And more often than not, it appears alongside the refrain “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
But this past week, the chant did not come from a megaphone or a protest sign. It came with a gunshot – fired at close range, aimed at two young people: Yaron Lischinsky and his soon-to-be fiancée, Sarah Lynn Milgrim. Their future was shattered in an instant.
It later emerged that both worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. But according to police reports, one fact remains clear: The shooter, Elias Rodriguez, did not follow them. He did not know who they were. He did not know where they worked. He walked up to a Jewish museum and opened fire. He did not see Israeli diplomats. He saw Jews.
This should have served as a declaration that revealed the true nature of the chant: that Jewish life, wherever it appears, is fair game. That in the poisoned moral economy of “Free Palestine,” Jewish blood is a form of currency to be spilled – from the blown-up buses of the Second Intifada in Jerusalem to the rockets fired at Tel Aviv; from the massacred communities of southern Israel on October 7 to the Jewish museums of America.
But murder, it seems, is not enough – not for the ideologues, nor for their apologists. And so we are left with the inevitable question: What does it mean? What does this chant, this creed, this performance of outrage actually signify? The question is almost never answered – not in earnest – and this is no accident. The brilliance of the slogan lies precisely in its refusal to define itself. It is a blank check of virtue, cashed in different currencies by liberals, Islamists, socialists, and tyrants. It does not commit its speakers to clarity. It does not oblige them to history. It certainly does not demand moral consistency. It is, in truth, a slogan designed to mask, not to reveal.
In our age, where slogans are treated as arguments, “Free Palestine” functions less as a political demand than as a tool of ideological laundering. It washes the sins of autocrats and extremists in the waters of anti-imperialism. It allows theocrats to pose as progressives, and it empowers those who jail dissidents and ban women’s rights to parade as human rights champions – so long as they all oppose the Zionist.
The origin and true meaning of "Free Palestine"
The chant first emerged from the megaphones of Arab dictators. It was a metaphor for Arab humiliation at the hands of the supposed puppet of Western powers – the Jewish state. It allowed Arab autocrats to mobilize their populations against an external enemy while silencing dissent at home.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s charismatic strongman, turned freeing Palestine into the centerpiece of pan-Arab redemption. For him, Palestine was not a homeland in distress – it was a wound inflicted, a rallying cry against humiliation, and, above all, a justification for rule. It allowed him to consolidate power, crush internal opposition, and divert attention from his own domestic failures – all in the name of liberating a land he had no intention of freeing.
Let us not forget: When Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt ruled Gaza, there were no calls – none – to “Free Palestine.” There were no protests against Arab rule. No chants in Cairo. No demonstrations in Amman. Why? Because Palestine was never defined as the West Bank and Gaza. It was – and is – defined as all of Israel.
When the Arab states suffered a staggering defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967, the mythology had to evolve. No longer could Arab nationalism claim to be the liberator of Palestine. That torch passed to a new kind of actor: the revolutionary. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, founded in 1964 – before Israel occupied a single inch of the West Bank or Gaza – made its mission plain: to annihilate the State of Israel and replace it with an Arab one. Their slogans were clear. Their maps were absolute. Their bullets, pointed at school buses and synagogues, did not discriminate.
As prominent Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi perceptively noted in 1998: “The PLO’s goal was always the liberation of all of Palestine. Even under the Jordanian and Egyptian administrations, our vision did not shift from the liberation of Palestine as a whole.”
Yasser Arafat, the master of this “revolutionary” spectacle, repackaged the war against Israel into a global cause. He made terrorism fashionable. He held a rifle in one hand and a peace proposal in the other, smiling as the world pretended not to notice which hand he actually used. He globalized the chant. He made “Free Palestine” an exportable brand – one that found eager consumers in Western universities and radical movements hungry for a struggle, any struggle, to validate their own moral vanity.
By the 1970s and ‘80s, “Free Palestine” had migrated far from its birthplace. It became a rallying cry for foreign revolutionaries. It didn’t matter that most had never met a Palestinian. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t point to Ramallah on a map. What mattered was the image of revolution. The chant was no longer even about land – it was about the revolution. About being on the “right” side of history, even if it meant supporting the wrong people.
It now echoes in the streets of Paris, the lecture halls of Cambridge, and the protests of New York. But its essence remains unchanged. The visuals at every one of these protests confirm this. The placards don’t show two flags. They show one map. The chants are not about democracy in Ramallah. They are about vengeance in Jaffa and burning Tel Aviv. The key hoisted in the air is not symbolic of aspiration. It is a demand for reversal – a fantasy of “return” that would mean the demographic destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.
I remember hearing the chant in English for the first time in South Africa, back in 2011. University students screamed the slogan – and others – like “From Ferguson to Palestine.” It made no sense. What did Ferguson, Missouri, have to do with Israel or Palestine? Let alone a university campus at the southern tip of Africa. And that is the point. It doesn’t have to make sense. It only needs to unite all against the symbol of evil – the one they declared the barrier to a more “just” world: the Jew.
We should know this – very few of its chanters, if any, are willing to address what the chant means in the language in which it was born. In Arabic, there is no vagueness. The original chant is Min al-ma’ ila al-ma’, Falasteen Arabiya – “from the water to the water, Palestine is Arab.” Not Palestinian. Arab. Not sovereign, nor half-Jewish. But conquered.
For many Westerners, chanting “Free Palestine” is a declaration of moral clarity. But in practice, it is a confession. They are not asked to explain how peace would be built. They are not asked to acknowledge the consequences of Hamas’s rule, the corruption of the PA, or the jihadist incitement taught to Palestinian children. They are not asked to think. They are only asked to shout in rage.
If one truly cares about the Palestinian people – even if that’s all one cares about – a few questions must be asked: Free from what? From jihadist militias? From foreign manipulation? From a failed education system that grooms children for martyrdom? From Israel’s military occupation of parts of the West Bank? From the parasitic leadership that siphons billions in aid and stifles dissent? Free from Westerners shooting Jews in the streets of Washington while evoking its name?
We know the answer. So do its chanters. It means none of that.■
Samuel J. Hyde is a fellow at The Jewish People Policy Institute.