Calling for the destruction of a nation - be it Palestine or Israel - is calling for genocide.

It should be legal to call for genocide.

1.5 “from the river to the sea” is not a slogan calling for the destruction of Israel.

By defining the geographic scope of a future Palestinian state as the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the slogan encompasses the land where Israel currently exists. To remove all doubt about the context, remember that it has been widely used by groups like Hamas - whose founding charter explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel.

In the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) used it to call for what they saw as a “decolonized” state encompassing the entirety of Mandatory Palestine. By 1969, after several revisions, the PLO used the phrase to call for a one-state solution, that would mean “one democratic secular state that would supersede the ethno-religious state of Israel”.

I’m sure there are people who use this phrase now and do not wish to destroy Israel. Just like there are people who use phrases like “all lives matter” and genuinely want racial equality. Unfortunately the terms are hard to disambiguate from the people chanting them.

Either way, we won’t settle this argument now, and we don’t have to. I simply do not wish to see people imprisoned for saying offensive things. That seems like an important pillar of democracy to me. I uphold the rights of people to say offensive things especially when I disagree with them. Free speech means nothing unless we’re doing it when it’s really hard.

If your interpretation of “Palestine will be free” somehow includes killing people because they’re Jewish, then you’re telling on yourself.
It’s really simple, and didn’t require a text wall to explain.

“Palestine will be free”

This is not part of the original call to action. That is a modern addition used very selectively. It is frequently omitted, as we see on the t-shirt on the activist in the article. Selectively adding a nice phrase on the end of a very bad phrase doesn’t erase the original meaning, intent, and history of the phrase.

Please also note that I did not suggest that the slogan is a call to kill all Jews. The slogan is a call to destroy Israel. Those are not mutually inclusive. Palestinian activists argue that when right wing Israelis call for the destruction of Palestine, that does constitute intent to commit genocide, and I agree. So I don’t have much tolerance for hypocrisy on this. I find the call to destroy any nation - be it Israel or Palestine - to be incredibly immoral.

I’m failing to see how the phrase “from the river to the sea”, alone, can be considered a call to destroy Israel, let alone unequivocally genocidal. It seems like there’s a lot of top-down reasoning required to arrive at either conclusion. I don’t think there is genocidal intent on the deployment of those words on that woman’s top. I think you assume too much. Israeli leaders use unmistakably genocidal language. And then they also commit genocide. You don’t get to both sides this issue with a very tenuous argument that this popular slogan is a call to genocide.

This is like saying “I don’t see how the phrase “white power” alone can be considered a call to kill black people?” 🤣

It is a call to destroy/eliminate Israel. Don’t try to pretend it’s not.

No, it isn’t like that. Because “white power” is used exclusively by extremists, whereby “from the river to the sea” is not. Do you see the difference there?

whereby “from the river to the sea” is not.

It is though. They might not think they’re extremists, but they are.