In a recent survey of 250 college students across the US, some 86% supported the Palestinian chant “From the river to the sea,” — but only slightly more than half of them (47%) were able to name the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as the boundaries that the slogan is talking about.
Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates rivers, the Dead Sea—and even the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was or what the Oslo Accords were.
After learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, two-thirds of the surveyed students went from supporting "from the river to the sea" to rejecting it.
When 80 of the students were shown on regional map that a new Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—leaving no room for Israel—three-fourths if them changed their support to "probably not."
An art student from a liberal arts college in New England "probably" supported the slogan, believing that "Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state."When informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm, one of 41% in that group who did.
Another group claimed the chant calls for a Palestinian state to replace Israel. Of these students, 60% reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion, or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Only 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jews considered the chant to be racist and threatening.
Explosion of anti-Israel protests and antisemitism on US campuses
These chants have run rampant on college campuses in protests that have left Jews feeling targeted by classmates and faculty, and abandoned by the universities' administrators.
In a high-profile congressional hearing in Washington on December 5, the presidents of three of America's top universities were asked directly if "calling for the genocide of Jews"—referring to the slogan "from the river to the sea," and to chants calling to globalize the intifada—is against their universities’ codes of conduct; all three said the answer depended on the context.
The presidents, however, unanimously agreed that antisemitism was a serious problem on their campuses and has grown more severe since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s war against the genocidal terrorist group.