The slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" has recently become a hit with students at American institutions of higher education – but do the students who recite it enthusiastically even understand what they are saying? Ron Hassner, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley campus and president of Israel studies at the Helen Diller Institute, commissioned a survey of 250 students representing different backgrounds in American society to find out—and the results, which we summarized with Forefront, are interesting.
You may not be surprised to learn that 86% of students initially supported the slogan "From the river to the sea," which calls for the destruction of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian state. However, only 47% of them managed to correctly name the river (Jordan) and the sea (Mediterranean). Many gave strange answers, such as the Euphrates River or the Nile and the Dead Sea (which, as we know, is not a sea at all). Even stranger answers were that the sea is the Atlantic or Caribbean.
The survey also examined students' knowledge of the history of the conflict, and found that less than a quarter of them knew who Yasser Arafat was, and 12 of them even answered that he was Israel's first prime minister; Even worse, when asked in what decade Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter chose the answer that such an agreement had never been signed.
On the other hand, when students were presented with facts about the conflict, their minds seemed inclined to change: when a map was presented that emphasized that implementing the slogan "from the river to the sea" meant the complete erasure of Israel, three-quarters of the 80 students exposed to it changed their minds. 41% of students who supported a one-state solution changed their position after being exposed to a survey according to which both Palestinians and Israelis reject such a possibility. Of the students who were aware from the outset that the slogan calls for the erasure of the State of Israel in favor of Palestine, 60% changed their support after it was made clear to them that beyond the name of the state, this would entail the murder or expulsion of 7 million Jews and 2 million Israeli Arabs. Another 14% of this group changed their minds after being told that American Jews felt threatened by the slogan — though Hassner emphasized that among progressive students who claimed to be highly sensitive to abusive speech, the impact of this information was actually lower.
Overall, after being confronted with basic facts about the conflict, 67.8% of students switched from supporting the controversial password to rejecting it. These findings indicate that most anti-Israel activists throughout the Western world do so from ignorance, and if only presented with the facts, they will become less hostile to the Jewish state.
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