IN RECENT WEEKS, as Palestinians rose up in their homeland, in the wider Middle East, and around the world, you probably heard the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In cities across the globe, protesters responded to the pending expulsions of Palestinian residents from their homes in Jerusalem, Israeli attacks on holy sites, and the bombardment of Gaza. If you watched or attended any of these protests, you likely saw the slogan printed on a sign, or heard it drifting over the crowd.

You may also have heard claims that this slogan is antisemitic or even genocidal. On May 19th, for example, the New Yorker Union was widely attacked for tweeting, “Solidarity with Palestinians from the river to the sea who went on a 24-hour strike yesterday for dignity and liberation.” Whether in earnest ignorance or in bad faith, critics of the river-to-the-sea formulation argued that the union, and others who used the slogan last month, were implicitly calling for not only dismantling the State of Israel, but cleansing the entire region—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, an area encompassing the West Bank, Gaza, and all of Israel within its internationally recognized pre-1967 borders—of its Jewish population. (Unfortunately, the union backed down in the face of these smears.)

Like many Palestinians, I’ve long used this phrase. About a decade ago, Peter Beinart started a blog at The Daily Beast called “Open Zion” aimed at bringing together a range of perspectives on Israel/Palestine. He invited me to participate regularly, and at first I was hesitant, given the name. Would a project called “Open Zion” really be open to arguments that challenged the tenets of Zionism? I agreed to participate on the condition that I could write what I wanted and that my column could be called “From the River to the Sea.” As I explained to Peter, I wasn’t concerned with Israel’s identity crisis over whether it could be both Jewish and democratic; I was concerned that Palestinians were being denied basic rights throughout their homeland. My column, “From the River to the Sea,” would be focused on the unity of the Palestinian experience and how all Palestinians faced a shared struggle with Zionism regardless of where they lived.

Today, I believe the conversation has increasingly shifted in this direction. This is due in part to a general intellectual and moral awakening—in media, in academia, in activist spaces, and even among certain elected officials—on the subject of Israel/Palestine, but also because of the increasingly horrific realities on the ground. More than ever before, people around the world are accepting that the problem goes well beyond the occupation of the West Bank, and that discrimination against Palestinians occurs on both sides of the Green Line.

The recent Palestinian uprising foreshadowed a future struggle in which the Green Line is unimportant if existent at all, because across the country, Palestinians mobilized collectively on a large scale under their national banner. The phrase “from the river to the sea” captures this future as no other can, because it encompasses the entire space in which Palestinian rights are denied. It is in this space that Palestinians seek to live freely. It is across this space—and across the political and geographic divisions that Israeli rule has imposed—that Palestinians must unite to create change. It is this space that Palestinians call home, regardless of what anyone else calls it.

“From the river to the sea” is a rejoinder to the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination. Palestinians have been divided in a myriad of ways by Israeli policy. There are Palestinian refugees denied repatriation because of discriminatory Israeli laws. There are Palestinians denied equal rights living within Israel’s internationally recognized territory as second-class citizens. There are Palestinians living with no citizenship rights under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. There are Palestinians in legal limbo in occupied Jerusalem and facing expulsion. There are Palestinians in Gaza living under an Israeli siege. All of them suffer from a range of policies in a singular system of discrimination and apartheid—a system that can only be challenged by their unified opposition. All of them have a right to live freely in the land from the river to the sea.

But it is precisely because Zionist settler colonialism has benefitted from and pursued Palestinian fragmentation that it seeks to mischaracterize and destroy inclusive and unifying rhetorical frameworks. For example, journalist Marc Lamont Hill was attacked and ultimately removed from his position at CNN for calling for Palestinian freedom “from the river to the sea.” After all, it is far easier to dominate a divided people fighting different battles on different fronts than it is to dominate one people united in a single battle for the same universal rights.

Since Zionists struggle to make a persuasive argument against freedom, justice, and equality for all people throughout the land, they seek instead to attack the message and messenger. When Palestinians proclaim “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” many Zionists argue that this is a Palestinian call for genocide. But as historian Maha Nassar has noted, there has never been an “official Palestinian position calling for the forced removal of Jews from Palestine.” The links between this phrase and eliminationism might be the product of “an Israeli media campaign following the 1967 war that claimed Palestinians wished to ‘throw Jews into the sea.’” Jewish groups such as the American Jewish Committee also claim that the slogan is antisemitic because it has been taken up by militant groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas. But as Nassar writes, the phrase predates these uses, and has its origins as “part of a larger call to see a secular democratic state established in all of historic Palestine.”

The claim that the phrase “from the river to the sea” carries a genocidal intent relies not on the historical record, but rather on racism and Islamophobia. These Palestinians, the logic goes, cannot be trusted—even if they are calling for equality, their real intention is extermination. In order to justify unending violence against Palestinians, this logic seeks to caricature us as irrational savages hell-bent on killing Jews. Nor does the attempt to link Palestinians to eliminationism stop at the deliberate mischaracterization of this slogan; rather, it is deployed in many other contexts. In 2015, for instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaged in Holocaust revisionism by stating that it was really a Palestinian, not Hitler, who inspired the final solution. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, actually had to remind the Israeli Prime Minister that it was the Germans who were responsible for the Holocaust. Raising the constant specter of eliminationism has political utility for Zionists; in such a threatening environment, perpetual abuses of Palestinians can be rationalized.

This twisted logic is not only reserved for Palestinians. Marginalized groups are often accused of not being trustworthy and of having deep-seated ulterior motives aimed at destroying society. Jews should know this trope well, as it has long been a central feature of antisemitism. In fact, the worst antisemitic attack in American history was carried out in recent years by a murderer who attacked a synagogue because he thought Jews were destroying white Christian-dominated society by bringing in brown immigrants under the guise of humanitarianism.

Fundamentally, such arguments disregard what Palestinians are calling for when they use the phrase in question: a state in which Palestinians can live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominated by others nor dominating them. When we call for a free Palestine from the river to the sea, it is precisely the existing system of domination that we seek to end.

(article dated June 11th, 2021)

MEET Rori LuAnne* Dearing.   ( Altered Carbon based original character. )

                *Please note.  Any use of her middle name in character will result in her losing her shit because who the fuck names their child LuAnne in the 25th century it’s so 400 years ago….

                 First things first, OOC, yes, this is the same face claim as I use for Saori; it’s intentional / for plot purposes w/ certain characters where that holy shit it’s like looking at a ghost trope is lots of fun so…  Also, I think it’s particularly interesting in a world where bodies can be custom made and DNA is literally just a playground for scientists for there to be this freak natural repetition / recreation after 250 years.  It is something that family members remark on from time to time, but it’s not something that a lot of them really pay that much attention to, it’s the oh you look so much like so and so, but since none of the living family members even met Saori they don’t realize just how identical the resemblance is.  And most people that meet her wouldn’t know enough about her history / lineage to know though so.  She’s just a pretty, long-legged, pierced and tattooed cutie pie.    [ Any of those rare survivors from Envoy era that were at Stronghold or on Harlan’s World, or any that might have VR’ed in to a conference or something w/ Saori are totally free / encouraged to notice and react of course !!! ]

                  Yes, Rori is the great-great-great …. whatever many great-granddaughter of my other / latest original character, SAORI DEARING, an uprising sympathizer who lived on Harlan’s World during the Envoy war / during the time of the destruction of Stronghold.  [ the battle of stronghold is widely known as the battle where the Protectorate finally defeated the evil Envoys, murderers of children and women and whole families, terrorists who used sabotage, infiltration, mass murder, torture, bombings, wide spread terror attacks, etc. etc. etc. to try and overthrow the protectorate who wanted to do nothing more than keep the peace in known space etc. ] Rori and her older sister, CLAIRE DEARING, currently know nothing about their ancestor’s involvement with / support of the Uprising – which is probably for the best because Claire would probably die of mortification and Rori would loudly and proudly blast the news from the rooftops.  

                   Claire, written by Liz @magicandsciencemuses, is a (mostly) upstanding citizen who works earnestly to better her way of life and has a great amount of respect for the law and a more than healthy respect / knowledge of what the Meths are capable of; she is one of the directors of the Bay City branch of Psychasec as well as being a well renowned scientist in the field of genetics and body mods, cloning, synth, etc. etc.  She is very much the model child, works hard, works long hours, pays her taxes, follows the rules, tries very hard to keep out of trouble and avoid drama.    ADDITIONAL NOTE:  CLAIRE IS 200+ YEARS OLD.  Rori is in her forties (even though she appears in her early twenties) – in Meth years, Rori is practically a BABY.  

                   Rori, on the other hand, is pretty much the exact opposite.  While she is also intelligent and well educated, she was the wild child from the get go and was always the one that came home with the scraped knees and the bloody noses and the torn clothes, whether it was from actually just falling the frack over her own feet or getting into a fight with someone twice her size in defense of someone else or because they offended her with some smart ass / ill thought out comment that provoked her short-fused (but typically short-lived) temper.  She was almost always involved in some form of protests, some form of protect the planet, protect the species, protect the people, protect the sleeves movement, and became more and more focused on protecting the equality (or what is left of it) as she got ‘older’.  

                   She believes that a lot of what is acceptable and norm when it comes to the treatment of sleeves when it comes to the prison system and victim restitution as a whole is beyond fucked up   She believes that the whole essence of the prison system, stacks in storage, etc. is a huge step backwards and one that just does no good to anyone except those profiting financially from the system.  Ripping someone out of their sleeve and sticking them into storage seems entirely opposite of helpful to her.  There is no longer any opportunity for reform in the penal system.  Being on ice doesn’t give you time to think.  It doesn’t give you time to reflect on your life choices and realize what you’re missing.  It doesn’t give you time for soul searching or to learn methods in which to cope, it doesn’t allow you to better yourself in any way – literally the only thing that it does it rip you out of one time and then toss you back out into the world in what was just a blink of an eye to you.  Nothing changes.  Worst case scenario, you’re in a stranger’s body, a hundred years later, maybe you’ve got a family member or someone that was told about you enough to show up and give you a place to crash for a few days while you get your shit sorted but.  

                   Now you’re a stranger, with no working knowledge of the world, the politics or laws that have changed, the events in history that might have been world shatteringly important that you missed, no relevant job history, no contacts, no resources, and depending on what field of study or what kind of job you had, you might be entirely irrelevant plus - you’re a convict so what does that do for your likelihood of finding gainful employment - especially while in whatever broken down sleeve they give you on release ???  It pretty much guarantees the only life the newly released have to go back to is – crime.  

                And that’s not even getting onto the topic of renting out people’s bodies and how that just feels inherently wrong to her – they don’t even bother to try and use it as a deterrent tactics, it’s just a WAY OF LIFE and it just seems cruel and unusual to her.  There have always been accrued costs of prison, one way or another, sticking a body on ice / suspending it / cryogenic storage or whatever is WAY cheaper than actually housing criminals used to be.  And how easy is it for someone that’s corrupt to play that system ???? Want a particular sleeve for yourself or your partner but they won’t sleep with you?  Get them convicted and rent it for a week.  Have a Neo-C that you need out of the way at your job or that’s married to someone you want to pursue or that you have a grudge against and want to see them suffer / their family suffer?  Set them up for even the smallest crime, because once they’re yanked out of their sleeve that’s it, bye-bye.  

                   And it’s not just punishing the criminals! Seeing someone else walking and talking in the sleeve of your lover, your brother, your mother, your best friend and knowing it’s not them - it doesn’t matter how tough you are or act like you are, that hurts – knowing that that body is being used for god knows what and you can’t keep it safe / protect it ???  Knowing that the person’s sleeve is out and about because you couldn’t afford the mortgage payments to keep it hanging out empty until the person’s time was up and they can get put back in it ? That is brutal and cruel and unusual punishment to people that did nothing wrong but care.  

                   So… yeah.  Human rights / sleeves’ rights activist.  Has had the occasional brush with the law in terms of protesting, the occasional riot or act of vandalism, threats against particular organizations or Meths or whomever it is that she’s up in arms against at the time but, generally low level stuff that hasn’t gotten her in a ton of hot water legally speaking.  She actually does have a semi decent relationship with some of the beat cops or a detective here or there, she’s happy to turn over intel and information she finds about acts of actual violence or terrorism that she catches wind of and is especially happy to turn over anything she hears that deals with corrupt cops, politicians, Meths influence on anything with policy or wrangling positions of power for their chess pieces in law enforcement or political circles etc.  

                   She does dabble in some drug use, she drinks, she smokes, she swears, she sleeps around, she has tattoo and piercings that fluctuate a lot - she is still in her birth sleeve (though second clone after an airtram derailment a few years back).  She gambles, she shoots pool, she gets into the occasional fist fight, she has no problem calling anyone out on their bullshit but – she has a good heart and does her best to help out people in trouble around her whenever she can.  She drifts through a lot of circles; she has friends in all manner of walks of life in the underworld and legit circles, she makes it pretty clear she doesn’t have any interest in being involved in drama outside of her choosing and tends to usually manage to keep from pissing off the wrong people (she’s way more likely to have enemies among the politicians, the Meths, the policy makers than get caught up in a turf war etc).  

                   She has a loft apartment in Licktown, but she also has four or five other roommates and it’s very crowded and busy so she tends to prefer to crash at her hookup’s place when an option and also makes a semi regular habit of showing up at Claire’s in the middle of the night and crashing on her couch for a few days.  Despite their glaring differences, the sisters are actually pretty close and as much as they rib on each other, they would not hesitate to come to the defense of the other if necessary, in a heartbeat.  

                     Rori does come from a family of Meths.  Her lifestyle choices, her behaviour, the fact she lives on the Ground and in Licktown are all huge sources of embarrassment for the majority of her family.  The only reason she isn’t actually just cut loose and written off as the black sheep of the family is because Claire wouldn’t stand for it.  Rori does have access to a large stipend, which she does live off of at times but in general she prefers to make her own way - she works as a bartender, a tattoo artist, odd jobs here and there.  Whatever she doesn’t use of her monthly allowance, though, she does pull out every month and donate to a number of different activist groups, shelters, etc. - wherever needs it the most at that time.

Why do the intelligentsia denigrate President Reagan although he ended the Cold War and triggered the dissolution of the USSR?

The difference between Reagan and Trump is one of degree and not of kind. Reagan set loose the first pebbles of Deplorables that have become the Trump Deplorable avalanche

COMMENTARY:

Personally, I voted for him knowing that he believed body and soul in Supply Economics because it was so kind to the members of his country club. On that basis, he was a totally useful idiot for the Deplorables in California politics whose careers profited considerably by Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and the Black Lists. My dad was working for Ridgeway during the Army-McCarthy hearings and I have no fond memories of Joe McCarthy or Roy Cohn or the people like William F. Buckley, Jr., who admired McCarthy and considered him a National Hero and True Patriot. I define “Deplorables” by those metrics and we now know how the world works when the Deplorables are in charge: No Wall, No Christmas.

Well, these people have been in the Republican party since before I started voting and they have been nothing but ugly my entire life. You ought to be able to connect the dot’s between Tucker Carlson and Richard Spencer directly. I mean, come on. Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham just called off Christmas in DC because they are the cool kids, the Bret Kavanaugh crowd of 1955, Pat Buchanan and George Lincoln Rockwell and 1972. Pat Buchanan and Nixon and 1992, “Pitch Fork Pat” Buchanan and Grover Norquist. These people have been actively sabotaging Nixon’s Affirmative Action agenda since Reagan came to town. These are the people who have been fight the war to save Christmas longer than Birtherism and now, they pull the plug.

But, as they say, Politics makes for strange bedfellows. I voted for Nixon before I went to Vietnam and I voted for him after I got back and, as a veteran in dubious battle, he, Nixon, over-delivered on my expectations. Nixon is why there is no Soviet Union, today, and China is a player in Marx’s version of Capitalism, and mine, for that matter, but, for the orthodox Marxists, it’s engaged in heresy that Nixon planted while I was in Vietnam.

So, I voted Republican on general principles. I’m a hard-wired, born, bred and weaned an Eisenhower Republican, and, as a Hoosier, a Will Rogers FDR Republican, like Dick Lugar. Progressive, eyes on the horizon and distinct from the Dan Burton Copperhead Republicans that are the Hoosier tribe of Deplorables. In Indiana, Dick Lugar Republicans and Lee Hamilton Democrats got the roads built and the schools providing quality education tied into the land grant colleges and universities that sound very Socialist to day and the Dan Burton Republicans stood, like William F. Buckley, athwart the wave of history, shouting “Stop!” That’s why I call Buckley the Patriarch of the modern Deplorable.

So, I was voting Deplorable because I’m not a Democrat and I don’t understand their thinking. I live in DC, where everything that works at all works because the Democrats in Congress and the District are able to keep it running in spite of the Deplorables in Congress and, to a far lesser degree, in the District, dedicated to fucking up anything that requires the white Deplorables in town from paying for the services they receive, so I am a registered Democrat so I can vote in the primaries. Virtually every problem Mayor Bowser faces is a direct result of the obstructionism of Deplorables like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, the people who can’t figure out some way to make it clear to the Deplorable who convinced Trump to pull the plug on Christmas that Trump’s promise for the Wall is total bullshit at virtually any level of human self-organization and inquiry. It’s Newt Gingrich’s “Leadership by Tantrum” politcs as national policy.

These are very stupid people. I mean, it goes way beyond “stuck on stupid”. I mean, going back to Phyllis Schlafley’s obstruction of the ERA, these people have been pulling the plug on Christmas in the name of saving Christmas since Joe McCarthy inspired William F. Buckley to create a farm system for aspiring Deplorables that has produced Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Rich Lowry and Tucker Carlson so they could grab Trump by the balls and force him to pull the plug on Christmas.

Now, is that collusion or conspiracy or what? I don’t know, but that’s the shit Reagan brought to town with him and gave Pat Buchanan and Roger Stone a second bite at the apple and they haven’t missed a meal, since.

Nixon ended the Cold War in Vietnam: Reagan was there to facilitate Gorbachen pulling the plug on the Soviet Union and joining out side. Reagan should have shared a Nobel Prize with Gorbachev but he was betrayed by Donald T. Regan, who exploited the Alzheimer’s that was far more advanced than anyone could imagine. Edmund Morris captured it by inference with his fictionalization of blank spots in Reagan’s oral history. The assassination probably accelerated the process, but I suspect no one noticed because he was a martini a day man and the effects of the gin over time resembles late stage Alzheimers. The Juniper berries so something visually that becomes progressively introverted. As a bartender, I used to watch it happen in gin drinkers: they’s sit and stare towards the end on the night and you had to sort of wake them up so they could return to the present. That’s what it sounded like was going on between Reagan and Morris. Regan noticed this same phenomena and exploited it to run his own agenda out of the Oval Office, until Nancy saw it for herself and fired his ass just like Melania fired the Recardel women. Recardel is part of the Deplorable elements in the GOP Deep State. Her agenda is an element of Regan’s agenda now associated with the friends of the Russian enemies of Putin in the Deplorable leadershp of the GOP Deep State.

The thing Charley Sykes doesn’t seem to understand is that he’s a career Deplorable: Trump is a clone of Reagan, politically, only not nearly so intellectual. Reagan’s “New Federalism” was actually a useful reform based on his experience as a Governor: it was never financed. I may have coined the phrase “unfunded mandate” as the reality of Reaganomics began to emerge in the economy and that, at a very fundmental level, Reagan didn’t fully understand his own program. As a capitalist nation, it was easy to fix and implement, but, as capitalism is defined by the Deplorables, any public investment that didn’t directly benefit the members of Mar-a-Lago is a non-starter. And that’s besides the fact Reagan had everything he needed to put a permanent colony on the moon by 2001, just like the movie, but immediately began dismantling the federal apparatus he needed to implement his New Federalism and return to the Moon. The Soviets stayed in space and we have benefited from that, but people like Charley Sykes and the editorial board of the National Review and Weekly Standard have been pulling the plug on space in the name of growing up Deplorable.

So, I had been around Deplorables during the 60s as a fraternity member. The argument can be made that I am a Deplorable, because. like Rush Limbaugh, I’m as big a bigot as Woodrow Wilson. Unlike Limpdick, who considers white supremacy as a divine right, while I am ashamed of it and do what I can to mitigate my moral rot.

But, until they got here, it was impossible to anticpate the pure emotional density of their collective racism. In the 70’s, DC was the most racially mellow city in America, for a bunch of reasons. The only bigots of any consequence in DC was the Nixon Plumbers, good old Pat Buchanan, a native white bigot who misses the good old days before Martin Luther King and a whte boy could get a little rowdy in a Bret Kavanaugh kind of way and leave the cops to deal with the Democrats.

As an Eisenhower Republican, Deplorables fall into the catagory of“strange bedfellows” . I quit voting Republican in 1988 when it clear that the Deplorables were determined to pack the courts with Fascists, beginning with Scalia and running through Kavanaugh.

But, when I voted for Reagan, the Democrats were out of ideas, but all they had to do was to continue to implement the Nixon-Moynihan-Carter “Affirmative Action” agenda and we would now have a permanent United Nations colony on the moon and not be fucking around with some asshole alt-right wet dream of a Berlin Wall south of El Paso to go with their Prison-Industrial Complex that’s a big money maker for Jeff Session’s patrons. The Wall is a typical Deplorable piece of shit idea to go along with the War on Drugs, the invasion of Iraq, Trumpcare and the 2017 Tax Reform bill that has begun to snuff out the Bull Market. All Reagan had to do was to double down on Affirmative Action. The introduction of electronic trading and the explosion of the internet would have created a Reagan Economic Miracle 4 to five times greater, globally, than the parasitic mechanisms of Supply Side Economics ever contemplated, much less totally undelivered.

I would say that the intelligensia got it about right regarding Reagan: Trump is just a logical progression of who and what Reagan represented, going in. All in all, Reagan ended up being better than going in, but, if either Carter or Bush the Elder had been reelected, a moon colony would be yesterday’s news. Reagan had absolutely no vision for a horizon that included space: he was lost doing color commentary by telegraph.