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Episode 82: 'From the River to the Sea' - Lost in Translation?

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.91K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.


Our current question: 'From the River to the Sea' - Lost in Translation?


If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.


If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at haviv@askhavivanything.com⁠.


Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Okay, on to the next question in our series of answering the questions from the Internet.

0:09.9

I was skeptical about this. It turned out to be a fantastic idea. People are finding it useful.

0:15.0

I hope you find this useful. What does from the river to the sea mean? What river, what sea, and what's wrong with saying it?

0:23.5

I frankly don't know who you are. I don't know if this person is pro-Israel and wants me to just explain why this is problematic from an Israeli point of view,

0:32.9

or if this person is someone who wants to chant it in the next protest and really tries to, wants to understand

0:39.3

why the heck so many Jews are so upset by it in their milieu over in New York.

0:44.3

I don't know who you are. Maybe that's the beauty of the internet.

0:47.3

From the river to the sea, the very simplest sense refers to the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

0:53.3

And the idea is the old sense of the land of Israel,

0:56.3

what the land of Israel is, those boundaries.

0:58.7

So you have a river and you have a sea.

1:02.2

And in between the river and the sea are two peoples,

1:05.4

one Jewish, one Arab.

1:08.0

And what happens between those two peoples,

1:10.4

between the river and the sea, it's been the

1:12.3

big question, for a century. And when people say from the river to the sea today, they generally

1:20.2

are saying Palestine will be free right after. The argument is it isn't enough to talk about two states. It isn't enough to talk

1:32.3

about a Palestinian state in the West Bank in Gaza and a division into two people's, right, two states for two nations,

1:38.4

and the Palestinians need to rule themselves and the Jews need to rule themselves and everybody

1:42.0

lives together in happiness and harmony because somebody put a border between them, right?

1:46.5

That's not the concept.

1:47.4

The concept is that is all wrong.

...

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