From the River to the Sea

The national motto of Canada, “A Mari Usque Ad Mare,” which translates to “From sea to sea,” marks the occupation of a land which the prior occupants still call Turtle Island. While this proprietary geographical imagery derives from the Biblical Psalm 72:8, “He shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth,” its eschatological sense of “dominion” has been repeatedly transposed into an imperial one throughout the Common Era. The territorial imagery of “A mari Usque Ad Mare,” is evoked again in ‘America the Beautiful’, a popular patriotic song often confused with the American National anthem,

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

This proprietary boundary symbolism seems to be an identifiable feature of European settler colonial imagery and lore. Indeed, European settler colonialism can be said to have been inaugurated in 1452, when Roman Catholic Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, authorizing King Afonso V of Portugal to subjugate the lands and the lives of non-Christians. While Zionism does not derive from this Christian ‘doctrine of discovery’, the founding of Israel in the violent displacement of native Palestinians by non-native European Jews, can be seen as the last significant instantiation of such an ethnopolitical ‘dominion’.

Given both the history of settlement and erasure of Palestinians from their lands and the fact that in the past month, 10,733 Palestinians have been killed (10,569 in Gaza and 164 in the West Bank, November 8, 10:50 GMT Update) with the complicity of the collective West, I wonder if it is a guilty self-projection that underpins the interpretation that the freedom slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as a call for genocide (mass killing or other form of eradication with intent)? In fact, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has recently explained, this is not a call for the destruction of the state of Israel, but “a call for freedom ‘from the river to the sea’ for everybody.

Image: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/from-sea-to-shining-sea.html

https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/dum-diversas/

https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/2/from-the-river-to-the-sea-what-does-the-palestinian-slogan-really-mean