You support your claim that the meaning of the slogan “from the river to the sea” is ambiguous and contested with a link to a NYT opinion piece that makes the same statement without providing any evidence.
The fact that people shouting it may not know what it means doesn’t make its meaning ambiguous. What counts is what the people to whom it is addressed hear. Btw, the slogan was created in the 60s but the PLO - hardly a proponent of a friendly co-existence.
Created in the 60s? It would be easy to draw that conclusion by reading the introductory section of the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea) though it does say "was popularised in the 1960s", which might be a warning that it did not originate then.
Continue to the "History of the phrase" section, and it's clear that the phrase was not invented in the 60s by Palestinian activists. It seems (as supported by evidence in Wikipedia's usual citing of sources) to have originated as a Zionist claim before 1948; this was a seriously expansionist claim by revisionist Zionists. Sorry about all the "ists" here; they just can't be avoided in discussion of Middle East politics.
Any argument that what it REALLY means is an exterminationist Palestinian slogan would hardly count as a meaningful statement.
Thanks for your response. Curiously, German Wikipedia doesn’t contain the same information on the origin of the slogan. Nevertheless, the slogan was popularised by the PLO and it’s the anti-Israel activists and demonstrators who are parroting/shouting it.
Recent events make me wonder about that lacuna in German Wikipedia: namely, the business of Masha Gessen being awarded the Hannah Arendt prize, but with Bremen (which I believe is the sponsor of that award) refusing to allow its civic facilities for the presentation. Which is because Germany bans not only Nazis but pretty much anything negative about Israel. And Gessen has been unkind in her words about Israel.
I don't blame Germany for the free-speech violation in the Nazi ban, because it has uniquely strong reasons for it. (Well, Austria can have a say here too.) But I'm wondering if Wikipedia Germany is self-censoring relative to unpleasant data about the history of Zionism. Just my reaction, and I knew nothing of Revisionist Zionism till very recently, so no expert here.
Your last three leadership lessons - know your own mind, speak from the heart, and leadership is performance - are dead right, and were clearly not understood by these university presidents. I was reminded of Tony Hayward, the hapless BP CEO at the time of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. He famously and solipsistically said he 'wanted his life back' while crews struggled to contain the oilspill. But in a later interview he also said that he'd have done better under the public scrutiny if his degree had been in drama rather than geophysics; thereby demonstrating his complete failure to understand what his job was about.
You support your claim that the meaning of the slogan “from the river to the sea” is ambiguous and contested with a link to a NYT opinion piece that makes the same statement without providing any evidence.
The fact that people shouting it may not know what it means doesn’t make its meaning ambiguous. What counts is what the people to whom it is addressed hear. Btw, the slogan was created in the 60s but the PLO - hardly a proponent of a friendly co-existence.
Created in the 60s? It would be easy to draw that conclusion by reading the introductory section of the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea) though it does say "was popularised in the 1960s", which might be a warning that it did not originate then.
Continue to the "History of the phrase" section, and it's clear that the phrase was not invented in the 60s by Palestinian activists. It seems (as supported by evidence in Wikipedia's usual citing of sources) to have originated as a Zionist claim before 1948; this was a seriously expansionist claim by revisionist Zionists. Sorry about all the "ists" here; they just can't be avoided in discussion of Middle East politics.
Any argument that what it REALLY means is an exterminationist Palestinian slogan would hardly count as a meaningful statement.
Thanks for your response. Curiously, German Wikipedia doesn’t contain the same information on the origin of the slogan. Nevertheless, the slogan was popularised by the PLO and it’s the anti-Israel activists and demonstrators who are parroting/shouting it.
Recent events make me wonder about that lacuna in German Wikipedia: namely, the business of Masha Gessen being awarded the Hannah Arendt prize, but with Bremen (which I believe is the sponsor of that award) refusing to allow its civic facilities for the presentation. Which is because Germany bans not only Nazis but pretty much anything negative about Israel. And Gessen has been unkind in her words about Israel.
I don't blame Germany for the free-speech violation in the Nazi ban, because it has uniquely strong reasons for it. (Well, Austria can have a say here too.) But I'm wondering if Wikipedia Germany is self-censoring relative to unpleasant data about the history of Zionism. Just my reaction, and I knew nothing of Revisionist Zionism till very recently, so no expert here.
Your last three leadership lessons - know your own mind, speak from the heart, and leadership is performance - are dead right, and were clearly not understood by these university presidents. I was reminded of Tony Hayward, the hapless BP CEO at the time of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. He famously and solipsistically said he 'wanted his life back' while crews struggled to contain the oilspill. But in a later interview he also said that he'd have done better under the public scrutiny if his degree had been in drama rather than geophysics; thereby demonstrating his complete failure to understand what his job was about.