J7 letter to Facebook about its decision about the phrase “from the river to the sea”.

Mr. Mark Zuck­er­berg, CEO
Meta
1 Hacker Way
Menlo Park, CA 94025

Dear Mr. Zuck­er­berg,

We write to you as leaders of seven of the largest Jewish Diaspora com­munit­ies rep­res­ent­ing over 90% of Jews globally outside of Israel. As Jews, our com­munit­ies continue to feel the impact of the brutal Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, with its death toll of over 1200 Israelis, over 4000 wounded, and over 250 taken hostage, and over a hundred still held captive in Gaza. Our Jewish com­munit­ies continue to bear the brunt of dramatic increases of antisemitism, with huge number of attacks on our community members, our students, our insti­tu­tions, both on the streets and online. Alarm­ingly, the Oversight Board (OB) released its September 4, 2024 decision that the phrase “from the river to the sea” is not hate. We are pro­foundly dismayed at the Oversight Board’s decision, and we urge Meta to reject it and amend its hate policy to prohibit this phrase that effect­ively calls for the expulsion of half of the world’s Jews.

We fear that accept­ance of this decision would represent an indif­fer­ence to online hate and har­ass­ment. Regret­tably, this has been a pattern in Meta. From the decade it took Meta to realize that Holocaust denial is indeed hate, to your well-doc­u­mented role in the Genocide of the Rohingya Muslim community, to the ongoing failure to address hate against the LGBTQ community that has led to severe offline harms, to your role in fomenting movements rooted in con­spir­acy theories like Qanon that ulti­mately lead to the January 6 insur­rec­tion against the United States gov­ern­ment, Meta has sadly made itself a haven for rad­ic­al­iz­a­tion and extreme ideo­lo­gies in the pursuit of profit.

The phrase “from the river to the sea” is hate speech. This rallying cry, enshrined in the charter of Hamas, has long been used by anti-Israel voices, including sup­port­ers of terrorist organ­iz­a­tions such as Hamas and the PFLP, which seek Israel’s destruc­tion through violent means. It is fun­da­ment­ally a call for a Palestini­an state extending from the Jordan River to the Medi­ter­ranean Sea, territory that includes the entirety of the State of Israel, which would mean the dis­mant­ling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determ­in­a­tion, including through the forced removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland. Indeed, the Arabic version of the slogan is ‘From the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab’ (min el-mayeh lil-mayeh, Filastin Arabiyeh), making the meaning crystal clear: there is no space for Jews.

Usage of this phrase has the effect of making members of the Jewish and pro-Israel community feel unsafe and ostra­cized. A recent study of the American campus envir­on­ment from the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago (CPOST) found that “66% of Jewish college students under­stand the pro-Palestini­an protest chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” to mean the expulsion and genocide of Israeli Jews.”

Under­stand­ing that “zero tolerance does not mean zero occur­rence,” accepting the Oversight Board’s decision on this case will clearly indicate Meta’s will­ing­ness to tolerate violent hate speech on its platform. Moreover, the focus on the intent of the speaker over the impact of the speech in this decision shows a callous disregard for the exper­i­ence of mar­gin­al­ized com­munit­ies.

As the leaders of com­munit­ies rep­res­ent­ing the largest Diaspora Jewish pop­u­la­tions, we call on Meta to recognize the harm this phrase poses to the Jewish community worldwide, reject the Oversight Board’s short-sighted decision and urge it instead to take steps to address the ongoing issues with online hate and har­ass­ment that continue to pro­lif­er­ate across Meta’s many platforms.

Sincerely,
Argentina: Del­ega­ción de Asociaciones Israel­it­as Argen­ti­nas (DAIA)
Australia: Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry (ECAJ)
Canada: Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA)
France: Conseil Représent­atif des Insti­tu­tions Juives de France (CRIF)
Germany: Central Council of Jews in Germany
The United Kingdom: Board of Deputies of British Jews
The United States: ADL (Anti-Defam­a­tion League) and the Con­fer­ence of Pres­id­ents of Major American Jewish Organ­iz­a­tions