'Free Palestine': The New 'Heil Hitler'?

Few slogans have become as popular as 'Free Palestine.' Used since 2023 and reiterated in social media protests, graffiti, and chants in the streets and universities around the world—among banners, flags, keffiyehs, and bonfires in front of synagogues—it has become almost dogma. Is it a call for justice, a humanitarian cause, or simply 'a modern-day version of Heil Hitler,' as the Israeli Prime Minister stated after the terrorist attack in Washington that, in May, claimed the lives of Yaron Lischinsky and Sara Milgrim, a young and beautiful couple?

The full phrase, "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," indicates a territory where the Hebrew state would no longer exist. Thus, "Free Palestine ," which presents itself as a "banner of freedom," does not symbolize the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It is, in fact, a euphemism that calls for the total annihilation of the only Jewish state on the planet and its nearly 10 million inhabitants, among whom are approximately 2 million Muslim citizens. "Free Palestine" is not a political opinion. It is pure and unequivocal anti-Semitism. And it is a call for a new genocide.

This rhetoric is not isolated: it is echoed by terrorist groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and even sectors of Fatah that control the West Bank. Hamas's founding charter, in 1988, explicitly states this objective. Therefore, those who furiously repeat this dangerous slogan—even without realizing, or concealing, the violence that accompanies it and the depletion it provokes—directly or indirectly support political and military organizations that oppress women, criminalize homosexuals, and use Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Palestine was never a state. It is a geographic region. At most, a territorial designation—like North, Northeast, Central-West, Southeast, and South in Brazil. And infinitely smaller. The so-called "Palestinian people," a Palestinian identity in the national sense, did not exist before the arrival of Zionism and the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel. A people has a history. The local inhabitants did not consider themselves "Palestinian people." They were subjects of the Ottoman Empire and identified primarily as Arabs, Muslims, Christians, or inhabitants of a city (like Nablus or Jaffa). Nothing that constitutes a national identity, a distinct language, or a collective political project.

With the first waves of Jewish immigration around 1882 and the Balfour Declaration in 1917, local Arab elites began to organize—not to build a nation, but to oppose the Zionist project. Their identity was thus structured against the other, not around a political or cultural ideal of their own.

Most Arabs in the region came from families that had arrived over the centuries: desert Arabs, Turks, Circassians, or those who had become Islamized under Ottoman rule. There was no flag, no king, no language, no founding text, no clear historical figure. In 1917, the Arab population was estimated at around 500,000, mostly peasants living in villages without a solid political or cultural structure. The connection to the land was pragmatic, not spiritual or symbolic: "we cultivate, we sell, we move."

Even the name "Palestine" has no local identity roots. It was coined by the Romans and comes from the "Philistines" or "Philistines" who inhabited "Philistea," ultimately "Palestine," which the English later adopted. The letter "P" doesn't even exist in the Arabic alphabet. The symbols now attributed to Palestinian identity—the key, the olive tree, the watermelon—are recent inventions, popularized between the 1970s and 1980s. Not even the keffiyeh is Palestinian. It has Iraqi origins and was already worn in antiquity.

The Jewish people, on the other hand, maintained a deep spiritual and cultural bond with this land for over two thousand years. Even in exile, they prayed three times a day to return to Jerusalem, respected the agricultural laws associated with the land of Israel, studied three-thousand-year-old texts, and preserved Hebrew as a liturgical language until it was revived as a living language.

Zionism is not a colonial project. It is the return of a people to their ancestral land, after centuries of persecution and with a collective memory intact. There is no symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians. The Jewish narrative is ancient, coherent, and deeply rooted. The Palestinian narrative is recent and reactive, built on the rejection of the other. Zionist discourse is based on a millennia-old history, a faith, a language, and a culture. Palestinian discourse, on the contrary, revolves around victimization and the radical denial of Israel's right to exist, without presenting a viable project of its own.

This isn't a classic territorial conflict. It's the clash between a people's historic return to their land after thousands of years of waiting and an artificial narrative created to prevent it. Until this is understood, it will remain impossible to grasp the heart of the matter.

Palestinian statehood has been rejected seven times by Palestinian leaders

For decades, pan-Arabism, Soviet propaganda, European anti-Semitism, and religious fanaticism instrumentalized the idea of ​​"Palestine." The uncomfortable truth is that neither a Palestinian national identity nor a Palestinian state ever existed—and not through Israel's fault. Even after the UN partition of 1947—accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs—Palestinian leaders systematically refused to create their own state. Seven times they had this opportunity. Seven times they preferred to keep their people in refugee camps, blaming their neighbor for all their ills.

Yes, the slogan "Free Palestine" is a new form of hatred disguised as virtue. Until next time, which is today, and those who want peace don't call for the violence of eliminating others!