Revolutionary Rhymes by Useful Idiots

There is something almost heart-warming about the modern anti-Israel chant.

Not intelligent. Not informed. Not morally coherent.

But heart-warmingly comical.

In the same way it is heart-warming when a child at kindergarten discovers that “cat” rhymes with “hat” and suddenly feels ready to enter public life.

Because that is roughly the level we are dealing with here.

“From the river to the sea…”

Amazing. The crown jewel of political thought. Brilliant!

A slogan so short, so vague and so rhythmically satisfying that it allows people to feel revolutionary without suffering the burden of learning history, geography or the meaning of the thing they are shouting.

Apparently, this is meant to terrify us.

It rhymes, you see. And as everyone knows, the Jewish people – who somehow staggered through Pharaoh, Babylon, Rome, exile, pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, blood libels, gas chambers, suicide bombings, rocket fire, kidnappings and the comments section of Instagram and Wikipedia – are finally about to collapse because someone in a keffiyeh found a chant with matching vowel sounds.

Have they honestly convinced themselves they’ve discovered our kryptonite?

No! Not the nursery rhymes! Anything but the nursery rhymes!

Quick, everyone. Pack your bags. Cancel Shabbat dinner. Abandon Jerusalem. Let’s all move “back” to Poland – where we’re apparently from – because someone in a polyester scarf they bought with free next-day shipping, yelled a sentence with a chorus.

Don’t make us laugh.

Pre-school tantrums and reception-level rhyming chants are not going to dismantle more than three thousand years of Jewish memory. They are not going to erase Hebrew from our books, Jerusalem from our prayers, Israel from the map or the Jewish people from history.

At most, they will make us giggle, roll our eyes and wonder whether someone should gently introduce them to a Geography and History for Dummies textbook.

And the real beauty of it all is that if you ask any one of these rent-a-rant revolutionaries the most basic follow-up question, the whole performance collapses faster than a student protest tent in a light breeze.

Which river? Which sea? Where exactly is Israel on the map? What happened before 1948? What happened after 1948? What does “intifada” actually look like when real people are on the receiving end of it?

And that is when the intellectual fireworks begin:

“Coloniser!”
“Genocide!”
“Zionist!”

Oh no! Not the Z-word. Anything but that.

Imagine thinking “Zionist” is an insult. Imagine believing that the Jewish desire to live safely in our ancestral homeland is some sort of scandal, rather than one of the most stubborn, documented, prayed-for, bled-for and sung-for survival stories in human history.

But that is the magic of the chant. It saves people from the inconvenience of thinking.

Thinking is messy. Thinking requires reading. Thinking requires memory. Thinking requires the ability to hold two ideas in one’s head at the same time. Sadly, a great many of these slogan-of-the-hour enthusiasts seem to struggle with sentence structures longer than a fridge magnet.

So instead, they chant.

They chant in rhyme. They chant in slogans. They chant in bumper-sticker language because bumper-sticker language is all they have.

And then, because apparently every moral societal collapse now comes with a merchandise department, they take their little eliminationist nursery rhymes and put them on products.

Behold the glorious online marketplace of performative hate. Amazon. Etsy. The digital shuk of selective outrage.

There they are: “From the river to the sea” mugs, tote bags, hoodies, stickers, wall prints and charming little accessories for people who want to call for the disappearance of the world’s only Jewish state while enjoying free delivery and a tasteful handwritten font.

Nothing says “grassroots resistance” quite like ordering your revolutionary cosplay from a multinational marketplace with free next-day shipping and free returns.

And of course, no collection would be complete without the truly delightful “Globalise the Intifada” merch.

Lovely. So progressive. So punchy. So marketable.

Because apparently we are now meant to pretend that “intifada” is just a quirky cultural aesthetic, rather than a word soaked in the reality of exploded buses, bombed cafés, murdered families, traumatised children and Jews killed for the crime of being Jews.

But slap it on a tote bag and suddenly it is edgy activism. Print it on a hoodie and now it is “solidarity”. Put it in a pastel font and terrorism somehow becomes artisanal.

And then there are the maps.

Those adorable little maps of Israel completely filled in with watermelon colours, as though erasing an entire country is now some sort of wholesome graphic design exercise.

Apparently the watermelon is the symbol now because the colours match – so people with blue hair, ill-fitting trousers, questionable person hygiene and the intellectual capacity of a watermelon seed, can colour by numbers and feel morally superior as do their part to free a people held captive by a terrorist regime.

Genius.

But Jews understand symbols better than most. We have carried ours through exile, persecution, forced conversion, ghettos and genocide.

But there is something grotesquely revealing about the obsession with these maps.

Because they are not maps of peace. They are not maps of coexistence. They are not maps of compromise, reconciliation or a better future.

They are maps of erasure.

Maps that say, in cute colours and social-media-friendly packaging, what the chant says more bluntly: no Israel, no Jewish sovereignty, no Jewish self-determination, no Jewish presence that cannot be tolerated, diluted, demonised or deleted.

And all wrapped up in watermelon colours, which is almost impressive in its irony.

Because while they wave their fruit-themed fantasy maps, the thing their beloved extremists have grown most successfully is not peace, not democracy, not compromise, not prosperity, not coexistence and certainly not a better future.

What they have grown is hatred. Multi-generational hatred.

And then the Western fan club packages it all as merch.

Buy the hoodie. Share the post. Chant the rhyme. Ignore the bodies. Call it justice. Add to basket. Buy now. Delivered tomorrow.

The whole thing would be laughable if it weren’t so morally grotesque.

And yes, before anyone clutches their ethically sourced pearls, we were raised not to mock people genuinely in need.

Compassion matters. But this is not that.

This is not confusion in search of help. This is a self-inflicted outbreak of slogan poisoning.

A full-blown societal case of performative brain-freeze, where thousands of otherwise functioning adults appear to have replaced independent thought with laminated placards, TikTok captions and whatever rhyming couplet the loudest man/woman/insert-pronoun-here with the biggest megaphone remembered from last week.

It is not brave. It is not deep. And It is certainly not liberation.

It is what happens when moral vanity, historical illiteracy and a desperate need to belong to something, all climb into a washing machine together and come out as a protest chant.

And somehow, we are meant to take it seriously.

We are meant to pretend that hatred becomes moral if it rhymes nicely. That eliminationism becomes justice if it fits on a placard. That screaming “Zionist” at Jews is some sort of devastating intellectual mic drop rather than a flashing neon sign that says: I have learned absolutely nothing.

Because here is the thing they never grasp:

We are not frightened by their rhymes. We are not defeated by their placards. We are not going to dissolve into the sand because someone in a polyester keffiyeh bought a slogan hoodie and discovered a chant with a beat.

We have heard better lies from worse people. We have survived more serious enemies than TikTok militants and Etsy propagandists. We have been cursed in more languages than most of them can pronounce.

And still we are here.

Still building. Still arguing. Still creating. Still healing. Still feeding people. Still raising children. Still writing books. Still planting trees. Still speaking Hebrew in the one place on earth where Jewish history is not a museum exhibit but a living, breathing reality.

That is what really enrages them.

So let them rhyme. Let them march. Let them wave their watermelon maps and hold up their mass-produced “grassroots” signs.

Let them order their “Globalise the Intifada” sweatshirts and their “river to the sea” mugs and pretend they are the resistance while tracking their parcels on their phones (that were designed by Israelis) and posting selfies (on social networks built by Jews).

They are not saying anything new. They are not saying anything clever. And they are certainly not saying anything history has not heard before.

The river has a name. The sea has a name. The land has a history. And the Jewish people are not a slogan.

We are not a chant. We are not a costume for someone else’s moral vanity project.

And unlike their politics, we do not need to rhyme to be true.

But since rhyming is apparently the highest form of revolutionary genius these days, here is a little something for the chant brigade:

River, sea and plastic signs,
Hate looks silly when it rhymes.
Jews came home, the truth survived,
Now run off home and get a life.

You can rhyme and you can march,
You can scream you’re childish chants,
But you can’t erase what’s set in stone,
Israel has always been our home.