On January 12 — the same day that Vice President Kamala Harris visited the University of Michigan for a panel on climate change — a video of protesters from Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), holding Palestinian flags and hollering attacks on the Jewish state of Israel, went viral. Among the students’ chants were “Long live the Intifada,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “There is only one solution.” At a rally before the group marched, one speaker described how Israelis “water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” according to the Michigan Specter, the official publication of the university’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter.
Such rhetoric is, of course, inexcusable, and it is difficult to believe that the students were unaware of their slogans’ meanings. During the Second Intifada, one of two such Palestinian uprisings against Israel to date, civilians made up over 68 percent of the Israelis killed, according to B’tselem. “From the river to the sea” is nothing short of a call for Israel’s destruction, which would likely result in the mass death of the Jews who call the country home. And the talk of “only one solution,” a play on the so-called two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, evokes the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
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