The libertarian Goldwater Institute prides itself in “advancing the principles of limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty, with a focus on education, free speech, healthcare, equal protection, property rights, occupational licensing, and constitutional limits.” For instance, when it comes to wealthy people, the Goldwater Institute has sought to enable big money campaign spenders to be hidden to protect their ability to spend their fortunes to “speak” without fear of being revealed and facing consequences.

Yet in a post entitled, “University of Arizona ‘Art’ Exhibit Demands Destruction of Israel” a self-identified “queer”, “crip” (crip is a means of identifying as part of the disabled community) artist was not just attacked by the Goldwater Institute, but the entire University of Arizona was accused of supporting the annihilation of 8 million Jews in Israel for allowing this artist’s work to be displayed. To get there a conflation contortion used the art as an illustration to indicate the university’s support of anti-semitism.

Let’s start with the “offending” work and the caption below it by the artist.

Below the piece are two bilingual placards. One related to another piece by the artist and the second related to the one above. For this piece it says,

“they/them

Queers Demand Justice, 2024 (watercolor and gel on paper)

A Safety Spell for Queer Palestinians (after Ching-in Chen)

You in your radiant queer and trans beauty. You who I do not know in name, but in spirit. You who have a thousand beautiful names, some of which may never have been spoken. You who are fighting on multiple fronts. You who are my family.

You are deserving of all the joy in the world.

You will be safe in your own land. You will smile and laugh and dance. You will be known not as terrorists, but as peacemakers. Your land will be known as…. (the image cuts off but one might presume it says ‘Palestine.’)”

The Goldwater Institute claims, “If Palestine should extend from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, then it follows that the country that controls much of this territory must be destroyed. This slogan literally calls for wiping Israel—the world’s only Jewish state—off the map.”

Given that nothing in the placard suggests such an interpretation, why such an extreme interpretation? It goes to the Palestinian exception when it comes to free speech. Israel, we are told repeatedly, has a right to exist and a right to defend itself. The United States has provided extensive weapons and intelligence to help it do so. Palestinians, though, apparently do not have the same rights–so to advocate on their behalf is tantamount to saying 8 million Israeli Jews must be expelled. Repeatedly, those saying “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” have been accused of using hate speech.

There are two significant problems with this line of reasoning. It ignores the reality on the ground and it ignores aspirations for a better one-state solution than the defacto one-state solution at present.

This focus on only the most offensive interpretation of an expression, pretends that the expression, which originated in the 1960s by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, is being used without any context.

Israel’s ruling Likud Party’s founding documents in the early 1970s after Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 says the entire area “between the Sea and the Jordan will only be Israeli Sovereignty.” In other words, from the River to the Sea, Israel will be free. Israel has endorsed and expanded settlements in the West Bank since the 1970s (referred to by Likud as Judea and Samaria) and condoned further expansion by settlers who have terrorized Palestinians and taken their land since October 7, 2023. For Palestinians, that they are under Israeli sovereignty has been a fact of life. The policing, abuse and military suppression of Palestinians is consistently framed as a matter of Israeli security–despite the fact that it goes well beyond what might be justified simply in the name of security.

The Hamas Oct. 7, 2023 incursion into Israel led to the killing and brutal massacres of about 800 Jewish civilians and approximatley 400 soliders, along with aournd 250 people who were kidnapped–many of whom are now dead or feared dead. As Middle East scholar Michael Reimer put it, “For most Israelis, it was a vile and gratuitous offensive against Jewish civilians, impelled by the fanatical anti-Semitic annihilationist program of the Hamas movement.” As another scholar of the conflict Eyal Mayroz framed it, “By magnifying old, festering feelings of isolation and victimization within Jewish society, the callous or insensitive reactions to the October 7 attack ended up inflicting damage on the Palestinian cause. . . As emotions in Israel continued to run high, more and more people adopted the view that if the world hates us so much (evoking the days of the Holocaust), we will forever have to live by the sword.” 

Living by the sword has wreaked havoc upon Palestinians in Gaza and growing numbers in the West Bank. More than 450 days of Israeli reprisal for October 7th has been no less cruel and dehumanizing. Palestinians have been mercilously bombed, invaded, occupied, seen their homes and livelihoods destroyed. Most of the 2 million inhabitants have been forced to move multiple times, often now living in building shells or tents. More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli assaults (a recent Lancet Study suggests the number of traumatic deaths (from violence) in the first 8 months exceeded 60,000–and is likely now 70,000), which does not include what will likely eventually be revealed to be a huge number of Palestinians, especially children and older adults, whose deaths have been caused due to lack of clean water, inadequate food supplies, and the destruction of healthcare facilities. Hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, universities, and historical rhelics have all been targeted and destroyed. Noncombatant Palestinians have been arrested and tortured. These actions by Israel many observers characterize as “genocide.”

For reference, under the Geneva Convention, genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”:

• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
• Killing members of the group
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

Many scholars of genocide now conclude Israel is commiting genocide (those who don’t generally see Israel committing “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”)

When CNN interviewed Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, An American pediatric intensive care physician who volunteered for two weeks at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, she stated:

When 70% of the population that are killed are women and children, when the population is starved of food, of water, of medicine, when you have attacks, repeated attacks on all the hospitals, the clinics, the aid distribution sites, the humanitarian aid agencies that tried to help, more [United Nations] workers have been killed in Gaza than in U.N.’s history. When you have over 900 families that have been exterminated, that have been taken off of the civil registry, killed, when you have over 17,000 children that have lost one or both parents, when you have bakeries, aid distribution sites, churches, mosques, schools, and in the last three days—in the last 24 hours in fact—a hospital today that was bombed, as you just reported, the hospital where I personally was working, and I can tell you, they are working every second of every day to try and sustain life….countries will have to reckon—media agencies will have to reckon—with their major role in the genocide of an entire population and in the destruction of humanitarian law and rule of order.

A United Nations Special Committee found Israel’s methods of warfare consistent with genocide in November 2024. Likewise, Amnesty International also called Israel’s actions as genocide in December 2024 (last month).

In this context, exhortations of Palestinian liberation embraces a desire to live freely, but it does not have to be a zero sum game, where Palestinian freedom, necessitates Israeli suffering, just as Israeli freedom should not have to necessitate Palestinian suffering.

The second problem eminates from completely disregarding the Palestinian historical experience. Today the area from the River to the Sea is under defacto Israeli control. Yet before the increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine beginning in the early Twentieth Century (and controversial especially in Western Europe), the area was overwhelmingly Arab. The 1947 partition plan of the United Nations came to fruition as a consequence of a sustained terrorist campaign by militant Zionist groups against the British as well as the horror of the Holocaust during World War II. The resulting partition that proposed the new state of Israel included almost all the Jews there in the Israeli portion as well as a significant number of Arabs (400,000). The Arab portion had almost no Jews living there. Militant Zionists, who were well organized and armed, saw the partition as a starting point to expand from. Arabs, who were less well organized or armed, did not accept the imposition of the partition.

That context still leaves many in the region yearnng for a return to a unified Palestine–that does not have to mean the expelling of Jews, but more realistically means finding a way to move from the current situation of Israeli Jewish supremacy to one state of Palestine (or Israel) from the river to the sea which acknowledges everyone’s humanity and right to safety. That is far removed from the current situation, so it is obviously aspirational. However, it should not be assumed to constitute hate speech. In this artist’s case it clearly comes from a perspective of love focused on an oppressed group, not hate.

The artist ironically uses a watermelon to depict Palestinian aspirations. The watermelon includes the red, green and black of the Palestinian flag and emerged as a symbol of support for Palestinian freedom because usage of the Palestinian flag was often censored.

That returns us to the beginning where free speech is embraced unless it advocates for Palestinian rights. Just ask the folks at the Goldwater Institute, where they make a free speech exception for this work of art.