It is not a surprise that Palestinians are being attacked for calling for freedom in their homeland. For decades, the Israeli government and its allies have been trying to blunt any movement to hold them accountable. Recently this has taken the form of demonizing the protest chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” When Representative Rashida Tlaib, the lone Palestinian American member of Congress, uttered these words, she explained that the slogan was an aspirational call for freedom. No matter. Her colleagues, including 22 Democrats, censured her with a formal resolution that alleged the phrase “clearly” entailed “Israel’s destruction.”

That’s ridiculous of course. As I’ve written before, the idea that “from the river to the sea” carries genocidal intent is not true and has historically never been true. But, as I wrote, “it is in this space that Palestinians seek to live freely. It is across this space—and across the political and geographic divisions that Israeli rule has imposed—that Palestinians must unite to create change.”

I’ve written about this before, because this has happened before. Oppressive governments often attack the message and the messenger. The recent discourse around “the river to the sea” reminded me of some of the narratives around “Black Lives Matter.” There was no shortage of voices who responded to this much-needed movement by demonizing its slogan. It distracts from the calls for change and instead makes those mobilizing for justice the subject of scrutiny. We heard criticism that ranged from putative liberals who asked “Why not say all lives matter?” to those on the far right who saw the movement as a veiled call for white genocide. Many critics of BLM tried to turn the protesters into villains, and relied on deeply embedded societal racism to attempt to convince people that the organizers were actually deceptive, violent, and dangerous charlatans and that the only way to deal with them was to “send in the troops.”

This prompted the circulation of a meme with the quote, “Equal rights does not mean less rights for you. It’s not pie.”

But for many Zionists and the state of Israel, equal rights is seen as a pie. When Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset put forward legislation to make Israel a “state of all its citizens,” the Knesset banned it from even being discussed, and the Israeli Supreme Court agreed that the legislation needn’t be considered.

Today between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there is effectively one state, the state of Israel, and it rules over millions of Palestinians who are denied justice and equality. When we call for freedom from the river to the sea, it is this context we are responding to. We are calling for an end to Israeli domination, not for destruction of anyone but for the dismantling of unjust laws, systems, and practices. But to those who want to undermine our calls for freedom and support this system of injustice, it does not matter what we say our words mean.

Perhaps the most insidious part of the pile-on against Tlaib is that even though she went out of her way to explain that the phrase was not a call to Jewish genocide as some of her detractors preposterously alleged, it didn’t matter. Her critics had already determined what she thought, because she is Palestinian. This “we’ll tell you what you mean” attitude harks back to the Islamophobic hysteria of the early War on Terror period when we so often heard Muslims being told, “We learned everything we need to know about Islam on 9/11.” In committing to willful ignorance and bigotry, Tlaib’s opponents dehumanize Palestinians, silence them, and portray them as a monolith of barbarians. It is the pinnacle of racism.

What makes the attack on Tlaib even more absurd is that while Congress is demonizing calls for freedom in a space where Palestinians are systematically denied it, that same Congress supports the government of Israel, which explicitly commits to denying freedom to Palestinians from the river to the sea.

The original charter of the Likud party, the party of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu states, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”A more recent version, updated to reflect the party’s position in the two-state solution era, made this point clear as well, saying, “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.” Recently, when establishing the most far-right government in Israeli history, Netanyahu announced its agenda. The top item was, “The Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel—in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

This is not the protest chant of some college students or a comment from the only Palestinian American member of Congress. It is the stated policy of the party that runs the Israeli government, which controls the space between the river and the sea, and is committing war crimes in service of this agenda. Israel is conducting a war on the entire population of Gaza. In a month, it killed more than 10,000 people, over 4,000 of them children. It is targeting civilian infrastructure and denying life-sustaining resources like water, food, and fuel to all 2.2 million people in Gaza. Israeli officials have repeatedly used dehumanizing language and characterized the whole population as targets. No person of conscience should be able to look at what Israel is doing in Gaza along with its statements and policies of collective punishment and dismiss concerns of genocide.

In the West Bank, this government is committed to annexation and the continued expansion of Israeli settlements while escalating its military occupation. In recent years the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank has skyrocketed.