Burgertory owner: We have never doubted or questioned the Jewish connection to the Holy Land.
Founder of Australian burger chain Burgertory, Hash Tayeh, has issued a statement after being seen leading a chant of ‘From the river to see, Palestine will be free’ at a Pro-Palestine Rally.
Burgertory has eighteen stores in Melbourne, including Caulfield, and is Australia’s largest independently owned burger chain.
The burger company’s official statement on the Middle East is that they ‘want to make it unequivocally clear that we have never doubted or questioned the Jewish connection to the Holy Land. We firmly believe that no one’s connection is greater than another’s.’ Throughout all the posts and stories, Israel is not acknowledged by name. Israelis are mentioned in a paragraph on the ‘events of October 7’ that does not go so far as to use the words terrorism or Hamas to describe the perpetrators of the attack.
Meanwhile, Palestine is referred to as the homeland of the Palestinian people, and Jews get the vaguer phrasing of ‘connection’ and ‘Holy Land’ rather than Israel.
The Instagram story also stated regarding the rallying cry of ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, that ‘It is crucial to understand that the interpretation of this chant varies. While it may be perceived as a call for the death of Jewish people in Israel by some, the intended meaning is in fact, that Palestinians should be free, granted their basic human rights, and able to live in peace without violence.’
This is peaceful and genuine act while they keep chanting hateful speech and raise hitler photos. This is the CEO of big burgers chain #burgertory pic.twitter.com/JMklhA6Bwg
— Guy Peleg (@AnnoymousGiraf) October 29, 2023
The rallying cry, which was adopted by Hamas, has become common in recent years on university campuses and at organised pro-Palestinian rallies.
According to Jessica Winegar, a sociocultural anthropologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, the phrase originally in Arabic as ‘Min al-nahr ila al-bahr… filastin hurra’ was first used in the 1960s by the PLO and was used to describe a ‘doing away with the state of Israel.’ The elimination interpretation of the phrase is one that is held by the Anti-Defamation League and by news outlets including CNN, who fired academic Marc Lamont Hill as a political commentator for using the phrase during an address at the United Nations back in 2018.
In a ‘Letter from our CEO’ post on the Burgertory Instagram page, Tayeh writes that ‘The Dutch courts recently ruled that is protected speech and not anti-semitic.’ The Netherlands is not Australia, its rulings on what is antisemitism are not universal. It is also a country with rising levels of antisemitism and an antisemitic history it does not sufficiently acknowledge, with 53% of Dutch people unable to identify the Netherlands as a country where the Holocaust happened. Other European nations have had different approaches to the chant. In Germany, the use of it at a Nakba Day rally led to it being disbanded by the Police, while in Vienna, Austria, a demonstration was banned after their promotional material featured the phrase.
Burgertory’s Instagram story states, ‘If you had the opportunity to be present at these rallies, you would have witnessed the specific focus on advocating for a ceasefire and peace. The organisers of these rallies consistently make it clear that they are not protests against Jews, nor are they anti-Semite in nature.’ This assurance of focused and peaceful protests does not line up with the footage shown of varying rallies around Australia, where antisemitic chants such as ‘gas the Jews’ and ‘f*** the Jews’ can be heard.
Hash Tayeh’s insincere attempt at retraction of his endorsement of an antisemitic chant is full of weasel words and distortions of the truth. Let there be no misunderstanding – the chant that Tayeh now seeks to whitewash is a clear call for the destruction of the State of Israel and its people who happen to be the only people indigenous to the area on which Israel stands. The chant that Tayeh claims means something else should be reworded – “From the river to the sea there has never been Palestine and there never will be”.