A Bay Area woman sued the California Department of Motor Vehicles after it moved to pull her vanity license featuring a controversial pro-Palestine slogan.
Iasmine Abdennabi accused the DMV of violating her First Amendment rights after the department recalled her vanity plate featuring the letters “RVRTSEA,” a reference to the phrase “From the river to the sea.”
The saying refers to the geographic area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which includes Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Pro-Palestine activists say the slogan is simply a call for freedom from oppression, while Jewish groups have criticized it as antisemitic for implying the elimination of Israel.
According to the lawsuit, Abdennabi applied for the plate in December 2023, just two months after the deadly Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the Israeli-Gaza conflict.
The vanity plate was meant to express support for human rights “for all persons living between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea,” she said in the suit.
Abdennabi ultimately received the plates in May 2024, but she alleged that they were recalled in October 2025 after multiple drivers in cars behind her vehicle filed complaints to the DMV.
“I was shocked that (the DMV) would have issued this,” one complainant wrote, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “It supports terrorism and encourages violence.”
The DMV appeared to agree that the phrase could be “interpreted as racially or ethnically degrading and negative,” records showed.
An administrative law judge ruled in favor of the recall, prompting Abdennabi to turn to federal court for a ruling on First Amendment grounds.
Both the DMV and Abdennabi declined comment to the Chronicle. Her attorney Michael Millen told the outlet that she has a high chance of succeeding, pointing to similar past cases. The controversial plates are still on her vehicle as of now, he said.
Abdennabi, an in-house corporate lawyer and the founder of a wellness brand, seems to have publicly expressed pro-Palestine views in the past. Her name appears on an open letter by Law For Palestine calling for the Israel to be unseated from the United Nations General Assembly.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles has rejected thousands of custom vanity plate applications due to duplication, obscenity, sexual references, and policy violations.
According to the DMV’s manual, the “DMV must refuse any personalized license plate configuration that may carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency, or which would be misleading, based on” multple criteria, including requests that “has a negative connotation to a specific group.”
