The Washington Post describes a brazen example of US pro-Israel lobby power: “Last week, Marc Lamont Hill, academic, activist and media personality, addressed the United Nations at its commemoration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Hill’s speech was a bold call because it countered U.S.-led orthodoxy clinging to a two-state solution despite a one-state reality in which Palestinians are neither sovereigns of their own state nor citizens of Israel. Hill’s closing words, imploring international actors to support Palestinian freedom ‘from the river to the sea’, effectively demanded the dismantlement of an apartheid regime and the establishment of a bi-national state. In that sense, his views are commensurate with leading voices critical of the status quo in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet apologists for Israeli policies quickly mobilized a vicious smear and harassment campaign. CNN responded by firing Hill, and the chairman of Temple University’s board of trustees said he was searching for ways to essentially punish Hill, a media studies professor there.
His speech forms an important part of a renewed manifestation of Black-Palestinian solidarity, itself a component of a longer legacy of black internationalism and Third Worldism. In this sense, his speech echoed a discourse and vibrancy once emblematic of diplomatic revolutionary efforts at the United Nations that had receded in the folds of a collapsed internationalism.
The U.N. General Assembly established the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in 1977 in the wake of systematic U.S. efforts to undermine an international resolution to the question of Palestine. This U.S. intransigence formed part of its imperial global role, ranging from military interventions in Vietnam to its diplomatic protection of apartheid South Africa in the U.N. Security Council.
Contemporary renewals of Black-Palestinian solidarity have faced aggressive attacks by the U.S. liberal establishment. In 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) member groups published a platform outlining domestic and international policy toward the advancement of black freedom. It squarely endorsed solidarity with Palestinians. In the section on U.S. foreign policy, it described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as tantamount to genocide and endorsed the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel.
The concerted attacks on Hill not only represent a liberal heterodoxy and double standard on the question of Palestine. They also fit into a legacy of repressing black internationalists and the black radical tradition in the United States. Ironically, this episode is making vividly clear what a transnational movement has proclaimed for decades: Black and Palestinian struggles are entwined and represent a joint struggle for freedom. In its attempt to squash this trend, the liberal establishment, led by CNN, has inadvertently made this movement even stronger.”
Writing on the same incident, The Nation comments: “CNN fired its popular commentator the Temple University professor and public intellectual Marc Lamont Hill last week. Contrary to most reporting, Hill was not actually fired as a result of the speech he gave at the United Nations on November 28—he was fired as a result of powerful pro-Israel forces, most notably the Anti-Defamation League or ADL, who used the speech to demand that he be fired.
Dr. Hill’s comments were not anti-Semitic; they were anti-oppression, rooted in history and calling for a common humanity, grounded in the rights of all people, whether Palestinian or Jewish, African or European, black or Native American, Latinx or white.
Early in his speech Hill noted that ‘while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that all people are ‘born free and equal in dignity and rights,’ the Israeli nation state continues to restrict freedom and undermine equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as those in the West Bank and Gaza.’”
As always, the Israel-Palestine dispute is bitterly contested and each side routinely accuses the other of lies, propaganda, bad faith and insane levels of brutality and hate. When Prime Minister Rabin was murdered by a political extremist with a gun in 1995, it seemed apparent then that the peace process was dead and would never lead to a solution. That turned out to be true from the end of 1995 until today, 23 years later.
Given the fact that there will never be a free and independent Palestinian state, America really should rethink the US-Israel alliance. At present, it looks like the Palestinian people are forever doomed to live in poverty, misery, blinding rage and actual imprisonment. Is that what America stands for? Apparently it is.
For context, the cost-benefit of the alliance to the US over the years since 1948 is in the hundreds of billions in aid and repercussions for the alliance. The total arguably approaches $1 trillion.*** The US also suffers political fallout from supporting Israel, which has hampered global US interests and arguably efforts at global peace.
***
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel
https://www.wrmea.org/002-may/distorting-u.s.-foreign-policy-the-israel-lobby-and-american-power.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver (a significant part of bin Laden's rationale for attacking the US on 9/11 was the US-Israel alliance)
https://www.thebalance.com/cost-of-afghanistan-war-timeline-economic-impact-4122493 (Afghan war cost)
B&B orig: 12/11/18
No comments:
Post a Comment