Marc Lamont Hill, ‘Philosemite’

by Hugh Fitzgerald

Marc Lamont Hill is a professor of Media Studies at Temple University. He writes quite a bit about Israel and Jews. It appears to be the subject that interests him the most. He doesn’t care for Israel. The Israelis appall him. He does have a soft spot for the Palestinians. In 2018, he was fired as a commentator for CNN when it was revealed that he had tweeted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free,” which amounts to a call for Israel’s destruction and its replacement by “Palestine.” He kept his position at Temple University, however. Now there are calls for the university to discipline him for his denunciation of Jews who support Israel. The report is here: “Temple University Must Take Action Against Marc Lamont Hill,” by Melissa Landa, JNS.org, February 21, 2021:

Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired from CNN in November 2018 for his clarion call to destroy Israel, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is reiterating that call. This time, he has written a book, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, and has been promulgating his violent ideas in a series of interviews.

As Hill speaks about his book, in which he calls for “justice” for the Palestinian people, he disregards the history of the Jewish people, including their exile from the land of Israel, their millennia of persecution in the Diaspora, their endless longing to return to their ancestral homeland in Zion, and the presence of Jews in the land of Israel since biblical times. In doing so, he chooses to dismiss the existence of Jewish peoplehood, and instead, arrogantly and naively defines Jews as “a religion and a faith,” as he did during an interview with Carmen Perez Jordan on Feb. 18….

Marc Lamont Hill leaves out, in all his vaporings about the Jewish state, the 3,000 years of a continuous Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. Very likely he is unaware of it. He is unfamiliar with the Jewish texts that in exile expressed the yearning of Jews to return to that ancestral homeland, such as the hope at the end of the Haggadah that there will be another Seder “Next year in Jerusalem.” He hasn’t a word about what happened to Jews in their centuries of exile, either about the two millennia of Christian antisemitism they endured, culminating in the Holocaust, or about the 1,400 years of enduring the difficult status of dhimmis in Muslim lands, suffering a host of financial and other disabilities, including the required payment of the Jizyah, a burdensome tax that had to be paid by the Jews to the Muslim state in order to assure their safety. In other words, it was religiously-sanctioned extortion. For Marc Lamont Hill, none of this matters. Not knowing this history of endless persecution and murder endured by Jews, he cannot fathom how important it is for them to have the security of a state of their own. He writes as if the Jews arrived in “Palestine” only in the 20th century, having no organic connection to the land, and determined to displace the “Palestinian people.”

Hill does not refer in his copious writings on Israel to the Mandate for Palestine, which is the foundational document for the reconstruction, in the 20th century, of the Jewish National Home, that is, of Israel. Is he aware of what that document contains? It encourages, in Article 6, Jewish immigration and “close settlement by Jews on the land.” Does he realize that the “land” covered by the Mandate extends from the Golan in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean in the west? I suspect he has no idea about any of this. He is secure in his surpassing ignorance; any introduction of history, ancient or recent, would only confuse him.

Nor does Hill ever mention U.N. Resolution 242, which provides Israel with an independent claim to retaining much of the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights. This was the resolution passed on Nov. 22, 1967, that gave Israel the right to hold onto those territories won in the Six-Day War that it deemed necessary for its own security, so as to obtain, in the key phrase of the resolution, “secure [i.e., defensible] and recognized boundaries.” Among the territories both Israeli and American military men (who wrote their own report on Israel’s minimal security needs for President Johnson) judged essential to the Jewish state’s defense were the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley.

Indeed, watching and listening to Hill propagate antisemitic tropes as he promotes his book has been both illuminating and deeply disturbing. On one occasion, he mocked what he regarded as Israel’s demand for exceptional treatment — reminiscent of the antisemitic view that Jews regard themselves as the “Chosen People.” (Ironically, he was discussing Israel’s right to exist, a subject that originated when Israel’s legitimacy was called into question as an attack by Israel detractors like Hill, not as a unique demand by Israel.)

Israel has never asked for exceptional treatment. It asks only to be judged by the standards applied to all other states but which are so rarely permitted to the Jewish state. It has the same right of self-defense as other nations. It has the right to respond to attacks on its people., whether by national armies or by terror groups. It has the right to hold onto territory from which attacks have been launched on it, just as other states have held onto territory won in defensive wars in the past. The Jewish people have the same right to a state as other peoples, including the Arabs, who now possess twenty-two states, more than any other people; in land area those twenty-two states are 630 times as large as tiny Israel. And now, despite being so amply supplied with states, the Arabs want still another, 23rd state, whose existence would likely put Israel in permanent peril.

It is the Arabs, not the Israelis, who have received exceptional treatment. Of all the tens of millions of refugees since World War II, it is only the “Palestinian” refugees – that is, the Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine, and then Israel, between 1947 and 1949 – who have been allowed to pass on their refugee status as an inheritable trait. No other refugees in the world have been granted such an extraordinary privilege. Henry Kissinger is a Jewish refugee from Germany. His son, born in Boston, is not. Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian refugee. His son, born in Berlin, was not. But the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on, without any logical limit, are all considered to be “Palestinian refugees” and thus eligible to receive free housing, free medical care, and free education from UNRWA. No one has explained why the progeny of the original Palestinian refugees (who now number about 30,000) should alone continue to receive such extraordinary treatment.

On another occasion, he [Marc Lamont Hill] spoke about Israel as having stolen land from the Palestinians, using the words “transfer of people out of their homeland” and “dispossession,” eliciting the stereotypical image of the thieving, greedy Jew.

From the first decade of World War I, Jews returning to “Palestine” to rebuild the Jewish commonwealth bought land, at often exorbitant prices, from Arab and Turkish landowners. When the Palestine Mandate came into force in 1922, Jewish pioneers were also allowed to settle on “state and waste lands.” But there was no “dispossessing” of the Arabs by the Jews. Every dunam of land was paid for until the 1948 war. Just before and during that war, the Arabs of Palestine were urged, both by their own leaders, and by foreign radio broadcasts beamed from Arab states, to “leave Palestine” in order to get out of the way of the five invading Arab armies, and those Arabs could return once the fighting – which was not expected by the Arabs to last long — had ended, with the Jews either having been killed or having fled. The Arabs could reclaim their homes and, of course, also take possession of the homes and other property left by the Jews. It was not to be. The Arabs were decisively defeated. The homes left by Arabs who did not return to reclaim them could not simply be left empty; the state of Israel created a Custodian of Abandoned Property “to prevent unlawful occupation of empty houses and business premises, to administer ownerless property, and also to secure tilling of deserted fields, and save the crops….” The implied danger from Arab repatriation did not prevent Israel from allowing some refugees to return and offering to take back a substantial number, on condition that the Arabs sign a peace treaty. In 1949, Israel offered to allow families that had been separated during the war to return, to release refugee accounts frozen in Israeli banks (eventually released in 1953), to pay compensation for abandoned lands and to repatriate 100,000 refugees. In other words, there was to be no “dispossession” of the Arabs; Israel stood ready to pay for the abandoned lands. All it asked for was a peace treaty.

The Arabs rejected all the Israeli compromises. They were unwilling to take any action that might be construed as recognition of Israel, including signing a treaty that would result in payment for all the land that the Arabs had abandoned. If the Arabs refused to take the compensation – at fair market value — offered, there was nothing Israel could do, and the land they had abandoned was at long last taken over by Jewish owners. That’s what Marc Lamont Hill mischaracterizes as “dispossession.”

As for Hill’s claim that Israel was guilty of the “transfer people out of their homeland” – it’s nonsense. It was the Arab leaders themselves, both foreign and Palestinian, who urged the Palestinian Arabs to leave the area, to get out of the way of the five invading Arab armies, and to return once the war was over, to reclaim both their own property and that of the Jews who had fled or had been killed. Some Israelis, such as the Mayor of Haifa, urged the Arabs to remain, but most took the advice of their Arab brothers and left for what they assumed would be a most temporary stay abroad. There was no forcible “transfer”by Israel – the Arabs left voluntarily.

Most disturbing, however, was hearing Hill reiterate his genocidal call for an end to Israel as the Jewish state in an interview with Briahna Joy Grayon on the Bad Faith Podcast. He stated, “When I called for a free Palestine from the river to the sea, I was referring to … a belief that we should have justice and equality in the entire region of historic Palestine. When I say historic Palestine, I’m referring to that entire area, both in the State of Israel, what is now known as the State of Israel, founded in 1948, also in the West Bank, also in Gaza.”

Marc Lamont Hill made clear, yet again, that the “Palestine” he continually refers to is indeed “from the river to the sea” – consisting of the State of Israel in its pre-1967 lines, all of the West Bank, all of Gaza, all of the Golan. It is this Palestine that is to be made “free” by the expulsion of the Jews from the land they took from its rightful owners, the Palestinian Arabs. “Justice and equality” in Hill’s view requires an end to the Jewish state, and its replacement by Arab Palestine.

Equally disturbing, in his interview with Jordan, Hill argued that Israel is so despicable that those who associate Jews with Israel are antisemitic and that those who work to sever the relationship between Jews and Israel are advocating for the preservation of Jewish goodness. He stated, “Part of what Zionism has produced is the narrative … of Israeli policy and practice being equated with Jewishness, so that if I critique Israel, I’m critiquing Jewishness or Jews. We have to separate those things because actually in many ways it’s actually antisemitic to do the opposite. I don’t want Judaism associated with the occupation. Judaism is a religion and a faith and a tradition of justice, of love. … I don’t want that linked to the open-air prison of Gaza.”

Hill insists that it is he who is trying to rescue the Jews from themselves. He’s not antisemitic, merely obsessively anti-Israel. Because Israel is a terrible place, those who want to link Jews to Israel are not doing them a favor. He, Marc Lamont Hill, insists that his criticism of Israel is not intended to be a criticism of Jews; it is those who conflate wicked Israel with inoffensive Jews, who are the true antisemites. Then Hill – who in the past has repeatedly praised Louis Farrakhan, the antisemitic demagogue who appears to have no other subject but the perfidy of money-grubbing Jews, whom Farrakhan has compared to “termites” – feigns his admiration for Judaism, which he describes as “a religion and a faith and a tradition of justice, of love…”…

It is that respect for Judaism that makes Marc Lamont Hill want to clearly distinguish between despicable Israel and admirable Jews, the kind who — that’s why they are admirable — despise Israel. Why, Marc Lamont Hill can assure you – why should you doubt him? – he hasn’t an antisemitic bone in his body. Just like his friend Louis Farrakhan.

No doubt Hill’s offense is rank. American Jews overwhelmingly support Israel. But the numbers of those who say they “support Israel” differs, depending on the poll, and a better answer would be “somewhere between 80% and 95%” of American Jews say they support Israel. So Hill is criticizing not only Israel but the overwhelming majority of American Jews who support this abomination.

However, it’s hard to see what Temple University can do about Marc Lamont Hill. He has tenure – something he did not have at CNN. He despises Israel, but so far has not called for violence against Israelis, has not praised terrorist attacks, and has couched his antisemitism as philosemitism – he claims he wants to rescue Jews from those who would link them, so unfairly, to Israel. He would likely insist that “I am a supporter of the authentic Jews, those who follow the best traditions of Judaism, with its emphasis on justice and on love. I don’t want others to confuse that admirable Judaism with the Zionist ideology of modern-day Israel, that aggressive little Sparta whose dispossession of the Palestinians should not be blamed on innocent Jews, but only on the Israelis.”

Perhaps Marc Lamont Hill will slip up, drop his mask for a minute, praise Hamas or the PIJ for their acts of terrorist murder, encourage imminent lawless action to shut down a pro-Israel speaker, crudely disparage “the Jews” in general. And there’s another path to consider. I would not be surprised if there are passages in Hill’s “Except For Palestine” that were lifted, unattributed, from other authors similarly obsessed with Israel. That would give Temple University something to work with, emulating the way the University of Colorado finally rid itself of Ward Churchill. It’s worth, as they say, the old college try.

First published in Jihad Watch.