By Bruce S. Ticker
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — The top lie: “Hamas hasn’t surrendered because Israel has never given the Palestinian people one minute, one second, of self-determination, freedom and liberation,” claims Marc Lamont Hill, a professor at City University of New York.
Israel tried. Israel has reached out countless times to negotiate peace with Arab leaders. Especially, then Prime Minister Ehud Barak in July 2000 offered Yasser Arafat plans for an independent Palestinian state. Arafat ignored the offer and launched or facilitated a malignant war. Since then, Palestinians have made no serious effort to follow up on Barak’s proposal and successive prime ministers, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently closed the door on a Palestinian state.
Hill joined a rogues’ gallery of Israel bashers last Thursday (Sept. 12) for a panel discussion called “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free: The Struggle for Black & Palestinian Liberation,” a title which in itself distorts the connection between the Black community’s struggle here and Palestinians who are primarily at the mercy of their leaders. There is no connection.
The event, held in Washington D.C., might have been more aptly entitled “So Many Lies, So Little Time.” Most of the lies asserted by panelists involved justification of Hamas’ savagery and the so-called intersectionality between African-Americans and Palestinians. It was hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and covered by the publications The Algemeiner and The Free Beacon; information detailed below can be attributed to these publications.
Hill’s most disgusting comment was to justify Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis in southern Israel. He insisted that his “moral code” is against maiming, raping and slaughtering innocent people and kidnapping another 250, but… “As a non-Palestinian, it is not my job to tell people how to liberate themselves. It is not my job to tell people how to be free,” Hill said.
Who is not free? I grant that the Palestinians in Gaza are not “free.” They are controlled by Hamas and face retaliation if they complain about it. Hamas leaders have more freedom than everyone else. They have the freedom to oppress their own people and the freedom to murder Israelis as they treat the people of Gaza as human shields. The Hamas-controlled health ministry claim that Israel’s retaliatory raids have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians; these figures do not distinguish between terrorists and civilians.
Almost forgot. Hill does not need to explain his “moral code.” His “moral code” does not cover Jews.
Hill, who formerly taught at Temple University in Philadelphia, continued, “When we have the conversation about Hamas, don’t just talk about them like they’re some irrational, crazy people. (View Hamas) against the backdrop of Israeli settler states that sexually abuse people, that steal land, that kill people, that never hold on to a treaty.”
A minority of Israeli so-called settlers on the West Bank poses a serious problem in Israel, but is this supposed to justify Hamas’ outrages? Besides, Hamas has been deploying its horrid tactics long before “settlers” were causing trouble.
The struggle for clean water was concocted as common ground between the Black community here and Palestinians in Israel’s territories as U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib proclaimed, “Cutting off water is violent. From Detroit to Gaza, water is a human right.”
Water is indeed a human right, and it is subject to conflict in the Middle East. Tlaib, whose parents emigrated from the West Bank to Michigan, said her work on water issues in her state’s House of Representatives inspired her to link domestic concerns to the Middle East.
Tlaib, a Democrat, was probably referring to contaminated water in upstate Flint, population 81,000, where residents got sick after the then-Republican state administration diverted Flint’s water source from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to the Flint River. African-Americans comprise a slight majority of the city’s population.
Hill even discounts the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s support for Israel. “They try to tell you that (King) was a Zionist,” he said. “What King said was that he believed that Israel had a right to exist, but not to exist as an ethno-nationalist-apartheid state.”
Again, “Zionist” is treated as a dirty word. A Zionist believes that Jews have a right to life in their homeland while existing in peace with their neighbors – not to oppress another people. Social justice is hardly the goal of violent Palestinian extremists, as is the object of racial minorities in America. They seek to destroy Israel.
Broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, the panel’s moderator, said he was “tired” of debate over the war being minimized to an “Arab American” issue. He noted that a coalition of more than 1,000 Black pastors from Georgia signed an open letter to President Biden to demand a ceasefire.
”This is an issue that affects Black people, Brown people, young people, progressives, anyone with a heart,” he said.
The issue surely affects us all because “anyone with a heart” would lament the suffering in Israel as well as in Gaza. Hasan and his fellow panelists limit their sympathy to the Palestinians. They rarely if ever mention the Oct. 7 massacre, the ongoing detention of the hostages, Israelis who must cope with their injuries, all those who must live with the trauma of that day and Jews and others who will forever mourn the deaths of friends and family members or await the fate of the hostages.
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.