“A free Palestine from the river to the sea”

Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN after delivering his powerful speech at a United Nations event this week. On 28 November 2018, was the international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people where Hill spoke in regards of this topic. Hill being an active and very-well informed advocate for Palestine spoke the truth about the entire situation which rather bothered some.

Hill is an American academic, author, activist, television personality and professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University. Speaking up about how Palestine is actively an apartheid and accusing Israel for it, Hill found himself subject to not only a lot of backlash on social media but also at the risk of losing his teaching position. Taken from a part of his iconic speech, the following is a clear understanding of what I have just said:

While the Universal Declaration for 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. At the current moment, there are more than 60 Israeli laws that deny Palestinians access to full citizenship rights, simply because they’re not Jewish. From housing to education to family reunification, it is clear that any freedoms naturally endowed to all human beings are actively being stripped away from Palestinians through Israeli state craft.

The same Israeli lobby group who tried to twist and fabricate his speech into a hate speech propagating Jewish genocide and making it seem full of bigotry, which clearly was not, were the same ones who probably pressured CNN to fire him but also want him to lose his job. The sentence "a free Palestine from the river to the sea" was what the political lynch mob tried to accuse of being a genocidal call for the destruction of Israel.

Such accusations are outright lies and a means to silence and punish anyone who dares speak up for the rights of Palestinian freedom and equality from Israel's inhumane occupational regime, settler-colonialism and apartheid. Look at any American news media platform and you will sense this bias.
The whole situation clearly indicates that the smearing and targeting of Hill was a high-level Israel lobby operation likely with involvement of the apartheid regime itself.

A quote which really struck me from Hill's speech was "For every minute that the global has articulated a clear and lucid framework for human rights, the Palestinian people have been deprived of the most fundamental of them." which clearly states that Palestine is robbed of its basic rights and who is to blame? Well at this point in time it is not just the Israeli government and its supporters but also the whole world. It is the whole world which just stood by when the Palestinians needed us the most.

In the closing of his statement "Invited Representative of Civil Society" Hill said,

So as we stand here on the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the tragic commemoration of the Nakba, we have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grassroots action, local action, and international action that will give us what justice requires. And that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.

Hearing this closing statement really touched my heart because he is addressing all the people in the meeting that change is not only subject to words and signed documents but it can also be done locally, internationally and so on if we all understood the situation at hand and showed enough determination and care for a very necessary and long over-due change.

If you look at a map you will understand that by the sentence "from the river to the sea" Hill is indirectly affirming that that piece of land is indeed historic Palestine - once a land of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Rightful homeland to Palestinians and their future generation indeed though his sentence was taken out of context. What he meant was a suggestion to redraw Israel’s borders back to what it was pre-1948 partition granting full citizenship to Palestinians in Israel meaning a nation for all people.