The assault on Palestinians, Gaza and the West Bank
Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country. He has hosted shows for BET News, The Grio, Al Jazeera, and the Coffee & Books podcast. He now offers information and perspective every evening with “Night School” on YouTube.com.
He engaged in an insightful one-hour interview July 11-12 with Naba’a Muhammad, editor-in-chief of The Final Call newspaper, on Gaza genocide, Israel’s long oppression of the Palestinian people, why Americans should be concerned and significant changes in what he describes as a “longstanding one, but also a righteous” cause.
As a journalist, Dr. Hill has received numerous prestigious awards. He is a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Previously, he held positions at Morehouse College, Temple University, and Columbia University. Ebony Magazine has named him one of America’s 100 most influential Black leaders.
Since his days as a youth in Philadelphia, Dr. Hill has been a social justice activist and organizer. He has worked on campaigns to end the death penalty, abolish prisons, and release numerous political prisoners.
Dr. Hill has also worked in solidarity with human rights movements around the world. He is the founder and director of The People’s Education Center in Philadelphia, as well as the owner of Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books.
Dr. Hill holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) from the University of Pennsylvania. His current research and writing explore the relationships between race, culture, politics, and education in the United States and the Middle East.
Dr. Hill is the author or co-author of eight books available at www.marclamonthill.com. Follow @marclamonthill on “X,” and www.youtube.com/@marclamonthillofficial.
Below is the second excerpt from a three-part interview that has been lightly edited. See part one in The Final Call, Vol. 43 No. 45.
Naba’a Muhammad (NM): Marc, we talked before about how these Jewish groups target people and you’ve been targeted. When and how did that happen and why?
Marc Lamont Hill (MLH): The first thing I would say is I think it’s important to distinguish these particular Israeli advocacy groups from Jewish groups more broadly.
From my perspective, it’s not their Jewishness that presents a problem.
There’s a long history of Jewish organizations, just like Christian and Muslim organizations, doing important work in the world for justice. The issue is that the ADL presents itself as a civil rights organization and presents itself as an advocacy group when, in fact, it is largely an extension of the Israel lobby that has a long history of Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, and smear campaigns.
I have no issue with any group that advocates for the benefit or the protection of our Jewish brothers and sisters. That’s what they should do. All communities should organize and advocate for themselves.
The problem is that the ADL does so at the expense of the integrity of the civil rights movement and the moral consistency of the civil rights movement.
And then AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has also attempted to weaponize the discourse of anti-Semitism in a way that frames any critic of Israel as anti-Semitic. So, what they’ve done is they have closed, they’ve made the space for criticism and principle debate smaller.
NM: What do you think of mainstream media coverage of the destruction of Gaza? Not to mention assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank.
MLH:First, mainstream media coverage is as broad and as transparent as it’s ever been. Unfortunately, that’s a very low bar. In the 1980s, the New York Times would not even print the number of Palestinians killed in Lebanon. People like Cornel West and Edward Saeed had to literally go and protest outside the front steps of the New York Times just to get them to publish the numbers.
So now at least we see the bodies. Now we see the destruction. Part of that is because of the pressure that social media has placed on mainstream media, because you can’t ignore everything if everybody else is showing everything. But, the way they tell the story and which images they show is still highly selective and deeply biased.
We still tend to refer to Arabs and to Palestinians, in particular, as terrorists.
Even the frame of the Israel-Hamas war is a misrepresentation or misframing of what’s happening. We also continue to hear things like Israel has the right to defend itself. Statements like “Israel has the right to defend itself” become staples of both the commentators and of the hosts.
The problem with that argument is it ignores both history and law. Israel does have a right to defend itself as all nations do, but in its own territory.
But no nation has a right to defend itself in countries that it occupies. It would be like if I were to walk into someone’s home, rob their house, and they pull out their gun to protect their home, and they shoot at me and I shoot back and say, “Well, I’m shooting in self-defense.”
That would not be a reasonable argument. Then I could say, “Well, everybody has a right to self-defense.” Yes. But not in someone else’s crib. So, the mainstream media’s framing of the struggle ignores the fact that the West Bank is illegally occupied.
It ignores the fact that Gaza has been effectively controlled illegally by Israel since 2006. So, there’s no space to have a critique of Israel if the public doesn’t know that Israel’s actions are themselves in contravention of international law and customs.
NM: We’ve seen Israeli bombings and assaults on hospitals and schools, which are often mostly housing people displaced by Israel’s war, refugee camps … .
MLH: You just said something really important. I don’t mean to cut you off. I’m glad you said that. Let’s just use this example. At the time of this interview, Israel has bombed four different Palestinian schools on four consecutive days. And on each day, innocent children have been killed. No mainstream media outlet has shown the school or the destruction, no mainstream media outlet.
Since Oct. 7, there was a narrative circulating that Israeli babies were being beheaded, that 40 Israeli babies were beheaded inside of an Israeli village. All the evidence, all the data, all the proof has shown that that’s not true. Right?
There is no evidence to substantiate that there was a mass beheading of babies. But every media outlet ran with it. Once it was disproven, no one ran to correct it.
But just to give you a counterpoint, inside there was a village, a Palestinian village that was raided inside of the city of Rafah. There was a village that was invaded and because of a military strike, a Palestinian baby was beheaded. Literally, there’s an image and social media of a Palestinian father holding up his son, whose head was just cut off by Israeli weaponry.
Not one media outlet covered that. The same media outlets that ran with the beheaded Israeli baby story said nothing about the Palestinian baby. I don’t have a problem with mainstream media outlets covering the story, covering the violence on both sides.
But I do have a problem when they only cover allegations of violence against Palestinian people because it communicates a message subtly, implicitly, that the lives of Palestinian children are worth less than the lives of Israeli children, and that can’t be our moral position. But that has been the consistent argument of mainstream media outlets forever.
NM: With all these things we’ve talked about, these atrocities and U.S. media, what I see, in particular in mainstream media, is they have a list of things that happened that they mention. But there’s no talk of accountability and assigning of blame.
It’s kind of like “Palestinians died today” as if it just happened. What do you think of that and how did these Zionists and pro-Israel groups become so powerful, and how do they maintain that power and influence?
MLH: It’s interesting. This goes back to the media framing: When Israelis are killed by Palestinians, it’s two Hamas members killed Israeli teenager. Their names were Ali and Jamal, right? They’re very specific about the organization, the names, and they show you the pictures.
When a Palestinian gets killed, “Palestinian child dies.” Right? Or “Palestinian child is killed.” So, they move to the passive voice, they don’t say who did it.
By the headlines, you think they all had heart attacks or got struck by lightning. It’s like “Palestinian child dead in front of home,” “found dead in front of home.” They were found dead after they were shot by IDF soldiers. But they don’t tell that part of the story.
So, there’s a way that from our media narratives, we don’t allow for accountability. Then there’s a way, because they use the language of self-defense, it’s framed. It’s always framed as an affirmative defense.
It’s always framed as if Israel had a right to do whatever happened. So again, they rule out the possibility of critique because they sanitize the murder before we even get to investigate it.
We never have the conversation about the illegality of the occupation of the West Bank, the things that happen in Ramah, the things that happen in Hebron. We talk about as sort of unfortunate squabbles rather than acts of war.
Let me take a step back to your other question. The other piece of this, and the thing I think you’re getting at is these lobbying groups are well-resourced, and they’re well organized.
There’s a long history of the United States supporting Israel, not since day one, as late as the 1950s. We actually still had political tensions with Israel, for example, the fight of the Suez Canal with Gamal Abdul Nasser (Egypt’s president at the time).
But what we’ve seen since the Kennedy administration is the formation of a special relationship between the United States and Israel. That special relationship emerged, not coincidentally, at the same time that we had Tomahawk missiles to sell them.
When you look at the formation of the state of Israel, which was done largely with the support of the British, it prompts one to ask, what are these relationships?
The first part of the relationship, as I said, was ironically grounded in anti-Semitism.
Many of the countries, including the United States and the UK and France and others were so deeply anti-Semitic, and they were so committed to keeping Jewish people out of their country that they allowed the Israeli colonial project, Zionist colonial project, to happen in another country.
They were literally allowing the colonization of Palestine as a way of keeping Jews out of their own country.
Another reason is empires love to expand. So, when the British took over what was Ottoman Palestine until World War I, the British wanted what they call “empire on the cheap.”
What better way to have an empire and extend the empire than to have an imperial outpost in the Middle East? We’ve already scrambled it for Africa. We already took over Africa.
We already got these areas covered, we’re European people, but now we want to keep control over the so-called Middle East. So, what they did was they controlled it legally. They controlled it economically, but they didn’t actually care who ran it and who was there as long as they could control the empire.
So basically, that land became a client state of Western Empire since World War I. The British would’ve promised it to the Irish. They would’ve promised it to the Jews.
They didn’t care who had it as long as they could control things. But over time, it became increasingly clear to them that it was in their best interest to allow for the formation of a Jewish state for multiple reasons.
One of which was, again, that anti-Semitic thing of “we don’t want them here” and Hitler’s rise to power. There are pogroms, there’s killings, there’s genocide, there’s a Holocaust. All these things are happening in Europe. They had to go somewhere.
The Western nations were like, “They’re not coming here.” They put them where the Arabs are because they didn’t love Arabs either. So, the West had an economic, had a strategic interest from the beginning.
Then as time went on, that’s when you get to the 1960s when you started to talk about, as the U.S. became the dominant global empire as opposed to the UK, what you started to see was this thing that I just talked to you about, which is the U.S. developing a special relationship with Israel because it had an economic issue. They wanted to sell weaponry. They wanted to export. They wanted to expand the military-industrial complex.
As you get into the 1970s and 1980s, as oil interests became more important, and you saw the rise of Saudi Arabia, you saw the strengthening of Iran after the 1979 Revolution, the United States said, “Wait a minute. This is a neighborhood that we don’t got no part in. We at least need a cousin. We need somebody in that neighborhood that’s rocking with us.”
That’s when you began to see the growth of the U.S. strengthening even more so of the U.S. relationship with Israel. So, Israel becomes a client state and a military outpost for the United States. The United States supports Israel for multiple reasons. But right now, American national security is tied to the stability of Israel.
So, there are all these reasons. Over time, because there is an effective lobby, no matter how progressive you are as a Democrat, you’re not saying nobody should have a gun, right? You’ll say, “I support gun control.” Why? Because there’s a gun lobby.
You can be anti-abortion as you want, but even if you are in a Black community and a religious community as a politician, you’re not going to go but so far. You’ll say, “I support the right to choose.” You’ll say, “I support choice,” but you’re never going to go so far because there is an abortion or there is a pro-life lobby.
Similarly, the pro-Israeli lobby is so powerful that you never want to say too much because it can come at a high political expense.
If you have politicians that are rubber stamping legislation that reinforces the stability and strength of Israel and challenges people for questioning it, then you end up where we are right now.
(This is the second installment of a three-part interview.)
