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.
Understanding the significance of Hill’s address and the motivations of his detractors requires us to move beyond the immediate question of Palestine and issues of academic freedom and free speech. 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. In the context of decolonization and the groundswell of newly admitted states, the General Assembly emerged as the primary expression of the preferences of the international community. An overwhelming majority of these states, constituting the self-described Third World, considered Palestinian liberation as central to its agenda for challenging Western dominance and establishing a new international order. A key example is the passing in 1975 of UNGA Resolution 3379 describing Zionism as a form of racism.
American black radical thinkers and organizations identified with Third World movements and helped shape this global uprising.