CNN on Thursday afternoon fired its commentator, Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill, after right-wing defenders of Israel objected to a speech Professor Hill gave at the U.N. on Wednesday in defense of Palestinian rights. CNN announced the firing just twenty-four hours after Hill delivered his speech. Hill’s firing from CNN is a major victory for the growing so-called “online call-out culture” in which people who express controversial political views are not merely critiqued but demonized online and then formally and institutionally punished after a mob consolidates in outrage, often targeting their employers with demands that they be terminated. Hill’s firing, conversely, is a major defeat for the right to advocate for Palestinian rights, to freely critique the Israeli government, and for the ability of journalism and public discourse in the U.S. generally to accommodate dissent. Conservatives claimed to be offended, traumatized and hurt by Hill’s political views on Israel and Palestine, which they somehow construed as being anti-semitic, and demanded that CNN fire him as punishment for the expression of those opinions. CNN honored the demands of those claiming to be victimized by exposure to Hill’s viewpoints by firing him as a political analyst. On Wednesday, Hill appeared at an event of the U.N. Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, commemorating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. During his speech, he accused the Israeli Government of practicing “settler colonialism” and apartheid, supported the international boycott movement against Israel (modeled on the one that ended South African apartheid in the 1980s), and called for a “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” The right-wing outrage machine sprung into immediate action. The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein accused Hill of a “long history of anti-Semitism,” adding: “The phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ has been a rallying cry for Hamas and other terrorist groups seeking the elimination of Israel, as a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea would mean that Israel would be wiped off the map.”

And here it is, Marc Lamont Hill calling for a "free Palestine from the river to the sea" (video via @bennyavni) pic.twitter.com/E7ugrByKyf — Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) November 28, 2018

That leaves only two realistic choices: either (a) a single state “from the river to the sea” in which Israelis as a minority have full political rights while Palestinians are segregated and treated and repressed as second-class citizens, the very definition of “apartheid,” or (b) a single state “from the river to the sea” in which both Israelis and Palestinians share full and equal political rights. Professor Hill, like all morally decent people, opposes apartheid. Therefore, he advocates a single state in which both Palestinians and Israelis have equal political rights. What is actually offensive is not Professor Hill’s comments but rather the suggestion that it is “anti-semitic” or constitutes advocacy of “genocide” to support equal political rights for all human beings, including Palestinians. Indeed, Israel’s own former Prime Minister and Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has repeatedly warned that Israelis will be a full-fledged “apartheid” state if it continues to exercise dominion over Palestinians. There is no doubt that Israel is well down that path. Professor Hill opposes that path – because it’s classic apartheid and repression, and it’s nothing short of reprehensible to accuse him of being a Jew-hater for his advocacy of basic principles of human rights and self-determination.

Moreover, Hill’s argument that it has long been viewed as acceptable for repressed and occupied groups to resist their occupiers, including through the use of violence, is indisputably true as a historical matter. Does anyone believe that if the Chinese Army invaded and occupied U.S. soil tomorrow that it would be immoral for Americans to resist by all means, including violence? But this underscores a crucial point I’ve long noted: all forms of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation are deemed immoral in U.S. discourse. If Palestinians attack Israeli soldiers occupying their land, that’s called “terrorism.” If they advocate non-violent protest moments such as boycotts, that’s called “anti-semitism,” and is even criminalized in many places in the west, and punished on U.S. college campuses. If they hold peaceful protests on the border in their open-air prison in Gaza and have their own teenagers gunned down by Israeli snipers, that’s cheered as Israeli self-defense. The only permissible position in U.S. discourse is the demand that Palestinians meekly submit to Israeli occupation. Any proffered justifications for Palestinian resistance are not just condemned but punished, as Professor Hill just learned. This is not the first time CNN has fired one of its journalists for expressing views deemed “offensive” and “hurtful” by Israel defenders: recall that in 2010, CNN ended the 20-year career of Octavia Nasr, its Atlanta-based Senior Middle East News Editor, for the crime of expressing condolences and admiration upon the death of one of the Shiite world’s most beloved religious figures, highly controversial due to his affiliation with Hezbollah. All that said, it is undeniably true that are many people – Jews and others – who felt genuinely offended, hurt, unsafe and even traumatized by Hill’s remarks. I know people in my own family, and life-long friends, who insist, with great credibility and sincerity, to experience all of those negative emotions when they hear someone advocating a one-state solution or a boycott of Israel as Professor Hill did this week. Their offense, their hurt, their trauma, are real, at least in the very loose and sloppy ways those terms are now commonly used in the Age of Millennials to indicate negative reactions to political views one dislikes. It’s now quite common even in the places where ideas are meant to flow most freely – such as newsrooms and academic institutions – to demand that content be suppressed or punished if its expression “traumatizes” someone or makes them feel offended and “unsafe.” Though this self-protective mentality is often attributed to liberal millennials, it is in fact widely invoked across ideologies and generations to justify censorship. Recall that in 2014, the University of Illinois rescinded its teaching offer to Palestinian-American Professor Steven Salaita after he posted tweets harshly criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during Israel’s horrific, civilian-slaughtering attack on Gaza. That happened because pro-Israel donors, trustees and students claimed that they felt “traumatized” and offended by Salaita’s political views. Here’s how the New York Times explained Salaita’s punishment: “What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois,” Ms. Wise wrote last month, “are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.” “It’s about feeling safe on campus,” Noah Feingold, a member of a pro-Israel student group, told The Forward. “This is a professor who tweeted that if you support Israel, you’re an awful person.” This demand – used to justify Salatia’s effective firing as a scholar – that, even as an adult, one has the right at all times to feel “safe” from the expression of offensive ideas was the same one used by the right-wing movement during the Bush 43 years to try to have pro-Arab professors fired at Columbia University (a movement which newfound free expression activist Bari Weiss not only defended but helped to lead), on the ground that Jewish students felt “unsafe” and “traumatized” by the ideas they expressed: