American academic and pro-Palestinian activist Marc Lamont Hill told a virtual discussion hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that the Black Lives Matter movement supports the “dismantling of the Zionist project,” according to The Algemeiner.
In YouTube clip, Hill is shown speaking at a recent panel discussion, which DSA’s Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)/Palestine Solidarity National Working Group held, along with the National Political Education Committee, the DSA Muslim Caucus, and the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus (AFROSOC).
During the segment, Hill opined that “We can’t dismantle white supremacy or imperialism section by section” and said this applies to Israel as well, referring to it as “a settler-colonial movement in Palestine.”
Hill is a frequent user - as are his fellow BDS travelers - of the Israel-as-settler-colonial-state trope, a popular smear to attempt to deligitimize the Jewish state’s right to exist.
He also obliquely referred to George Floyd’s death, by claiming without evidence that Israel is responsible for alleged US police violence against minorities - in particular men in the African-American community.
Hill expressly accused Israel of teaching the US to commit racist acts of murder, saying that American police don’t need to be trained by Israel to “kill black people” and “vice-versa,” reported The Algemeiner.
All of this, Hill asserted, “speaks to a global system that we have to dismantle.” As a result, “Black Lives Matter, very explicitly, is talking about the dismantling of the Zionist project” and “very explicitly embracing BDS on those grounds.”
Hill is no stranger to controversy. In 2018, CNN fired the Temple University professor as an analyst when footage emerged of an intemperate, frothing rant in which he was filmed calling for a Palestine “free from the river to the sea,” a violent pro-Palestinian slogan that seeks to replace all of Israel, not just the disputed territories, with a Palestinian state.