CNN commentator fired for 'Free Palestine from river to the sea' comment

Marc Lamont Hill accused Israel of denying “citizenship rights and due process to Palestinians just because they are not Jewish,” and expressed his support for the BDS movement.

Protesters hold abanner that reads "Boycott Israel" during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Paris (photo credit: AFP PHOTO / DOMINIQUE FAGET)
Protesters hold abanner that reads "Boycott Israel" during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Paris
(photo credit: AFP PHOTO / DOMINIQUE FAGET)
CNN political commentator and Temple University Prof. Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN on Thursday, one day after he condemned Israel in a speech at the United Nations, saying that he thinks that there needs to be “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

Hill accused Israel of denying “citizenship rights and due process to Palestinians just because they are not Jewish,” and expressed his support for the BDS movement. Hill stressed that, although peace is an ideal, “We must not romanticize or fetishize it. We must promote nonviolence at every opportunity, but cannot endorse narrow politics that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in ethnic cleansing.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) responded to Hill’s speech, calling his comment “divisive” and “destructive” in an email to the Jewish Journal.
“Those calling for ‘from the river to the sea’ are calling for an end to the State of Israel,” Sharon Nazarian, the ADL’s senior vice president for international affairs, wrote to the Journal. “It is a shame that once again, this annual event at the United Nations does not promote constructive pathways to ‘Palestinian solidarity’ and a future of peace, but instead divisive and destructive action against Israel.”