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"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free": The right of colonized peoples to voice calls for freedom



On November 26, 2018, my colleague Professor Marc Lamont Hill, Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions in Temple’s Klein College of Media and Communications, delivered a speech to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People at the United Nations Day of Solidarity.

In his powerful speech, Professor Hill offered an impassioned call for solidarity between people of color, drawing out a vision for anti-racist solidarity. 


The speech made by Professor Hill is an excellent exemplar of principled communication scholarship that reaches out to the call for social justice. 

In his speech, Professor Hill calls out Israeli state-sponsored atrocities and the ways in which these atrocities have systematically oppressed, colonized, and threatened the Palestinian people. He categorically outlines the violence, racism, and torture carried out routinely by Israel on Palestinians.

At the end of the speech, Professor Hill invoked the rights of the Palestinian people, noting ““We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”  

For his reference "from the river to the sea," Professor Marc Lamont Hill was targeted by the Israeli lobby, with the right wing media playing up the attack on him, quickly moving to label him an anti-Semite. Patrick O’Connor, chairman of Temple University’s Board of Trustees, at Temple University , called for his firing. Mr. O’Connor labeled the statement by Professor Hill “lamentable” and “disgusting.” He told the Philadelphia Enquirer that had Hill worked for a private institution, he and others would have moved to “fire him immediately.” He also noted that he had instructed “Temple's legal staff to explore its options in response to Hill's remarks.” 

In the wake of this attack on a colleague's academic freedom, I tweeted about the fundamental right of a colonized peoples to call for an end to the colonization. This right, protected by the United Nations resolution on decolonization in 1960s, reflects the right of colonized peoples to demand freedom. It states:

"All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development."

This right to freedom is fundamentally tied to the right to voice in the culture-centered approach (CCA). In the CCA, colonialism is a fundamental threat to health and wellbeing, erasing the voices of the colonized in articulating claims to freedom. For making this theoreticaly informed claim that is intertwined with an active imagination of a practice of decolonization, the Israel lobby in New Zealand started targeting me, tweeting my employer and the Vice Chancellor, conveniently labeling me an anti-semite.

Having consistently fought over the years alongside colleagues who have been targeted by the lobby for exposing Israeli atrocities, I am all too familiar with the tactics used by Zionists. Most often, they hide behind the face of organizations as they throw out the label. Equating any critique of Israel with anti-semitism, the lobby works precisely through the silencing of voice. The paradox of Israeli democracy is its incorporation of violence and erasure as techniques of everyday management.

The fight for voice of the colonized so the colonized could articulate her desires for freedom is one of the most important struggles of our times. That Palestinian people have the right to call for ending the colonial occupation forms the fundamental basis for culturally centering health and wellbeing. To culturally center is at its heart to build communicative infrastructures for voices of decolonization.





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