A very odd correction from Newsweek on an article about the Marc Lamont Hill story. I wish I could find a copy of the original:
“Updated 11/30 12:14 a.m.: This story has been updated to remove information that includes an error that says no Palestinian state has ever existed.”
So Newsweek retracted the fact that no Palestinian state has ever existed?
A little searching as we can see the paragraph that was deleted:
When challenged about the comment on Twitter, Hill responded to say that he believes in a “single secular democratic state for everyone.” [At this point Newsweek has a tweet from Hill where he adds “This is the only way that historic Palestine will be free.”] However, Hill’s statement about a “historic Palestine” appears to be inaccurate as no Palestinian state has ever existed.
Newsweek was quite accurate.
“Historic Palestine” is a fiction of how modern Palestinians farcically refer to the area of the British Mandate, although it was never an independent state and its borders were drawn by Western powers. There is nothing historic about it.
Any map of Palestine prior to World War I includes parts of what became Jordan and Lebanon, and none of the Negev.
Marc Lamont Hill, by invoking “historic Palestine,” is consciously choosing a false construct meant to completely overlap with the territory that modern Israel controlled in 1967. The very term “historic Palestine” has zero to do with Palestine or Palestinian land, and everything to do with taking away any rights of Jews to any land in the Middle East.
It is an antisemitic term.
Newsweek was right in saying that no Palestinian state never existed. Hill know this very well. He knows that he is consciously choosing the areas that Israel controls, and nothing else, when deciding that this is what the borders of “Palestine” should be – just like the 1964 PLO Covenant explicitly excluded the West Bank that was then controlled by Jordan as part of “Palestine.”
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