Ritchie Torres Slams Marc Lamont Hill for Supporting ‘Violence’ Against Israel, Dismissing ‘Demilitarized’ Palestinian State

US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) slammed professor and Al Jazeera host Marc Lamont Hill after the latter, a prominent anti-Israel activist, criticized the congressman’s advocacy for the creation of a “demilitarized” Palestinian state and expressed support for terrorist violence against the Jewish state.

“Marc Lamont Hill went into a tirade against me for calling for a nonviolent demilitarized Palestinian state,” Torres wrote on X/Twitter. 

On Thursday, Torres shared a video of Hill in which the pundit criticized the representative for insisting that Israel is “an innocent nation-state surrounded by Hezbollah, Hamas, [and] the Houthis,” all of which are internationally designated terrorist organizations backed by Iran. Hill also lambasted Torres’s support for a “demilitarized” Palestinian state, arguing that this would leave the Palestinians “under the literal gun of the Israeli military.”

“We’re talking about occupation, my friend,” Hill said in reference to Torres. 

Hill continued, defending violence by Palestinian terrorist groups against Israel. Hill insisted that Palestinians “absolutely” need to engage in violence against the Jewish state, claiming that peaceful tactics will never help them achieve freedom and independence. 

Marc Lamont Hill went into a tirade against me for calling for a nonviolent demilitarized Palestinian State.

He accuses me of lying about Israel being surrounded by the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah. Never mind the mass murder of 1200 Israelis by the former or the displacement… pic.twitter.com/UqLC3a497R

— Ritchie Torres (@RitchieTorres) September 5, 2024

“You keep talking about the ‘Free Palestine movement’ as if it’s bound up in violence, as if an oppressed and occupied people don’t have a right to resist,” Hill continued. “I’m not going to adopt a respectability politics that says, \somehow, we can only support Palestinians if they say they’re non-violent.’  Sometimes you’ve got to be violent. When you’re fighting an oppressive, violent state you absolutely have to be violent. Hugs and flowers don’t get you freed from an apartheid ethnostate, just saying.”

Torres responded in apparent astonishment, questioning if Hill supports the indiscriminate slaughter of Israeli civilians by terrorist groups as a means to achieve Palestinian political goals. 

“He insists Palestinians ‘absolutely’  have a right to be violent. Does that right to violence extend to the execution of the six hostages by Hamas? Does it include the abduction of an infant? The kidnapping of a Holocaust survivor?  He dismisses any rejection of violence as ‘respectability politics.’”

Torres went on to say that Western anti-Israel activists encourage Palestinians to engage in counterproductive behavior which only perpetuates their immiseration.

“The Western anti-Zionists, glorifying violence from the comfort of their ivory towers, are doing an irreparable disservice to the very Palestinians they claim to champion,” Torres concluded.

Hill has a long history of peddling anti-Israel narratives and calling for explicit violence against the Jewish state. 

In 2018, Hill was fired from his position as a CNN contributor for calling for “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Hill has also voiced support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), an initiative which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as the first step toward its eventual destruction. The pundit also praised antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — a hate preacher who has referred to Jews as “termites” and called Nazi leader Adolph Hitler “a very great man.”

In 2019, Hill skewered mainstream media outlets as “Zionist” organizations, a nod to the antisemitic conspiracy theory notion that Jews control the media. The progressive activist also pushed an unsubstantiated claim that Israel is “poisoning” Palestinian drinking water. Mere weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 slaughter of 1,200 people across southern Israel, Hill argued during a podcast appearance that the Palestinian Islamist organization should be designated a legitimate “government” rather than a terrorist group.