December 10, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -    For 30 years, the United Nations has held an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on 29 November. The event rarely merited even a passing nod in the mainstream media. Until last week.

Marc Lamont Hill, a prominent US academic and political commentator for CNN, found himself deluged by a tsunami of outrage over a speech he had made at the UN headquarters in New York. He called for an end to Oslo's discredited model of interminable and futile negotiations over Palestinian statehood – a strategy that is already officially two decades past its sell-by date. 

In its place, he proposed developing a new model of regional peace based on a single state offering equal rights to Israelis and Palestinians. Under a barrage of criticism that his speech had been anti-semitic, CNN summarily fired him. 

His dismissal echoes recent, largely confected furores greeting attempts by organisations to take a more practical and ethical stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both Airbnb, an accommodation bookings website, and the UK branch of the Quakers, a society of Christian religious movements, have faced howls of indignation in response to their modest initiatives.

Last month, Airbnb announced that it would remove from its site all properties listed in illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory in the West Bank. Shortly afterwards, the Quakers declared that they would refuse to invest in companies that profit from Israel's theft of Palestinian resources in the occupied territories.

Both moves fully accord with international law, which views the transfer of an occupying powers' population into occupied territory – the establishment of settlements – as a war crime. Again, like Hill, the two organisations were battered by adverse reactions, including accusations of malevolence and anti-semitism, especially from prominent and supposedly liberal and representative Jewish leadership groups in the US and UK.