“I deal with a lot of mental health stuff because of this. I have so much anxiety,” fretted Rutgers University Professor Noura Erakat while discussing her anti-Israel activism at Washington, D.C.’s Busboys and Poets restaurant on K Street. Given Erakat’s ludicrous views on the Arab-Israeli conflict, one might indeed question her mental health. But the like-minded audience of 100 at the June 20 event for her latest book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, found her unfounded, revisionist history to be on the level.
While introducing Erakat, Busboys and Poets founder Andy Shallal noted proudly that the packed event room bore the name of Communist Israel-hater Angela Davis. Moderating the discussion was Khury Petersen-Smith, an Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) fellow and an organizer of the “2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine,” the slogans for which include the trite “Zionism is racism.” Fittingly, Rasha Abdulhadi, a leftist poet and self-described “queer Palestinian Southerner,” read one of her poems.
The audience included a who’s who of anti-Israel leftists, such as Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin and Phyllis Bennis of IPS, an event co-sponsor. James Cobey and Zeina Azzam, well-known activists from Washington, D.C.’s local anti-Israel scene, attended. Erakat gushed that being “in the company of movement family” made this event her book-tour favorite.
In this hard-left echo chamber, Erakat recounted her personal traumas. In a paranoid nightmare, “There was just a red target on my head from a missile that followed me everywhere as I was running through Gaza.”
She also bragged about being among the founders of the anti-Semitic Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. After law school, she was an intern for the equally odious U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, which, as she noted, is now the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
Even more troubling was Erakat’s acknowledgement that she earned her law degree in order to push a Palestinian agenda. “The law is politics,” she stated coldly, and “we should have no faith in the law, but approach it cynically.” She then flatly admitted, “This is why I went to law school; I wanted to sue” Israeli officials.
Erakat’s conception of the Palestinian agenda was equally radical: “Palestine is a revolution and not a state-building enterprise,” she declared. Recalling the century of conflict between Arabs and Jews following the 1917 Balfour Declaration, she announced, “I never call it a conflict. It is called the Palestinian struggle for freedom.”
Regarding fellow Israel-hater Rep. Ilhan Omar, Erakat whitewashed her anti-Semitism with an appeal to racial and religious victimhood. Whenever Omar “says innocuous things,” Erakat alleged, “because she wears hijab, all of a sudden that must have some anti-Semitic overtones.”
Erakat repeated her thesis that Arabs could “help indigenize” Israeli Jews into the Middle East and “rehabilitate that relationship” within a unitary Arab-Muslim-majority Palestinian state. Gravely distorting the nature of the Jewish state and its population, she asserted that “Israel was very much established in order to earn acceptance within Europe” and “so that Jews could become white.” She claimed that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, stated, “Israel is part of the Middle Eastern geography only,” which, given the region’s incessant hatred against Israel, was not entirely unreasonable.
“If you are indigenous to this land, shouldn’t you be a part of the Middle East in all ways?,” Erakat asked of Israeli Jews, suggesting the question: Should Israel therefore become a dictatorship or a theocracy? She favored this “one-state solution” over Israel being a “satellite state for Jews all over the world,” even though Zionism’s core is the reestablishment of a homeland for the Jewish diaspora. She fantasized about the equivalent of a “South African moment, when Nelson Mandela was no longer the president of black South Africans but became the president of South Africa.”
To bolster her anti-Zionism, Erakat appropriated the struggle of Mizrahi Jews — those who hail from the Middle East and North Africa — against what is, in fact, rapidly diminishing discrimination in Israel. She wanted “to cut across the native-settler binary. Instead of it being Palestinians versus Jewish Israelis, why don’t we do it as a racial struggle against .. the racial hierarchy within Israel?” Erakat rejected the terms “Middle Eastern Jews” or “Mizrahim,” claiming they serve “to separate them from the Arab world, so they cannot be both Jewish and Arab.”
As noted by Israeli Mizrahi journalist Hen Mazzig, anti-Israel ideologues like Erakat are imposing an Arab identity upon unwilling Jews. Jewish presence in the Middle East, along with other non-Arab communities such as Aramaic Christians, predates the region’s Arabization following the Islamic conquests in the seventh century. Moreover, Jews suffered greatly under Muslim rule in Arab countries. Such realities make a mockery of Erakat’s “vision for Jewish Israelis in the region” that would be supposedly “better than what Israel has been able to offer.”
Equally absurd were Erakat’s theories about the alleged “relationship between queer theory and Palestinian liberation,” given the mortal dangers to gay individuals in Palestinian society. Invoking intersectionality, she declared that if Palestinians are part of “emancipation on all levels, then we can’t stop at the door of homophobia,” even as she dismissed Israel’s tolerance for homosexuality as “pinkwashing” and “homonationalism.” Nonetheless, she admitted Palestinian society might not be so accepting when she warned that outsiders must let them “define that on their own terms.”
Erakat and her allies in Washington, D.C., and beyond form a leftist/Islamist, red-green coalition centered intellectually in Middle East studies, which in recent decades have abandoned principled scholarship for grievance-based, politicized writing and teaching. Lacking an empirical foundation for their claims, these activists in scholars’ robes invent false narratives that propagandize students and policy makers and willfully blind journalists. Academe’s unwillingness to reform itself leaves the job of countering and defeating these lies to extra-university organizations and concerned stakeholders, including alumni, donors, and legislators. Absent sustained efforts, today’s outrageous claims will become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
Andrew E. Harrod is a Campus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher, and writer who holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a J.D. from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter at @AEHarrod. This article was cross-posted from The American Spectator.
RichardL says
I have been a professor for decades now and even I marvel at times, how insane academia has become. I bet Rutgers (a Jewish university that pays incredible salaries: 200k for an assistant prof in business) is proud to have a raving loonie like her on their list of faculty. Many Catholic universities hire Mohammedans and atheists when they could hire Catholics. Having said that, I work in a very sane Catholic university and I have a feeling that places like Georgetown, Rutgers, Notre Dame etc will lose ground to sane universities.
Rarely says
Rutgers is a “Jewish university”??? Kindly explain.
RichardL says
Crusader and you are right: Rutgers isn’t Jewish. I didn’t mean to say it was a Jewish-run university – that cannot be the case as it is a State university – for some strange reason I thought Rutgers has a strong Jewish connection. I can’t even tell where that impression came from. Georgetown formally isn’t Jesuit any longer as the Jesuits handed the governance over to a lay board.
The info about the pay is correct though. I have first hand experience.
Rarely says
There is a problem here. The concept that a University can be “Jewish-run” or has a “strong Jewish connection” both presume some sort of perverse agenda. A University may have a Jewish Chancellor, a number of Jews sitting on the Board of Governors and/or a disproportionate number of Jewish professors but these people are certainly acting in their capacity as Administrators and educators and NOT as a group pursuing some sort of hidden Jewish agenda.
carpediadem says
Ah, so if a university is Christian or Catholic-run it’s not perverse, disproportionate or bizarre at all, but if it’s run or established by Jews it’s perverse, disproportionate and bears watching.
Right, Gotcha.
Soooooooooooooooooooo good to have these little details explained by the cognoscenti.
Kind of like the constant obsessive whining by various Christian righties about whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Jews constantly vote Democrat even though Jews form a minuscule number of voters amongst the YUUUUUGE 300 million potential voters in the US, but, being Jewish, their every move must be watched, commented on and obsessed about.
CRUSADER says
How is Rutgers a Jewish university?
Eighth oldest college in USA; a public/state “ivy” school;
one of the colonial colleges charted prior to 1776.
Named for Henry Rutgers, revolutionary war hero.
——————————————————————
Catholics often have taken on the mantle of caring
for “strangers” as Jesus is said to have wanted,
as if illegal immigrants and invaders of spaces
are somehow excusable in civic society…
Many of the institutions looking after illegal immigrants
are Catholic organizations… in spite of the law !!!
They see it as their Catholic duty to “resist”…
To many Catholics, “strangers” are the Other…
and so Catholics turn themselves into doormats.
The current Pope (Frank) is a perfect model of this
insanity….
———————————————————————
Communism, anarchism, anti-Semitism, anti-Israelite,
collectivist coalitions, identity-politics…extreme anxiety…
This sort of skewed ideology infects campuses and towns
susceptible to Leftist / Islamist (Red & Green) agendae.
As Dennis Prager points out, who needs a university degree
from indoctrination centers these days? Better to save money
and save yourselves from debt and saving your own souls
by doing else-wise.
Education, after all, is rooted in one’s own development,
not in what others tell you….or make you think….
Kudos are due to Harmeet Dhillon for defending Andy Ngo
against Antifa anarchists. They are meeting on Capitol Hill.
RichardL says
Rarely, you are interpreting me wrongly. I am extremely pro-Jewish Zionist. There are many Jewish universities in the US – nothing wrong with that at all.
GreekEmpress says
RichardL,
Can you tell me the name of the “sane” Catholic college you spoke of earlier? I want to pass it on to family members filling out college applications next year and beyond.
Thanks.
CRUSADER says
Amen!
I can only think of Covenant College, Hillsdale College,
Christendom College, and Prager U….
None of these are Catholic academic institutions….
GreekEmpress says
Yes! Also great choices for a college education.
Angemon says
No wonder she’s such under mental stress – trying to combine “Palestinian” “liberation” and “queer theory” requires ignoring that Israel doesn’t persecute homosexuals while “Palestinians” do, thus making her, the “freedom fighter” supposedly defending gay rights the actual purveyor of persecution of gays.
Words have meanings. If a “term” gets to be defined by different groups and it means something different for each of them, then the term means everything and, therefore, nothing.
carpediadem says
She is a close relative of the professional agitator negotiator Saeb Erakat of Fatah, Pali Authority.
I believe she is his niece.(This may need correction.)
She has imbibed Jewhating madness along with the rest of them.
If these people spoke about anyone but Jews this way their madness would be immediately apprehended.
ElderlyZionist says
“Erakat rejected the terms ‘Middle Eastern Jews’ or ‘Mizrahim,’ claiming they serve ‘to separate them from the Arab world, so they cannot be both Jewish and Arab…’.”
Nonsense. It was the Muslim Arabs who rejected Arabic-speaking Jews as comrades in Arab nationalism, and drove them from their ancient homes throughout the Near East, before there was ever an Israel to spark Muslim aggression. I recommend Naim Kattan’s memoir “Farewell Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad” for details of exactly how that came to pass in Iraq of the 1930s-40s.
https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Babylon-Naim-Kattan/dp/0285637800
Ben says
I laugh at these “palestinian” activists that use Mizrahi Jews like me as props to try and form a narrative that Israel is a “white supremacist” state or whatever the crazy story they’re trying to make up is. They should really know that Mizrahi Jews are almost to a man the most Zionist, anti “palestinian” and most distrustful of the Arab and islamic world precisely because we know exactly what life is like for us under islamic hegemony.
CRUSADER says
“Oh! People of The Book….”
Mohamhead made up Islam by stealing ideas from the Jews
in order to appeal to them, so he could grow in influence…
….before he would deceive, betray, and behead the Jews in Arabia….
Militant Mohamhead’s political movement was cloaked in “religion”….
================================
Religion of Peace: A Brief History of Islam
– Brigitte Gabriel
#islam #religionofpeace
Brigitte Gabriel gives a short history lesson about Islam at the Values Voter Summit in 2015. As usual she gives an impassioned speech about the dangers that Islam poses to the United States and the world.
Here’s the link to her full speech at the conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWsZu…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aACpy7fLjFo
James says
I often see articles that try to equate Israel with Nazi Germany and the Palestinians with a freedom strugges or a civil rights movement. I saw a youtube picture of Jesse Jackson giving a speech in the Auschwitz monument. As if to say various leftist groups in America are like the Holocaust victms. But that is a cliche in American politics, every group that wants something claims to be like Holocaust victims, even if it uses the tactics of Nazis to pursue its aims. How much do the kite fire bombs, rockets fired into Israel from Gaza, tunnels under the border and men with knives and machettes attacking randomly on the street have to do with civil rights? Suicide bombers and payments to families of terrorists by the Palestinians. And where are the democratic parties and elections in the Gaza and West Bank? Are they all going to settle down and be good citizes as soon as they have civil rights? How much freedom and civil rights do Jews get in Muslim majority countries? And with Nelson Mandella, he is no longer alive, and the black ruling party and population are talking of confiscating all the farms of the Boers, even though the Boers have been there for 400 years, and the country could have a famine is all the current farmers were driven out or killed and incompetent natives took over the farms. Where is the civil rights motivation there? Is it not more like black supremacy or black privilege or even racism against a minority. Where is Mandella now?
gravenimage says
Rutgers Professor Noura Erakat’s Hatred of Israel is Driving Her Crazy
………………….
Short trip…