“There’s not enough at this moment to support the charge of genocide” brought against Israel, said George Washington University international affairs and political science professor Michael N. Barnett during a January 18 webinar. His comment marked a fleeting rational moment to a discussion of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) charges against Israel otherwise marked by the panel’s Israel-hatred exemplified by Noura Erakat, associate professor of Africana studies at Rutgers University. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Islamist-dominated Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers.
Barnett joined Erakat – among the most vitriolic anti-Israel academics in America – to address the Arab Center Washington DC’s webinar on “Gaza and the Crime of Genocide: Legal and Political Dimensions of Accountability.” The webinar followed South African’s December 29, 2023, submission of genocide charges against Israel at the politicized ICJ, based in The Hague, Netherlands.
“Reading the South Africa report, 85 pages of quite impressive detail, suggest that there is a very strong case for atrocity crimes and war crimes, which in many ways carry the same kind of heavy consequences as do genocide,” Barnett proclaimed. “But initially, I was of the view that the South Africa charge was a bit of political grandstanding,” he added. For advice, he could turn to Germany – with its history of genocide against the Jews – as Germany has intervened in the case and condemned South Africa’s politicization of genocide.
Erakat, on the other hand, labored to lend an aura of academic respectability to a fusillade of false anti-Israel claims. Since October 7, 2023, “three months of warfare” in Israel’s offensive to destroy Hamas in the Gaza Strip “has resulted in over 24,000 Palestinian deaths, 40 percent of whom we are told are children, or 10,000 children,” she said, reciting casualty figures from Hamas-run agencies without noting their distortion into anti-Israel propaganda. Analysis of Hamas’s claims reveal that Israel has maintained a two-to-one civilian/enemy combatant casualty ratio in Gaza, remarkably low for such difficult urban terrain and a testament to extraordinary Israeli efforts to protect civilians.
Erakat focused on the fate of Gaza hospitals, noting that “Israel began bombarding the last remaining hospital, Nasser Hospital,” in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, Gaza’s “last functioning hospital.” Israel “has decimated now nearly 35 other hospitals” as Hamas “command-and-control centers, as launching pads and human shielding,” yet “at the very same time has failed to provide evidence,” she claimed. This false claim disregards numerous reports from the Israelis, American intelligence, journalists, and physicians who have worked under Hamas control in Gaza, as well as released Israeli hostages once held in such hospitals.
Ignoring the difficulties of conducting military operations in Gaza, she asserted that Israel justified “this high level of death and destruction” as the “result of an urban warfare, dense areas, Hamas fighting, Hamas human shielding.” This “makes it seem that somehow the conditions” Israel faces “fighting Hamas in urban conditions is unprecedented,” she said, although military observers have noted the unique challenges facing even Israel’s experienced troops. Hamas has had over a decade to embed itself in an extensive network of tunnels underneath Gaza’s urban infrastructure, where almost every civilian structure cynically shields military installations.
International law “mandates a state to cease and desist an operation should the civilian harm and casualties exceed the military advantage to be achieved,” Erakat concluded. She did not clarify what level of proportionately between civilian and military casualties would prohibit Israel from fulfilling its stated war aim of destroying Hamas, an existential threat to Israel. “We can see very well that the military advantage that Israel has achieved is minimal if non-existent,” she claimed, for “Hamas continues to fire rockets from the center of Gaza City, indicating that its capability has not been diminished.” Yet the Israeli government has said it has already destroyed two-thirds of Hamas’s fighting units, which would be a significant achievement in such a difficult campaign.
Erakat was disappointed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not impressed with the ICJ’s authority – its jurisdiction is not compulsory – as she. “Right in the aftermath of the ICJ hearing, we heard Prime Minister Netanyahu say that it does not matter what The Hague says, that Israel will proceed as it sees fit,” she complained. Thus, “it is up to any country to decide what it needs to do in order to ensure its national interest,” she said, as if this were not a common maxim for any country fighting for its citizens’ survival.
Israeli Agricultural Minister Avi Dichter’s recent reference to a “Gaza Nakba” alarmed Erakat. This Arabic word for “catastrophe” has achieved mythological status for people of Palestinian descent like her. It refers to some 600,000 Arabs who lost their homes during Israel’s 1948 independence war in the territory that became Israel. In 1948, “Israel conducted military operations that targeted Palestinian civilians” under a “defensive operation in Plan Dalet – that plan including the destruction of villages,” she said, invoking propagandistic myths about Plan Dalet. She thus reiterated the common Palestinian falsehood that Israel expelled most of the 1948 Arab refugees, when in reality most of them fled conflict, often with the encouragement of Arab leaders who wanted to clear free-fire zones.
Today Erakat fears that “Israel has articulated that it wants to achieve a Nakba, or the removal of Palestinians, in order to achieve its security and peace” as in 1948. “Other forms of colonization,” she said, “are based on racial discrimination, whereas Zionism is based on racial elimination.” Not only does this twist Dichter’s words, as he spoke merely of Gazans evacuating conflict zones, but it fails to mention that no countries in the Arab world or beyond want to receive Gazans, with their well-known jihadist sympathies, as refugees.
Superficially, Erakat’s statements may sound sober and sophisticated. Unmasked, they reveal her unremitting hatred of Israel. Her promotion of South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel illustrates how the Jewish state, no matter how grievously attacked, will be portrayed as fascistic and evil while providing a platform from which to demonize Israel.
Andrew E. Harrod, a Middle East Forum Campus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher, and writer, is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter: @AEHarrod. This article was cross-posted with the author’s permission from New English Review.
Bexarkat says
I would be curious to know how long someone would live if they took a position that “Islam is based upon religion elimination” of anything other than Islam?
tim gallagher says
Perfect summary of stinking, evil, rotten to the core islam, Bexarkat. No matter what is said by the Muslim scum about any other religious ideology, islam is, without a doubt, the most evil, barbaric load of crap of a religious ideology that is still fouling up the human race. islam is unadulterated filth. The only problem is that so many people, in all our countries, are so stupid that they still are somehow fooled by islam and somehow still think that it is worthy of respect. As the Muslim invasion goes on of all our countries, people had better wake the hell up or it will be too late and civilised, non-Muslim life will be in danger throughout the world. islam has nothing good or noble to offer humanity.
JOHN LLOYD SCHARF says
𝙈𝙪𝙝𝙖𝙢𝙢𝙖𝙙𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙨𝙢 𝙞𝙨 𝙖 𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙤𝙘𝙞𝙙𝙖𝙡 𝙘𝙪𝙡𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙙𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙝 𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙨𝙩 𝙅𝙚𝙬𝙨, 𝘾𝙝𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙨, 𝙋𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙣𝙨, 𝘼𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙨, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙨𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙤 𝙙𝙤 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙙𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙞𝙧 𝙧𝙤𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙧𝙮, 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙚, 𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙢𝙪𝙧𝙙𝙚𝙧.
tim gallagher says
Spot on. A very good summary of islam, John. If only enough people would wake up to this reality.
From The Other Side of Town says
Mr. Erakat is projecting himself onto others. Looking in the mirror is not the way to understand others.
mgoldberg says
‘Rutgers Prof Noura Erakat: ‘Zionism Is Based on Racial Elimination’- and yet, ‘Zionism’ has never advocated any such thing, in 3000 yrs. And yet. the Hamas Charter states asserts: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
And of course the stated goal of Islam, is to submit all others to Islam, and to eliminate all other faiths.
Yet if one were to mention as the historical verities in this regard; the actual atrocities attempting to wipe out national polities by muslims, one is accused of ‘bigotry’, or ‘hatred’. Hence it is obvious that we need to demand the actual accounting and open discussion of just what Islam advocated, does and has done for 1400 yrs.
Wellington says
The more a person is anti-Israel the more that person is either massively ignorant or simply malevolent.
John Smith says
Spot on Wellington, I totally agree.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
What’s it about this school, which is both rabidly anti-Jewish and anti-Hindu (courtesy Audrey Truschke)? Do they still have so many students beating down their doors that they’ve decided to tick off 2 major religious communities?
FYI says
And that Gharqar Tree hadith prophecy that calls for the total elimination of the Jews?
Say Noura Erakat..like..isn’t THAT Genocide?
It is!
Do muslims not read their OWN sources?Read it prof…
SAHIH MUSLIM 2922
muslims never get IRONY.It is islam that is trying to Genocide the Jews..and the Christians.
How do such imbeciles even get to become professors?But then maybe it is no surprise given that Centuries of muslim “scholarship” has failed to detect that allah sufffers from a lack of omniscience which is obvious from all the Scientific,Theological and Historical errors in the Holey Kooran.
FYI says
“And the last hour would not come unless the muslims will fight against the Jews and the muslims would until KILL THEM until the Jews would hide themselves behind a tree..there is a Jew behind me..come and KILL HIM..”
Sahih Muslim 2922
Is that GENOCIDAL enough for the lefty/muslim “professors”?
Hamas subscibe to this islamic savagery.That is what they were doing on oct 7th,They commited WAR CRIMES.The pallys brought the catastrophe upon themselves by supporting Hamas.How they danced in the streets,how they boasted about raping innocent women!
The Gazans should be prosecuted for war crimes.They are not as innocent as the keffiyeh wearing Lefty hypocrites pretend them to be.
A competent scholar ALWAYS checks the sources.
So check the source..profs..
The Gharqar tree hadith:Sahih Muslims 2922.
Who is that wants Genocide?
The “innocent” muslims.
James Hoagland says
As can be expected from pro-Islamist’s the professor inverts and twists facts and reality. Islam seeks to eradicate other religions which is why they wage “holy war”. Jewry happens to be a religion and a nation and the inheritors of land among which is Judea and Samaria. It is Islam and the Arabs that are the occupiers and it is Islam that aims to recreate a worldwide Islamic Caliphate.
bill says
It is amazing how professors who are supposed to be highly intelligent and informed and committed to facts keep, keep trotting out Hmas; casualty figures as facts. Facts at university research level are supposed yo subject to peer review. Where is the peer review of Hmas’ claims. In any case when speaking of genocide.. The perpetartors do warn poeple in advance they are coming and to get out of the danger area as the IDF does, whereas Hamas tries to prevent peope leaving and as has been well shown locates its operations in
and beneath civilian facilities
Also the population of Gaza has increased 3 fold since Hamas took it over. Israel has or had no control over Gaza and only wants to be left in peace in its own small territory.
bill says
apolgies for typos, will try to do better next time
bill says
Sorry for naby typos, Perpetrators do not warn. Supposed to be subject to peer review