RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The car looks like from the video that it lost control,” Rutgers University law professor Noura Erakat recently fantasized about her Palestinian cousin’s June 23 death; her cousin was clearly filmed in a car ramming attack near Jerusalem against Israeli police. Her lies about this jihad violence, obvious to any objective observer, merely added to her grotesque Israel-hatred in a July 14 Institute of Middle East Understanding (IMEU) podcast with her equally radical host, Omar Baddar.

Baddar shamelessly introduced the “This is Palestine” podcast by describing the death of Ahmad Erakat, the nephew of leading Palestinian Authority (PA) official Saeb Erakat, as occurring in “what appeared to be a car accident.” Yet Israeli security cameras clearly recorded Ahmad driving his car into Israeli border police stationed at the so-called “container checkpoint” on the road between the PA communities of Bethlehem and Abu Dis, Ahmad’s home. A woman police officer, miraculously only lightly wounded in the attack after Ahmad’s car sent her flying, left no doubt about his deliberate assault.

Despite Baddar’s assertions that “Israeli authorities lied about Ahmad’s actions,” Ahmad subsequently rushed from his car, possibly to continue the attack. While Erakat claimed to see Ahmad “attempting to put his arms up” in surrender, the police in reality had no choice but to shoot him. Erakat also claimed that an Israeli ambulance, which arrived within five minutes of the shooting, made a “sadistic” refusal to treat Ahmad, but actually pronounced him dead upon arrival.

Erakat baselessly speculated that Ahmad “might have been nervous at the checkpoint or that there was a malfunction in the car” and bizarrely advocated “looking at the car and the black box,” something only airplanes have. She thereby ignored that Ahmad previously had filmed himself denying accusations of collaborating with Israelis, accusations which could have motivated him to clear his honor with a suicide attack. She contrastingly suggested Ahmad’s car model, a Hyundai Accent, has had a poor malfunction record since 2011, but both the Accent specifically and Hyundai cars in general have received good reliability ratings.

No evidence as well supported Erakat’s claim that the container checkpoint “is not the site that you would go…to attempt any type of operation” to attack Israelis. Israel has suffered over 80 such Palestinian “car intifada” attacks since 2015 in all manner of places. The container checkpoint experienced a previous car ramming attack just last April 22.

Hedging Erakat’s bets, she nonetheless justified that Ahmad’s behavior “is not a terrorist attack,” for the checkpoint “soldiers themselves are legitimate targets.” Baddar elaborated that Ahmad could have been “engaging in an act of legitimate resistance against occupation forces who are present on Palestinian land.” All such nonsensical hairsplitting ignores that Palestinian terrorists like Ahmad make no distinction between attacking Israeli military and civilian targets, and precisely the former prevents attacks on the latter.

Expressing fake objectivity, Erakat claimed to be “really, really, critical of Hamas,” for indiscriminate Hamas rocket attacks, for example, are “reckless” and “illegal.” Nevertheless, the “right to use force by Palestinians against Israel is a sanctioned right.” “Parts of it legitimate; and parts of it not,” Baddar added in his discussion of Palestinian “resistance,” without explaining where this has ever been non-terrorist or why destroying Israel is valid.

Such terrorism arises precisely from what has been described as a Palestinian “culture of death” immersed with antisemitism and jihadist ideology, but Erakat wallowed in victimology. “Ahmad wasn’t granted the benefit of the doubt of human error,” she stated with crocodile tears rhetoric. “But you don’t get that benefit of the doubt when you are racialized as a threat, when you are securitized and boiled down to not being a subject and a human but merely being an object in Israeli settler-colonial imagination.”

Given that Palestinian society and its supporters such as Baddar and Erakat do everything to justify terrorism, it is no wonder that “Israeli occupation troops are conditioned to perceive every Palestinian as a threat,” as Baddar stated. Likewise, Israelis are correct in understanding that among Palestinians “young kids from the day that they are born are raised to want to kill Jewish Israelis,” contrary to Erakat’s dismissals. She condemned the “racialization” of rightwing Israeli politician Ayelet Shaked, who controversially posted in 2014 a Hebrew article on Facebook that discussed how Palestinian mothers “birth snakes.” Unlike Erakat, Shaked has repeatedly explained her hard logic.

While Baddar de-legitimized Israel as merely “pre-[19]48 territories” that existed before Israel’s independence that year, Erakat slandered Israeli Jews as greedy land thieves. She propagated the myths that Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance and more recently a planned Tel Aviv homeless shelter are desecrations of Muslim cemeteries. “This is Zionism; this is precisely what Zionist settler-colonization looks like. It’s a continuous insatiable appetite for territorial acquisition that mandates the removal, the dispassion, and the concentration of Palestinian natives,” she stated.

Baddar and Erakat discussed how Israeli authorities had refused to release Ahmad’s body for family burial, part of what he denounced as an “absolutely despicable and inhumane policy of holding people’s dead bodies.” Israel justifiably holds terrorist corpses at a Tel Aviv University (TAU) morgue in order to pressure Hamas to release the bodies of two dead Israeli soldiers as well as two Israeli hostages and also to pressure Arabs against inciting terrorism at funerals. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel supporter Erakat thus emphasized boycotting TAU, in order to bring “to light the entwinements of the academy and Israel’s settler-colonial project.”

Such rantings from Erakat make wonder why anyone would take her or Baddar seriously. Her agitprop that “Palestinians are exhausted,” but their struggle “offers us an opportunity to demand an end to imperialism” deserves no serious consideration. The public within and without the academia should dismiss such odious distorters to obscurity.