6 | MARCH 25 • 2021

1942 - 2021

Covering and Connecting
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PURELY COMMENTARY

continued on page 8

commentary
‘Progressive Except for Palestine’
R

utgers University
assistant professor
of Africana studies
Noura Erakat demands that
self-professed progressives
share her
Israel-hatred,
lest they carry
the taint of
“Progressive
Except for
Palestine”
(PEP).
She made
this point laboriously during
a March 3 webinar with
Marc Lamont Hill and also
Mitchell Plitnick, whose
recent book, Except Palestine:
The Limits of Progressive
Politics, is dedicated to
Erakat’s terrorist cousin,
Ahmed Erekat, killed last
June by Israeli border
security after committing

a car-ramming attack that
injured a guard.
Hill, professor of
communications at Temple
University, and Plitnick,
former co-director of the
radically anti-Zionist Jewish
Voice for Peace (JVP) and
former vice president of the
anti-Israel Foundation for
Middle East Peace, spoke with
Erakat as part of a book talk
presented by Chicago’s leftist
Haymarket Books bookstore.
The trio invoked the tired
litany that the State of Israel
racially oppresses Arabs,
whether its own citizens or
their Palestinian relatives.
Hill claimed absurdly that
PEP is just as unacceptable
as “Progressive Except for
Slavery.”
Erakat praised the
infamous 2001 Durban,

South Africa, United
Nations World Conference
against Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia
and Related Intolerance,
which degenerated into
a hate-fest against Israel.
She had had a tangential
conference connection as a
researcher for a conference
paper titled “The Forgotten
‘ism’: An Arab-American
Woman’s Perspective on
Zionism, Racism and
Sexism.”
“Global, grassroots
coalitions” went to Durban,
she boasted, “intent on
holding up the banner that
Israel is an apartheid state.”
The U.S. Durban
delegation, led by America’s
first black secretary of
state, Colin Powell, thought
differently. Disgusted by the

conference’s antisemitism,
the delegation withdrew.
Erakat asserted without
evidence that the “United
States was using Israel to
protect itself because it was
going to be held to account
for reparations for people
of African descent in the
United States.”
For Erakat, Palestinians are
always victims, never violent
perpetrators. Last summer,
she fantasized that Israeli
border guards shot her
Palestinian cousin during a
tragic car accident and not a
car-ramming attack, as video
proved conclusively (all the
more reason for Hill and
Plitnick to honor him).
Like Plitnick, who
denigrated Zionism as
a “European construct”
akin to other previously

Andrew E.
Harrod
jns.org