6 | MARCH 25 • 2021 

1942 - 2021

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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

