Unfortunately the Lannan Foundation continues their anti-Jewish racism (see here for a list of all of the anti-Semitic speakers they’ve brought in since 2001) by bringing in speakers who would deny Jews – and seemingly only Jews – a right to a homeland. Because many Jews and even the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives have felt comfortable not taking up anti-Semitism specifically (or shrug off anti-Semitism) we feel justified to call the Lannan speakers anti-Jewish and racist. Maybe the use of this term will raise some eyebrows higher than the term anti-Semitism.
Most of the Lannan speakers would even deny Jews the right to live in Jerusalem or areas that constituted pre-1967 Israel. And they try to justify this racism with rhetoric that is laced with the denial of historical facts, hyperbole that re-writes history to conform with their “narrative,” what Joseph Epstein recently called in the Wall Street Journal a “nonsense word” because it attempts to use inflated or imprecise language to produce false stories.*
And this is what Noura Erakat, a terrorist-praising extremist, does in her public presentations about Israel and the Jewish villages in Judea and Samaria. She throws around terms like “colonialism,” “illegal,” “settler-decolonization,” “apartheid ” and “demographic destruction,” without defining them or providing true (vs. “narrative”) historical context. She even fabricates claims, such as “Despite all Zionist claims of nativity and indigeneity, [Israel] has been envisioned as a satellite state in the Middle East and a site of ingathering for a global Jewish population. It has never been envisioned as a part of the MIddle East.” [From Middle East Forum, June 16, 2019]
Erakat, the niece of Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erakat, attempts to appropriate Israel’s integrated Middle East Jewish refugees, which she calls “Arab Jews” – a term Israeli Jews from Arab lands reject, and which numbered about the same as the 1948 Palestinian war refugees and now are about 50% of all Israeli Jews. She claims Israeli Jews from Arab lands (who call themselves Mizrahim) are subjected to their own “racial violence” within Israel, and then, ironically, racially stereotypes them because they don’t learn Arabic or about their cultural history.
To Erakat the law is to be used purely for political means. She distorts its purpose for social order and claims it should be used through lawfare to expel the Jews from Israeli land. She supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and, again ironically, by claiming Jews should have no place in a future Palestine, would be committing ethnic cleansing – the only type of ethnic cleansing that has been publicly proposed so far in the conflict.
In short, as Andrew Harrod from Campus Watch states, “nothing is beneath such an inveterate Israel hater, who masks her lies and propaganda with sophistry and a smiling face. […] Erakat’s ahistorical, mendacious claims demonstrate the decadence of contemporary Middle East studies, where ethnic and religious bigotry masquerading as virtue has replaced the search for objective truth.”
*In the Claremont Review of Books in 2014 Wilfred McClay says this about our contemporary use of “narrative:”
The ever more common use of “narrative” signifies the widespread and growing skepticism about any and all of the general accounts of events that have been, and are being, provided to us. We are living in an era of pervasive genteel disbelief—nothing so robust as relativism, but instead something more like a sustained “whatever”—and the word “narrative” provides a way of talking neutrally about such accounts while distancing ourselves from a consideration of their truth. Narratives are understood to be “constructed,” and it is assumed that their construction involves conscious or unconscious elements of selectivity—acts of suppression, inflation, and substitution, all meant to fashion the sequencing and coloration of events into an instrument that conveys what the narrator wants us to see and believe.
SFMEW is a beneficiary organization of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico.