American Jews enjoy and suffer from, respectively, “white privileging and white fragility,” stated Sahar Aziz, director of Rutgers University Center for Security, Race, and Rights (CSRR), during its February 21 webinar. While Jews in America and beyond face a global surge in antisemitism following Hamas’ brutal October 7, 2023, attack upon Israel, CSRR and its factually-challenged director have once again displayed anti-Jewish, jihadist apologetics.
Aziz spoke with her likeminded colleague, Noura Erakat, Rutgers University associate professor of Africana studies, in a webinar titled after her 2019 book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. She concurred with Aziz, stating that Jews have effectively “become white in the United States,” like groups such as Irish Americans, who have entered mainstream society following past prejudice. American Jews should recognize that they “are privileged vis-à-vis their Muslim, their Palestinian, their Arab counterparts and colleagues,” Aziz said of groups increasingly notable for their hatred of Jews and Israel.
“With privilege comes responsibility and not the abuse of that privilege to oppress other people,” Aziz lectured supposedly powerful, oppressive Jews while Muslims worldwide have celebrated jihadists such as Hamas. She contrasted in America “how easily vilified and dehumanized the Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab communities” are while Jewish “voices are centered, their experiences are centered.” “White fragility is all about feelings of the white privileged group and to hell with the bodily autonomy, the liberty, the life, the dignity, and the physical safety of black bodies,” she said without showing concern for Jewish bodies.
Given Aziz’s denial of Islamic and leftist antisemitism centered around hatred of Israel, she considered Jew-hatred largely a matter of history. Many people “are speaking in anachronistic terms and in contexts that are not even in the United States and also happened in the past,” she said. She seems to think antisemitism died with Adolf Hitler in 1945 and has no relation to Iran’s modern Islamic Republic.
Such denialism prompted Aziz laughably to assert that Jews should join her Israel-hating coalition to win allies against what she saw as the main antisemitic threat. This intersectionality was a precondition if Jews “want people to pay attention and to care about the various ways in which your community may be oppressed” from “traditional Eurocentric, white nationalist antisemitic” threats. Erakat similarly wanted “to imagine our struggle as a united struggle against white supremacy” alongside “Jews who face antisemitism…stemming from white supremacy.”
Few Jews would see Erakat as an ally, given her venom against Israel, slandered by her as an “exclusively Jewish state that necessitates the ongoing removal of Palestinians, their dispossession, and containment.” Israel lacks “meaningful equality for the Palestinian citizens of the state” under “apartheid,” she said, even as Israel’s Arabs increasingly identify with Israel and volunteer to perform both military and nonmilitary national service. This undermines her assertation that in Israel to “discriminate, you don’t have to say no Arabs welcome or no Palestinians welcome, you can say other things like military service required, which becomes a smoke screen.”
Correspondingly, Israeli self-defense, a responsibility that any state must fulfill in response to aggression, held little appeal for Erakat. Currently protesting Israeli actions to destroy Hamas, “anti-war activists are being accused of antisemitism for being anti-war activists for calling for an end to genocide,” she said. Yet the extraordinarily low levels of civilian casualties during Israel’s Gaza offensive refute her absurd genocide charges while Hamas theft of humanitarian aid is the reason that Gaza Arabs are “starving”.
While Erakat demanded that Israel cease its military actions, hostile moves towards Israel did not bother her. “This is a moment to rescind from the Abraham Accords,” she said, citing the peace agreements negotiated between Israel and various Arab states in 2020. “Egypt has threatened to rescind from Camp David, which is good,” she added in praise of indications that Egypt might abandon its 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
While Erakat made the debunked claim that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) recognized Israel in 1988, she undermined any such recognition by demanding a Palestinian “right of return.” Under this concept, millions of descendants of some 600,000 Arabs who fled what became Israel during its 1948 independence war could demand a “return” to Israel as so-called “refugees,” resulting in a demographic destruction of Israel’s Jewish state. Numerous legal arguments rebut her contention that Palestinians “are denied the right of return as established by customary law, human rights law as well as [United Nations] General Assembly Resolution 194.”
Even as Erakat advocated destroying Israel, it remained unalterably an aggressor in her mind. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has attacked Lebanese targets “in an effort to draw Lebanon into the war,” she said, ignoring the attacks upon Israel by Hamas’ fellow jihadists in Lebanon from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. It “would be in Israel’s interest to expand the war to have the U.S. become involved to be able to finish the job under the cover of a massive war,” she said, as if Israel had some nefarious objective other than to live in peace.
Yet Zionist Jews fighting to survive in Israel, and not their Palestinian and other jihadist tormenters, appeared to Erakat as selfish. “The way that we have thought about Palestine all this time is to center Zionist settler sovereignty as the ultimate priority around which people can get the crumbs once that’s taken care of,” she said. Given Arab rejection of Zionist offers to accept an Arab state alongside a Jewish state in the territory of what was the post-World War I League of Nations Palestine Mandate going back to 1937, her statement is ludicrous.
Perhaps the only thing more shocking than the topsy-turvy views of academics such as Erakat and Aziz is the fact that they are so prominent throughout publicly and privately funded higher education. Jews and others with the slightest pro-Israel inclinations will never receive fair treatment from this duo inside or outside of the classroom, a mockery of the university as a free exchange of ideas. Tax and tuition payers in New Jersey and beyond must find ways to end this intellectual farce.