Even the most articulate Palestinians (like Noura Erakat) have the idiotic zero-sum mentality that helping Israel = hurting Palestinians

From the start, the "pro-Palestinian" movement has not been pro-Palestinian at all. It has been anti-Israel. And its supporters, no matter how educated or articulate, are so consumed with hate for the Jewish state that they literally cannot tell the difference between the two concepts.

Noura Erakat, the "human rights attorney" and assistant professor at Rutgers University, wrote an op-ed for NBC News that crystallizes this basic fact  - and thereby reveals a major reason why the Palestinians have remained stuck in limbo for so long.

Notwithstanding several early steps that distinguish him from his predecessor, President Joe Biden promises to continue [Trump’s] legacy. It’s true that the new administration intends to reinstate critical U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees and will reopen the PLO mission office in Washington, D.C. Just Monday, it announced that it will rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council, from which the Trump administration withdrew mostly in protest of its scrutiny of Israel.

But none of these policies, welcome though they are, will challenge the oppressive status quo sustained by the United States. Worse still, the Biden administration will uphold several of the Trump administration’s most damning precedents.

These examples are most revealing:

The new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has made clear that the administration will not move the U.S. Embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv; it will maintain, and celebrate, Israel’s normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan without ensuring a single enduring concession for the Palestinians; and it will continue to provide Israel with unconditional military support in the amount of $3.8 billion annually — a precedent established by Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama.

Late last week, the Biden administration also expressed “serious concerns” over the International Criminal Court’s effort to exercise jurisdiction over Israeli officials to prosecute them for war crimes, and is even considering maintaining the Trump administration’s sanctions on the court’s leading personnel.

She brings three examples of what she considers anti-Palestinian policies: keeping the embassy in Jerusalem, supporting peace between Israel and Arab states, and maintaining military aid that gets spent in the US.

None of these policies hurt Palestinians. None of them affect Palestinian lives at all, except for Gaza terrorists who want to murder Israeli civilians with rockets. None of them are speedbumps towards a Palestinian state.

They do support Israel as a sovereign nation – which this “human rights lawyer” considers “damning.”

The rest of the article is more of the same, complaining that a definition of antisemitism that includes demonizing the Jewish state’s very existence is somehow anti-Palestinian.

Erakat is so filled with hate for Israel that she literally cannot tell the difference between “pro-Israel” and “anti-Palestinian,” nor the difference between “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Israel.” She fully subscribes to a zero-sum mentality that what is good for Israel is automatically bad for Palestinians – and, worse, that nothing can be considered good for Palestinians unless it is also bad for Israel.

The UAE and Bahrain (and to an extent Morocco and Sudan)  have abandoned the zero-sum mentality. No one can call them “anti-Palestinian” although the Gulf Arabs are justifiably critical of the current Palestinian leaderships.  They see Israel not as an enemy but as a partner that can help them thrive; not as a open Jewish wound in the Arab Middle East but as a permanent feature that improves the region and that can lift up Arab states.  Instead of zero-sum, they seek a win-win. The zero-sum mentality that they maintained for so many decades did not help them – or the Palestinians – one bit.

The zero-sum mindset is childish and counterproductive. If there is one lasting change from the Abraham Accords, it is that this puerile way of thinking is finally on the wane in the Middle East.

As long as the Palestinians – including their Western “defenders” – cannot grasp that basic concept, they will never get anywhere.

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No Safe Spaces for Jews at Rutgers (Judean Rose)

Intimate that once, a long time ago, a senator or celebrity touched someone inappropriately or without permission and the media is on it like white on rice and #MeToo hashtags on Twitter. Refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, and you lose everything you own. Get shot at by a white officer for robbing a convenience store while black, you spawn an entire movement and Beyoncé will dance your story at halftime.

But at Rutgers, professors who hate Israel and the Jews are free to use the classroom to spout their lies and their hate and if Jewish students speak out, they're told it's "free speech." They're told they have no recourse. They must put up and shut up.

Now it's important to note that in the U.S., there has been a huge spike—a 67% increase—in antisemitic incidents this past year compared with 2016. Note too, that Rutgers has the largest percentage of Jewish students of all U.S. campuses. Depending on whether those Jewish students are New Jersey residents or from out of state, their parents may be paying upwards of $15,000 for them to be taught to hate Israel and to be ashamed of being Jewish.

An exaggeration, you say? Let's take a look.

We've got microbiology professor Michael Chikindas, exposed by Israellycool's Aussie Dave, for posting antisemitic cartoons and sentiments worthy of Der Stürmer. Chikindas is not just a Jew-hater, he also seems to be insane. The things he writes! From Algemeiner:

Chikindas [published] multiple posts referring to women — including Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev, First Lady Melania Trump, and President Donald Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka Trump — as “b**ches” and in some cases “sl*ts.”

After sharing an article claiming to expose the “global elite,” he wrote, “These jewish motherf*****s do not control me. They can go and f**k each other in their fat a***s — you see, I really do not have anything to loose (sic), hence nothing to be controlled.”

Antisemitic image posted on Facebook by Rutgers University professor Michael Chikindas (photo credit: Michael Chikindas, Facebook)

I don't know about you, but I would not want this insane Jew-hater (who cannot spell) anywhere near my children. I certainly would not want to pay $15k for the privilege of having my children sit in his classroom where he might spout who knows what ugliness! To use a Jewish expression, "Feh!"

Michael Chakindas

But Chikindas is just one of Rutgers Jew-hating academics. There's also Jasbir Puar, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers. Puar has accused Israel of genocide; of mining organs for scientific research; and has called for "armed resistance," which, of course, is code for "kill the Jews." Puar also said we Jews use the Holocaust to "hijack the discourse" of "Palestinian trauma."

Jasbir Puar

There's a third poisoner of young minds at Rutgers, and that is Mazen Adi, who, for the paltry sum of $15K or so, will lecture your children on international criminal law and anti-corruption. Perfect, coming from a guy who represented the Bashar Assad regime in the UN. While he was at the UN, Adi said that Israel targeted civilians, trafficked in children's organs, and buried enemy soldiers alive. He called Syria, on the other hand, a "trailblazer" in the fight against terrorism, and told everyone how Assad was committed to a peaceful resolution to the conflict (like chemical attacks on civilians??). Adi is said to have spoken of Arab terror in class, calling it a legitimate form of "resistance" (more code for "kill the Jews") to Israeli "occupation."

Mazen Adi

Israellycool exposed Chikindas, and Algemeiner then reported the story. That made people aware of what is going on at Rutgers, helped amplify this horrible thing: that these three dishonest, nay EVIL, people who lust for Jewish blood have reached the highest level of academia and are teaching your children (for which parents, many of them Jewish, are paying a fortune). Perhaps as a result of this bit of media "noise," a town hall meeting was facilitated by the Rutgers student government. The students were addressed by the president of Rutgers, Robert Barchi.

And what did Barchi do? He denigrated Algemeiner, which wasn't even the original source of the story (that would be Israellycool). He lectured the frightened, offended, angry Jewish students on free speech. Something that just would not have happened had the professors in question disparaged black people, for instance, or gays.

No.

Had that been the case, there would have been no conversation about free speech. Indeed, Chikindas, Puar, and Adi would be gone, kaput, past tense. There would be hashtags to tweet, the students offered safe spaces.

But there are no safe spaces for Jews.

At least not at Rutgers, where the largest concentration of American Jews pay through the nose, for "higher" education.

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