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By Debra Rubin
(MARCH 31, 2022 / JEWISH LINK) The “outrageous” decision by the New Jersey School Ethics Commission to decline to hear a complaint filed against two Palestinian-American commissioners on the Clifton Board of Education over anti-Israel statements made at a board meeting is being appealed.
The appeal is being led by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and is being handled pro bono by Jeffrey Schreiber, a partner in the East Brunswick office of the law firm of Meister Seelig & Fein at the organization’s request. Many members of the Jewish community believe the statements crossed the line into antisemitism.
“For the ethics commission to dismiss this without holding a hearing is outrageous, especially when they’ve acted against others in much less obvious situations,” Schreiber told The Jewish Link in a phone conversation. “We seem to be living in a world where anything said about anyone is verboten except when it’s said about Jews. Then no one does a thing. I have a problem with that.” He cited a case in which a school board member had been censured for posting private offensive anti-Muslim remarks on a private Facebook page.
The commission had received lengthy certifications and legal briefs submitted by the two commissioners, Ferris Awaad and Fahim K. Abedrabbo, and their attorney, as well as the response to those filings by the complainant, Elisabeth Schwartz.
In those documents the two sides clashed repeatedly over interpretations of state law and board policy. Schwartz, a former Englewood Board of Education member, had her complaint against Awaad and Abedrabbo dismissed on January 25 by the commission, part of the state Department of Education.
Members of the Jewish community had dubbed the commissioners’ statements as “dangerous” and “untruthful” and their accusations against Israel of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and comparing its treatment of Palestinians to the killing of George Floyd as antisemitic. The statements made at the May 20, 2021 meeting sparked two-and-a-half hours of heated public comment, largely on the Middle East situation, at the August 5, 2021 meeting by members of the public on both sides of the matter.
Schwartz also said Awaad’s closing statement at the board meeting, “Free Palestine. Free my people,” which is linked to the Boycott Divestment Sanctions campaign against Israel, is “intensely antisemitic and anti-Israel.”
“Our position in this case is that the two school board members violated their ethical obligations under the School Ethics Act at a school board meeting to promote their own partisan political positions that have nothing to do with the schools and the children they are educating,” said Susan Tuchman, director of the ZOA’s Center for Law and Justice.
She said that the remarks made by the commissioners promoted “gratuitous falsehoods about Israel that were particularly egregious at a time when antisemitism is surging in this country and around the world.”
Tuchman noted that many anti-Israel issues “crossed the line into antisemitism,” prompting a letter from the ZOA to the school board. While school board members are free to speak about various subjects at meetings, Awaad’s and Abedrabbo’s remarks were “filled with lies” and antisemitism that violated the public’s trust.
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