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JADALIYYA CO-EDITOR NOURA ERAKAT ADDRESSES THE UN IN COMMEMORATION OF
THE 77TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE NAKBA  
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Noura Erakat
May 16, 2025
Jadaliyya
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_ Noura Erakat highlighted the shortcomings of international law in
stopping Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in
Gaza while raising several steps that the international community can
take to intervene. _

The United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable
Rights of the Palestinian People, held a special meeting May 15 to
commemorate the 77th anniversary of the Nakba. Here Noura Erakat is
addressing the session., YouTube screenshot

 

Commemorating the 77th anniversary of the start of the Nakba,
Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat addressed the UN (video below).
During the address, Erakat  highlighted the shortcomings of
international law in stopping Israel's ongoing genocide against the
Palestinian people in Gaza while raising several steps that the
international community can take to intervene. She also locates the
UN's current failure to stop this genocide in a broader global history
of imperial domination, colonial impunity, and fascist conquest.
 

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Click here to watch the full UN commemoration of the Nakba's 77th
anniversary. [[link removed]]

I. ONGOING NAKBA:

Today is day 585 of genocide. Every day is a day of unprecedented
atrocity. Two days ago, we saw a baby in a red onesie, not yet 1, have
both of her tiny legs amputated. We witnessed a missile rip through a
hospital to kill a renowned journalist receiving treatment and learned
of the assassination of a 12 y/o boy who witnessed the massacre of 15
paramedics and their burial in a mass grave. Israel has destroyed 92%
of Gaza’s residential buildings, incapacitated its 36 hospitals, and
prevented the entry of food and basic goods. In doing so, Israel is
not only killing Palestinians now but threatening the possibility of a
Palestinian future. A campaign that seeks to obliterate the future of
a people is a genocide. Yet, despite these chilling statistics and an
ICJ decision indicating its plausibility, there remains controversy as
to this basic fact. Why?

The most pervasive talking point is that Israel is not targeting
Palestinians as a people but only targeting Hamas. Putting aside
significant issues in law and fact that militate against this point,
let me just share with you some statistics:

What we know, so far, is that at least two percent of the Palestinians
in Gaza have been killed, (52,400), including over 20,000 children
buried anddisappeared. The names of those under the age of one fill
the first 14 pages of a 649-page document. So far, 1200 entire
families have been wiped off the civil registry. Three months into the
war, the UN 1 humanitarian chief described Gaza as
“uninhabitable,” and since then the situation has only gotten
worse. This certainly exceeds Hamas militants.

According to Israel, these horrifying numbers are irrelevant because
they are the result, they say, of deliberate human shielding by Hamas.
Again, putting aside significant issues in law and fact, let me just
share with you the tactics of the Israeli Army itself. It has:

* Sniped children twice above the waist
* Used quadcopters to shoot injured children sprawled on the floor
* Destroyed the largest (Al Basma) in vitro fertility clinic,
including 4,000 embryos
* Executed Palestinian patients with their hands zip tied and thrown
into mass graves
* Sexually assaulted detainees captured without charge or trial
* Bombed safe routes where Palestinians were ordered to flee
* Bombed safe zones where Palestinians were ordered to shelter
* Tortured medical doctors to death
* Destroyed more than half of Gaza’s desalination plants
undermining access to clean water
* Leveled all 4 major universities, attacked factories, libraries,
bakeries, heritage sites, 247 mosques, 3 churches, and bulldozed 16
cemeteries

As put by Professor Sherene Seikaly, “Any honest observer of this
war understands that the target of Israeli force and US-supplied
weapons is the Palestinian civilian. Hamas combatants are the
“collateral damage.”

The purpose of this campaign is the destruction of the Palestinian
people for the sake of achieving long-term Israeli security, what I
call “Nakba Peace” a violent oxymoron that predicates
Jewish-Israeli safety on the elimination of Palestinians. In pursuit
of its territorial ambitions to achieve unchecked Zionist settler
sovereignty, Israel has removed Palestinians for 77 years and
counting; it has imposed a permanent military occupation on the West
Bank and Gaza for 58 years and counting; and it has besieged 2.3
million Palestinians for 17 years and counting. What we have been
witnessing for the past 585 days is the cruelest and most violent
episode of the ongoing Nakba.

On November 12, 2023, Agricultural Minister Avi Dichter, told us
plainly, “This is Nakba 2023.” A campaign that is evidenced across
Palestinian geographies, including in the northern West Bank where
some 40,000 Palestinians have been removed this year. The Trump
administration has adopted this goal in its current bid to build a
Gaza riviera and remove Palestinians to the Sudan, Somalia, or Syria.
And most recently, on May 4, 2025 the Israeli cabinet unanimously
voted to reoccupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse its remaining
inhabitants.

That is why the return of more than 300,000 Palestinians to their
homes in North Gaza in early 2025 was so incredible. It was the first
time in nearly 8 decades of ongoing Nakba that we witnessed the return
of Palestinians en masse, a return that embodies the national 3
aspirations of the Palestinian people. As chronicled by Ahmed Abu
Artema who marched home,

On that day, I walked as I had never walked before – about 15 km
non-stop. I entered Gaza City, a dream long cherished during the days
of war, now realised.

Despite unprecedented cruelty, Palestinians refused to surrender and
marched home by foot. This is precisely why Palestinians are
racialized as a security threat- because they/we refuse to disappear.
The Nakba is ongoing and so is Palestinian resistance to their/our
elimination.

II. INTERNATIONAL LAW

There is sufficient law to end the genocide, to lift the blockade, to
end the occupation, and to realize the self-determination of the
Palestinian people. Had international law ever been enough,
Palestinian refugees would be growing their families and their gardens
on their original lands rather than be searching for the remaining
flesh of their babies beneath the rubble.

Remarkably, the time of genocide has also been a moment of significant
judicial strides furthering Palestinian liberation.

In January 2024 – the International Court of Justice determined that
Israel’s campaign was plausible genocide.

In May 2024, it issued another provisional measure ordering the
withdrawal from Rafah; and

That same month, the International Criminal Court finally issued
arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

In July 2024, the ICJ issued an Advisory Opinion determining that
Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza is unlawful, ordering it
to withdraw its settlers and military from the territory, and to
provide reparations to the Palestinian people.

Last month, the ICJ heard an argument on the legality of banning
UNRWA, the UN refugee agency responsible for humanitarian relief –
and now banned amid a starvation campaign that has killed 57 children
in two months.

This is not a legal controversy; it is a political one. The United
States, among other states, has wrung its hands behind judicial
rulings. But this is selective deference to the court.

In its last days of office, the Biden administration recognized there
is a genocide of the Masalit ethnic tribe in Darfur by the Rapid
Support Forces. When asked whether they could use the same standards
to make that decision to adjudicate Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the
US Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice said “it will
ultimately be for (ICJ) judges to decide” – with zero irony that
they did not have to submit their evidence on Sudan before the ICJ.

This is not a legal controversy but a political one. The selective
deference to the ICJ on the question of genocide of Palestinians is an
attempt to deflect responsibility. And the ongoing counterrevolution
against activists globally is an attempt to revise a history of the
present. 5 Since 2020, an emerging consensus among legacy human rights
organizations as well as the world court, have defined Israel as an
apartheid regime. Rather than boycott, divest from, and sanction
apartheid Israel, the global community has attempted to normalize it.
Five years later, we see the danger of allowing that exception.

Apartheid and genocide are on the same continuum. Three of the
specific acts conducted to maintain apartheid are identical to the
acts conducted to commit genocide. In the former, they are done with
the intent to dominate, in the latter, with the intent to destroy.
Genocide is the logical outcome of any project to conquer and settle
the land upon which another people live, unless it is checked.

Many of you have either experienced colonialism directly, or have
ancestors who have experienced it. You are painfully aware of its
legacies.

That is why in 1974, this body firmly resolved that Palestinians are a
juridical people, Palestinians exist and deserve to exist. By
relegating Palestine to a bilateral political issue beyond the reach
of international norms, you have steadily normalized occupation. By
failing to apply sanctions and engage in boycott, many of you
normalized apartheid and now by failing to act, you are at risk of
normalizing genocide.

But if you normalize genocide, you will have nothing left.

If it is permissible to deny a people exist, to cage them, subject
them to systematic warfare, then to use AI to bomb them at
unprecedented rates in their homes, to burn them alive in tents, to
experiment on them with suicide drones, to deny them medical care, to
6 allow premature babies to rot in NICU units, and mamas to be denied
anesthetic to have c-sections, to starve them while their food decays
in miles of aid trucks, all without consequence and worse, while
insisting that their lives are secondary – if not altogether
insignificant – relative to Zionist settler sovereignty, then I
promise you that no one is safe. As put by Colombian President,
Gustavo Pietro, “Gaza is a rehearsal for the rest of the world.”

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said that victory
in the war would mean the full destruction of Gaza and the
displacement of its residents. He has also boasted that Israelis
“are finally going to conquer the Gaza strip. We are no longer
afraid of the word, occupation.” Smotrich’s audacity is our
failure.

You must make it impossible for Smotrich and anyone else to boast of
conquest through genocide in the 21st century, make those who speak it
have to say it in hushed whispers.

III. INCAPACITATION OF A GLOBAL SYSTEM

Let us speak honestly, most of you fear U.S. retribution. The genocide
in Gaza is one of the major atrocities of our time, and most people in
the world are against it. Our inability to stop it reflects an
international system where the equality of nation-states remains an
aspirational principle.

It might be good for us to remember: the United States is an empire
but the United States is not the world. In this precise moment, US
lawmakers welcomed the international war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu
into the White House. US lawmakers and universities welcomed Minister
of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, who was disqualified from
military service because of his affiliation with the Kahane movement,
declared a terrorist organization by the US and Israel.

Can you imagine being so extreme that you cannot serve in the Israeli
army? The same army that sprays 5.5 year old girls with 335 bullets
and executes 15 paramedics and buries them along with their ambulances
in a mass grave? The Israeli army wouldn’t have Ben Gvir, but US
lawmakers and several U.S. universities embraced him, just as they
colluded to kidnap, disappear, and deport students. Do not look west
for moral or political leadership. The United States has long
absconded on that position. Do not let the United States and Israel
upend the global system.

In its defense of Israel, the United States threatens the entire legal
structure established since the Second World War:

* The US has vetoed 5 ceasefire resolutions to end this genocide,
despite the extraordinary invocation of Article 99 by the UNSG and two
invocations of Uniting for Peace Resolutions twice

* US vetoes at the UNSC – five times to prevent a ceasefire (49
times total since 1967) + US vetoes to protect apartheid – 15 US
vetoes between 1963 and 1988

* Both the Biden and Trump administration have denigrated the ICJ
– US National Security Spokesman, John Kirby described the ICJ case
on the Genocide 8 Convention as “meritless, counterproductive, and
completely without any basis in fact, whatsoever.”
* The U.S. is not even a signatory to the Rome Statute, which
established the ICC, but the Trump admin has passed an EO to place
sanctions on the Prosecutor and anyone who cooperates with the court

* In October 2024, 107 members of Congress threatened to cease
financial support to the UN if it unseated Israel. Literally
threatening its budget for doing its job.

* What is the purpose of the UN, if it cannot stop a genocide and
prevent a calculated starvation of 2 million people?

The international community has failed many times before, and, at
great cost. One of the most significant times was in 1936 when the
League of Nations allowed Mussolini’s fascist Italy to invade
Ethiopia, an independent member state of the League. Then, the League
imposed cosmetic sanctions rather than an oil embargo to stop the war.
It tolerated Italy’s use of chemical weapons and described
Ethiopia’s people’s war as human shielding. The consequence of
racist imperialism was ultimately the dissolution of the League of
Nations. The UN was born of this failure. It was born of the
commitment to not let the atrocities of genocide from Namibia to the
Armenian Genocide to the Holocaust, happen again. It is that
commitment that is at stake today. If you do not stand up and speak
out, this very system will be a casualty of the US-Israel genocidal
war on Palestine and the Palestinian people.

Today, we do not need the United Nations to be a powerful symbol of
international cooperation, we need your collective action to simply be
powerful.

IV. CLOSING

In this moment, we have many choices. We can acknowledge Israel’s
campaign as genocide and impose an arms embargo, block the ports,
sever diplomatic ties, sever all civilian and military trade, impose
cultural and academic boycotts, and unseat Israel for its obstinate
transgressions.

If genocide is too much, you can confront this atrocity as a war,
specifically, a colonial war against a racist regime and alien
occupation, regulate it with the Additional Protocols and customary
laws of war that recognize the captives as POWs, ensure them humane
treatment, recognize Palestinians militants as combatants, and permit
third party intervention. We can use the law to protect hospitals and
schools and shelters, to protect the journalists and doctors and aid
workers, to forcibly open the humanitarian corridors, and abide by the
ICC arrest warrants to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant upon arrival.

If war is too much, you can confront this atrocity as a humanitarian
tragedy, you can send in a peacekeeping mission to protect
Palestinians who have been denied their right to self-defense for
nearly eight decades.

If humanitarian tragedy is too much, you can find a way to have mercy
on the Palestinian children – the ones who have been pulled from the
rubble with two limbs and no family and find themselves in a cage
without food or water.

Do not sit in the seat of power and do nothing. The United States is
an empire but the United States is not the world. You are the world-
each and every one of you has the capacity halt this charade and to
fulfill the minimal mandate of protecting a people’s right to exist.

Individually, you are each someone’s ancestor and you will be an
ancestor to someone. Our time on this earth is ephemeral, I implore
you to give it meaning. As the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish
reminds us: “We are not the most chosen people in the world but no
one is more chosen than us.” You cannot abandon Palestine without
betraying your legacy, your progeny, and yourself. May we transform
this world into a place worthy of our children. May you be protected,
may you be strong, may we be victorious. Free Palestine and may
Palestine free us all.

_[NOURA ERAKAT is a Professor of Africana Studies  and the Program
of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Noura is the
author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of
Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the
Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent
Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is
co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and an editorial board member of
the Journal of Palestine Studies as well as Human Geography. She is
a co-founding board member of the DC Palestinian Film and Arts
Festival. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional
Subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, as Legal Advocate for
the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency
Rights, and as national organizer of the US Campaign to End the
Israeli Occupation. Noura has also produced video documentaries,
including "Gaza In Context" and "Black Palestinian Solidarity.” Her
writings have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times,
the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation,  Al Jazeera, and
the Boston Review. She is a frequent commentator on CBS News, CNN,
MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, the BBC, and NPR, among others. She completed
non-resident fellowship of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard
Divinity School in 2021. In 2022, she was selected as a Freedom
Fellow by the Marguerite Casey Foundation.]_

* Nakba
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* Genocide
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* Gaza
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* West Bank
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* Palestine
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* Israel
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* apartheid
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Oct. 7
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* Ceasefire
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* Hamas
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* Hostages
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* Humanitarian Aid
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* starvation
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Noura Erakat
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