Netanyahu at the UN: Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Interview by Al-Jazeera America

On 1 October 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu addressed the seventieth session of the United Nations General Assembly. His speech came one day after Palestine President’s Mahmoud Abbas’s speech to the Assembly where he indicated that a lack of adherence to the Oslo Accords would render them null and would revert the Occupied Territories to complete Israeli control. In his address, Netanyahu dedicated most of his time to decrying the Iran Deal and highlighting the threat Iran poses to Israel and the rest of the world relying on Islamphobic tropes, such as sleeper cells in the United States. Netanyahu attributed the demise of the peace process to the lack of Palestinian good faith and described Abbas’s speech as an indication of an unwillingness to negotiate. In this interview with Al Jazeera America, Jadaliyya Co-Editor, Noura Erakat, responds to Netanyahu’s speech. She emphasized that while the dissolution of Oslo would be optimal, it is highly unlikely. Erakat added, that the current status quo places responsibility for Palestinians on the Palestinian Authority at the expense of the international community, thus making it cheap for Israel to continue its occupation and settler-colonial expansion, 

“We need to remove the farcical nature of this conflict as one between two equal powers and return it….to what it actually is, which is a settler-colonial condition which continues to expand without accountability and results in daily violence against Palestinian bodies and people….we are incentivizing Israel’s occupation. We are incentivizing Israeli violence because we are paying for it.”