The unfolding crisis in Gaza, where relentless Israeli bombardment has killed more than 1,500 people since Saturday, is “a humanitarian catastrophe,” says Palestinian American human rights attorney Noura Erakat. She says Western leaders and the mainstream media have relied on racist, Islamophobic tropes to build a false consensus “that war is inevitable and that whatever consequences come out is the fault of Hamas, thereby further blaming the victims for their own killing and massacres.” Erakat also decries the Israeli order that 1.1 million residents in Gaza relocate under threat of a ground invasion. “What we are seeing is a genocidal campaign. You cannot forcibly transfer 1.1 million Palestinians in a 225-square-mile enclosed area. There is nowhere for them to go,” says Erakat, an associate professor at Rutgers University and author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.
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Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick Department of Africana Studies. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of theJournal of Palestine Studies. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is the coeditor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011 and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. More recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine, which includes a short multimedia documentary, "Gaza In Context," that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, "Black Palestinian Solidarity." She is a frequent commentator, with recent appearances on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others, and her writings have been widely published in the national media and academic journals.