Noura Erakat, is a noted Palestinian legal scholar, human rights attorney, and activist. She is an assistant professor at George Mason University, and was one of the speakers at the annual conference organized by the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. She spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on March 2, 2018.
The theme of the conference was: The Israel Lobby And American Policy 2018. Speakers explored the different ways in which a powerful Lobby for Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,AIPAC, influences US law, our Middle East policy and our elections, steering the flow of donations to Israel-friendly members of Congress who ensure the flow of foreign aid and weapons to Israel.
Noura Erakat followed Dr. Virginia Tilley. She argued in her presentation that the U.S. is supporting an Apartheid State in Israel. Noura Erakat, in contrast, depicted Israel as a Settler Colonialist state.
She said: “I want to urge us to think of this as settler colonialism first—a project that’s distinct from colonization, in that the settler who moves into the colony is traveling with their sovereignty with an intent to stay…. There is the removal of the native with the intent to replace them with the settler …”
Noura Erakat carefully lays out the argument in this talk and concludes with a deeply disturbing parallel. “The United States” she says, “is a settler colony. What we see going on in Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline is actually the removal of natives, and taking away of their lands, and obscuring the fact that they exist as a people. It is perpetuating a myth that the natives have disappeared in very similar ways that we perpetuate the myth of disappearance of Palestinians.”
She is also the producer of the short video “Black Palestinian Solidarity,” and is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Justice for Some: Law as Politics in the Question of Palestine.
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