by Noura Erakat, Published on Mondoweiss, October 8, 2024
Editor’s Note: This is the transcript of a speech delivered by Noura Erakat on August 30, 2024 in Chicago as part of a panel titled, “All Eyes on Palestine,” at the Socialism conference in Chicago. It is being repurposed here as part of the Mondoweiss Reflections on a Genocide series.
It is day 329. The situation on the ground in Gaza has only gotten worse. A quarter of a million Palestinians will likely die due to starvation, famine, and disease. In the words of Lara Elborno, every day is the worst day, and worse than what we’ve already witnessed. Systematic sexual assault of Palestinian detainees, burning refugees alive in plastic tents that asphyxiated them before they melted their skin, polio outbreak, and now an all-out incursion into the West Bank in what Palestinians have repeatedly warned is an ethnic cleansing project from the River to the Sea.
This horror is amplified by the fact that it follows, three ICJ decisions, an ICC request for arrest warrants for Israel’s head of state and Defense Minister. After we have thoroughly debunked the most racist lies about atrocities that never took place. Even after Israelis bellow the quiet part out loud, this colonial genocide continues with increasing cruelty and an unceasing supply of weapons that you and I have paid for.
There are no words left and certainly less need for experts. So I humbly offer five lessons that the genocide in Gaza has taught us.
1. It has exposed the enduring colonial nature of international law
For nearly 11 months, we have been witnessing a colonial genocide and the inability of international law and legal institutions to stop it. This failure reflects the nature of the Genocide Convention itself – which is legislated in 1948, not because it is the first or the worst campaign to destroy a people, but because it is the worst to take place within Europe’s shores. The exclusion of indigenous, African, Asian peoples from the scope of harm partly reflects the development of the laws of war as a European project that deliberately relegated the non-European as a “savage other” ineligible for civilian status. The final draft of the Genocide Convention removed colonial violence from its scope and represented a Eurocentric humanity. The inability to stem genocide today illuminates that there is no international law but law for Europe and a law for all others.
This is why this battle has also been what Palestinian scholar, Nimer Sultany has described as “an epic legal battle of Global South vs. Global North.” Note how, with few notable exceptions, states of the Global South have intervened at the ICJ to support South Africa while states of the global north have intervened on behalf of Israel. Note also, how Namibia’s late president told Germany it had no authority to comment on what is and is not genocide and that Nicaragua brought its own suit against Germany for complicity in Genocide. And though international law has failed to stop this, the international rulings have catalyzed weapons and diplomatic sanctions.
Most significant it has enabled us to move from discussing the legality of Israel’s operations to describing it wholesale as illegitimate. This war is not designed to extract captives or destroy Hamas, but to depopulate the Gaza Strip and continue the Nakba. The return of the Nakba as the frame through which to understand Israel’s conduct from 1948 to the present, reflects the success of Palestinians to redeploy international law in the service of their emancipation even as we face the most extreme expression of Zionism’s eliminationist project in generations.
2. This is a U.S. genocide of Palestinians
In the first six days of Israel’s campaign, the Biden administration sent it 6,000 bombs. This week, it has sent 50,000 tons of weapons – causing the equivalent of over 3 atomic bombs dropped on a besieged population denied safe quarter and any means necessary for survival. The U.S. has matched this with the provision of immunity at the UN Security Council as well as directly sabotaging ceasefire negotiations.
Significantly, the Biden administration has facilitated this death making in contravention of its own laws and the popular will of its constituents displaying the crisis of so-called democracy. Worse, it is going even further to manufacture consent and squash dissent. For example, in a bipartisan vote of 269-144, the House passed an amendment to prohibit the State Department from citing the Gaza Ministry of Health statistics on Palestinian casualties, even though international journalists are refused entry, Palestinian journalists are targeted, and UN agencies like UNRWA are maligned, thus leaving no other reliable source to cite.
Despite U.S.’s role in genocide, broad swaths of Americans insist there is a difference between what happens over “here” and over “there.” Let us be reminded of a direct continuum captured by what Martinican artist and politician Aime Cesaire called the “boomerang effect.” What is deployed in colonial geographies manifests within its metropole. This is most apparent today in U.S. policing.
Sociologist Julian Go traces the militarization of U.S. police to the Spanish American War in 1898 when the US became an imperial power in the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and the DR – this catalyzed the transformation of the US military into a force that can protect colonial holdings – that was evidenced in the revolutionary changes to police forces in the US, when they were transformed and “created a hierarchical chain of command, … operational and tactical methods including surveillance, mapping, anticipatory policing, weapons training, and mounted police units.” U.S. police reflected the U.S.’s imperial army evidenced in the occupation of Ferguson and the repression of Black uprising more generally.
Today we see this effect in the deployment of anti-terrorism laws to squash dissent of protestors in Cop City, in censorship of books, and the authorization of police onto college campuses. It may be easy to describe Palestinians as the sacrificial lamb to advance a progressive agenda, but that would be a total misread. We are the canaries in the coal mine and the front line of what is coming for everyone. Letting us die is not making you safer.
3. Universities are an extension of the state’s coercive apparatus
We have witnessed universities being the greatest source of harm to the students and faculty. In April, several police officers piled up on its Washing University Professor, Steve Tamari. He was punched, body slammed, kicked, and dragged for standing around with his students. The police broke several of his ribs and his hand, upon arrival to the hospital, the doctor told him, he was lucky to be alive. What has become clear is that rather than being the site of knowledge production and dissent, the university is an extension of a coercive state apparatus.
There are many explanations for this but one of them has to do with public funding. Universities have been subject to the worst austerity measures. It has made up for this windfall through donations from corporations, most notably weapons manufacturers, which have been receiving more public subsidies. As the government cuts funding to universities, it increases them to weapons industries, who in turn fund universities, imbricating them in the military industrial complex.
In 2020, the USG funding to Lockheed Martin alone exceeded all funding to the DOE. Unsurprisingly, federal spending to weapons manufacturers ballooned after 9/11. These companies profit in three ways: supplying weapons, private security, and reconstruction- demonstrating they profit both from fueling war and dealing with its aftermath.
These very companies are keeping universities afloat- At Johns Hopkins for example, the university received twice as much money from defense contractors over the past ten years than from tuition. Today, the Pentagon fuels one-fourth of university revenues. The university functions in concert with the military industrial complex and depends on this alliance.
4. Zionism has no moral legs to stand on
Though we have failed to stop a genocide, we have made plain the moral bankruptcy of Zionism – though Israel really takes the most credit for that. Israeli state and society have told us that for them to feel safe, they must depopulate the Gaza Strip to “finish the job”. Israeli society is calling for more rape, more killing, they are mocking Palestinians who are starving and being shredded apart, its soldiers are flexing on killing babies, blowing up mosques as wedding announcements, and wearing the lingerie of women forced as an expression of their masculinity. American Zionist settlers are leaving Hyde Park and Park Slope to settle Palestinian lands and then demand Palestinians be killed because of how dangerous it is- while lamenting that “colonialism gets a bad name.”
Zionism has historically had significant moral sway among Americans, including folks we may admire like WEB DuBois who saw in Zionism a model for liberation of oppressed people. Today, folks are not lining up to defend Zionism. To the contrary, there is a silent majority that fears the risk of attack, harassment, doxing, loss of employment. Zionism is so weak, it needs to be maintained today through coercive force.
AIPAC, which used to operate quietly, has to loudly wield its punitive stick. It has poured no less than $100 mil into the US election. Notably, it spent $8.4 million dollars to unseat Cori Bush campaign and took credit for it, saying “pro-Israel is good policy, good politics, for both parties.” But notably its ads did not say a WORD on Palestine or Israel- it focused on missed votes and infrastructure bill. Worse, it replaced Bush with Wesley Ball, the prosecutor who acquitted Darren Wilson, in Ferguson saying there was not enough evidence against him evidencing a willingness to unravel progressive, anti-carceral agendas for the sake of protecting Israel. Their aggressiveness is an indication of their weakness.
5. Racism and Power – the invisibility and power of Palestinians
Racism is doing tremendous work in this moment to prime audiences for mass slaughter of Palestinians and to invisibilize our power. In line with Islamophobic and historic antisemitic tropes, Palestinians have been racialized as outsiders who can’t integrate into Western society but are instead planning to impose “creeping Sharia.” They are outside of modernity, too religious, and intrinsically violent, they are a threat to others and even themselves because of colonial stereotypes about brown men being dangerous to their own women. It is this racial framing which also makes Palestinians appear as a redundant population that can be expended.
So dehumanizing is this discourse, that outrage for Israel’s targeting of civilians did not happen until the targeting of seven World Central Kitchen humanitarian aid – the first time in April. The attack finally prompted the Wall Street Journal editorial board to question Israel’s war noting that it had “achieved neither of its war goals of returning all the hostages…and successfully routing Hamas from Gaza,” continuing that despite tactical gains, a strategic victory was far off.
Our 35,000 dead were not enough to compel that conclusion, neither were the 4 premature babies who rotted in the NICU, neither was the voice of Hind Rajab pleading for someone to save her or the image of what was left of Sidra Hassouna’s bodies hanging from the beam of what remained of her home. The horrors from Al Shifa were not enough- not the 300 dead, not the decaying bodies being feasted upon by ravaged dogs and cats, not the corpses whose arms were zip tied and featuring bullet wounds of execution, not the gutting of the largest hospital in the north – our lives were not enough, we did not even qualify for a presumption of innocence.
And just as we are rendered into nothingness, our power is being outright denied. As Yazan Zahzah pointed out, it was Palestinians and an anti-genocide movement that made clear Biden was unfit to run for office and yet our role is not even acknowledged. Now the entirety of this presidential election could be swung by the anti-genocide camp – so much so that the Democratic Party, in another bid of gaslighting and deflection of responsibility, have described our calls to end slaughter as being Pro-Trump.
It was our power that catalyzed the South Africa petition at the ICJ and the ICC arrest warrants. It was our power that has catalyzed a split between the Global North and the Global South and illuminated the colonial nature of the world.
It was the power of our people in Palestine Action that shut down three Elbit firms in the UK and the first one in Cambridge. It was our power that compelled French insurance company AXA divested all money from all major Israeli banks.
In the words of Rafeef Ziadah who could not be with us tonight, Palestinians have taught the world life- like the six prisoners who used spoons to dig themselves out of one of the highest security prison in the world. Like Dr. Amira Al Souli who braved sniper fire to collect the body of a fallen patient. Like citizen journalists Bisan Owda and Hind Khoudary who continue to report from the ground knowing full well their press vest is a target for Israeli snipers.
It is our people, who are still standing today despite 11 months of bombardment by a nuclear power, backed by global superpower, and fueled with weapons from the UK, Germany, and Italy…it is our frontline in diaspora organizing across the globe of young Palestinian, predominantly hijabi women, who are the epitome of feminism and power in this moment defying expectations and setting new standards.
We are power. We are life. We are victorious.
*Featured Image: Tens of thousands of pro-Palestine supporters protested in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., on November 4, 2023. (Photo: © Eman Mohammed)
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in the Department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice. Her research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, national security law, refugee law, social justice, and critical race theory.