Legal Studies Assistant Professor and human rights attorney, Noura Erakat has been busy this spring. She was recently the keynote speaker at two academic workshops focused on the commemoration of events marking 50 years since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and will serve on a panel at a conference at the United Nations Headquarters in New York this June.
The first event was held at UC Berkeley, Erakat’s alma mater, by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Her purposeful keynote speech, “Taking the Land Without the People: International Law and the 1967 War”, compelled the audience to think about how occupation law has enabled Israel to fulfill its territorial ambitions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip rather than impede them. The presentation, based on a chapter in Erakat’s forthcoming book encourages the audience to think about the indeterminacy of law and its relationship to power.
In Late May, Erakat was the keynote speaker at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. The workshop was appropriately titled ‘Violent Order: Extinguishing Palestinian Resistance, Expanding Israel’s use of Force”. In this workshop students and academics were walked through key legal developments between 2000 and the present that has enabled Israel to expand its use of force against Palestinian civilians under its jurisdiction. These legal shifts have had global implications as they have come to inform the laws of armed conflict between states and non-state actors in the so-called Global War on Terror.
Later this month, Erakat will travel to New York to attend the United Nations Forum to Mark Fifty Years of Occupation. There Erakat will serve on a panel to address “The Gaza Strip: an Integral Part of the State of Palestine”. Human rights leaders and educators from around the world will gather to spotlight efforts to end the occupation in Palestine and create a peaceful future. Erakat’s contribution will focus on rehabilitating the question of Gaza within the question of Palestine more broadly since recent wars have detrimentally set it apart as a national security issue.
June 15, 2017
