This week, Boston Review coeditor Deborah Chasman spoke with Palestinian human rights activist, lawyer, and associate professor at Rutgers University Noura Erakat about Hamas’s attack, the response by Israel and the United States, and why the condemnation of war crimes—by both Hamas and Israel—is no substitute for politics.
Deborah Chasman: Thanks for joining me. It’s always difficult to talk about politics in the wake of spectacular violence, so I’m grateful to be in conversation. It feels particularly constrained this time.
Noura Erakat: What is scary is the enthusiasm and the self-righteousness with which any discussion of context is being decried. People are reading my recent articles and interviews as celebrations of Hamas’s killing of children. You would have to be incredibly perverse to read anything that I’m writing as that. But right now, anything other than unequivocal support for a disproportionate Israeli military response is seen as apologizing for Hamas’s attack. I’ve been saying over and over from the beginning that unless we understand the context, we are going to read Hamas’s actions as a lustful search for blood from Palestinians, as primordial, irrational religious hatred, which necessitates an overwhelming and devastating military response. Sadly, that is what a lot of the media and politicians are now doing: they are creating a through line between Nazi genocide and this moment because they have utterly failed to historicize it.
DC: With the shocking violence of Hamas’s attack, public discourse—including on the left—has centered around moral condemnation: what is or isn’t morally beyond the pale, what counts as fair justification for retribution, and collective punishment. As a lawyer and human rights activist, what do you think that focusing only on a moral framework might obscure?
NE: As an attorney, I find it refreshing to hear a moral approach precede a legal one. But the fixation on the morality of the offensive that included atrocities committed against Israeli civilians has a depoliticizing effect because it eschews a massive power imbalance, which shapes the current crisis. My insistence on context, which echoes nearly every Palestinian intervention, is to illuminate that there are root causes of this sensational violence. If we contextualize the civilian harm and the violation of the rules of engagement—including Israel’s manifold violations and its civilian harm—what we should be examining is, what is the framework, the underlying violence that characterizes everything that happens? And that framework is the crime of apartheid: a sustained seventy-five years of settler colonial removal, fifty-six years of occupation, and sixteen years of siege. Apartheid is, and will continue to be, the greatest crime against humanity in this instance. Because after this episode is over, and surely it will be, the regular daily warfare against Palestinians continues, as it has for decades. But this warfare does not get registered as such, because it’s read as what Teju Cole calls “cold violence”: the slow, daily degradations of living under occupation. But Israel conducts a tremendous amount of outright violence against Palestinians as well: look at the murder of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin in May 2022, the 2020 murder of my cousin Ahmad Erekat at a West Bank checkpoint, the settler incursions into Hawara, and the aerial and ground invasions against the Jenin refugee camp this summer.
And what is ironic is that even as us Palestinians are being cast as inherently violent, we’ve also historically been the source of spectacular nonviolent protests. Think of May 2018, when young Palestinians organized the Great March of Return. We saw thirty to forty thousand Palestinians at the Gaza perimeter, demanding the right to return home, to lift the siege. And they were shot down like birds at a 300 meter distance by Israeli snipers: 50 were murdered and more than 1,700 wounded. They posed no harm to Israeli military infrastructure or to Israeli civilians. And Israel itself admitted that they were using indiscriminate, disproportionate force: the decision to shoot these nonviolent marchers came directly from then–IDF commander-in-chief Gadi Eisenkot. They are admitting to war crimes and the intentions to commit them before Palestinians have even mobilized.
DC: Because we can only conceive of Palestinians, and of Palestine, as threatening—not as subjects and a nation responding to acts of violence committed against them.
NE: There are a tremendous amount of war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed. Hamas’s targeting of civilians was one of them, but to the extent that they captured soldiers or struck military installations, that is legal within the language of law. Palestinians have the right to self-defense and to use force to resist settler colonial occupation—not an unqualified right, but a right nonetheless. Now, though, governments can only conceive of Palestinians as being violent, irrational terrorists, not as nascent sovereigns operating within international law frameworks asserting, however objectionably, a right to self-determination. We forget that Hamas, in the Palestinian accession to the Rome Statute in 2015, submitted itself to ICC prosecution for the crimes they committed at the same time the court prosecuted Israel for theirs. The ICC prosecutor Kamil Khan has announced an intention to prosecute Hamas in recent days but has not indicated an intention to investigate Israel.
But the siege Israel is now engaged in constitutes an illegal war against the population that it occupies. Its methods of warfare violate the principles of distinction, to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and the distinction of proportionality, that the harm caused be proportionate to the military objective they want to achieve. Israel has told us ahead of time that they’re using disproportionate and indiscriminate force. We have an ipso facto layout of the war crimes to be committed. We know that they’re committing collective punishment.
The violation at the heart of it all is the usurpation of the Palestinian right to self-determination created by Israel’s prolonged occupation. The crimes are plenty, both in what we describe as jus in bello, how war is fought, as well as jus ad bellum, the right to use that force at all.
But the real question is, what is the value of these criminal allegations in the absence of the political will needed to pursue their remedy? What we’re seeing right now is a complete absence of that political will, and instead, a search for revenge. Because when viewed in isolation, what Hamas did is absolutely illegible to unfamiliar audiences who don’t even know the narrative of a Palestinian homeland. From what we understand, Hamas had political objectives in its attack: to capture soldiers to leverage a prisoner exchange, to undermine Israeli normalization with Arab governments, and possibly to draw Israel into a ground offensive in order to irreversibly alter the status quo. It seems that even Hamas was surprised by Israel’s military unpreparedness.
DC: How does this understanding of the right to self-determination, and of the concept of a Palestinian homeland, help us understand Hamas and its attacks?
NE: It shows us that Hamas has very clearly articulated political objectives as I just shared. We’re failing to understand Hamas as a political actor—a democratically elected political actor—and only seeing it as a monstrosity. Removing that context sets up an understanding, constructed on an imperial infrastructure of the War on Terror, that this is Islamic fanaticism driven by primordial religious hatred for which there is no political solution. It sets up a common-sense logic that military force is necessary and inevitable irrespective of the human toll.
Hamas was established in 1987, twenty years after the occupation started and thirty-nine years after the forced displacement of Palestinians in the Nakba. They were originally an Islamic group intent on spiritual rehabilitation, one that understood Palestinian dispossession as partly a loss of their adherence to God.
They became a nationalist movement in the context of the First Intifada (Palestinian uprising). Since then, they’ve opposed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and have since been demonized. But by 2006 they begin to resemble the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in that they no longer want to be just a resistance movement, but also want to be a power in government. And this is an organization that is thinking very thoughtfully about being in governance. Over time, they have amended their charter so that they can envision not necessarily permanent peace with Israel, but what they call a hudna, a truce.
And Israel understands very well that Hamas is a legitimate political actor. In the past, it has worked closely with them in order to maintain the status quo that exists in Gaza. Israel has had the opportunity to rout them out before, but Israeli generals have made clear that they don’t want to, because Hamas’s government maintains stability in the Gaza Strip. In 2006, Hamas could have entered into a unity government with Fatah but for Israeli and U.S. interventions that foiled it. But now, none of these things are registered.
DC: And we’ve seen how these tropes can be used so powerfully. For example, Israeli leaders have made public pronouncements that civilians in Gaza are being warned of the military response and that they should leave before bombings begin. That appears as an ethical consideration. But do they have anywhere to go?
NE: It’s very cynical, on three registers. Number one, the most obvious one, they’ve been hermetically sealed into the Gaza Strip, which is the function of siege. And in this situation, the Israeli Minister of Defense not only declared Israel would put Gaza under complete siege, not create a humanitarian corridor, and cut electricity off to everybody, but they have also bombed the only border crossing between Egypt and Gaza that Israel doesn’t control.
The United States has announced that it intends to create a humanitarian corridor for Palestinians—mostly because Israel intends to raze the Gaza Strip completely. They are planning on untold violence as we speak. But what Palestinians in Gaza know is that if they leave, they will never be allowed to return, which is constructive and constitutive of the Palestinian condition of forced exile. In this case, the Palestinians’ search for refuge is a risk that they will forever be removed from their homes.
And even if such a humanitarian corridor is created, historically, Israeli combat tactics show we should be cautious of the military’s respect for any of these considerations. In 2008 and 2014, they dropped leaflets on Gazans to take shelter and then deliberately targeted the UN infrastructure that provided shelter, claiming the buildings were Hamas weapons depots. In other cases, they would engage in a practice called “roof knocking,” where the army would tap a Palestinian home with a small missile and then give the family three minutes to leave before striking it with another, more deadly, missile. Imagine the paralyzing anxiety that comes over somebody in a moment like this. Yet Israel claims they are the most moral army in the world because of things like the provisions of warning. And they have done this successfully because of the racial construction that will not have us believe that Palestinians can be victims—that whatever happens, they are to be blamed for their own deaths.
DC: Initially, I had wanted to talk briefly about something more hopeful, but I’m not sure. Maybe it’s not the moment.
NE: That’s what’s been so heartbreaking for me. I am at a total loss as I look around. There is a concerted ratcheting drumbeat for war. There is a lust and a thirst for Palestinian blood. In the days before the attacks, I had a lot of hope. We had built transnational solidarity networks. We had shifted paradigms amongst the media. Many different sources and producers of knowledge had come to understand Israel with a dose of cynicism. Human rights organizations had come to more or less a consensus that Israel oversees an apartheid regime. I could see hope in the delegitimization of Israel and Zionism as a framework of liberation, given that it’s a settler colonial ideology. But since then, all I can think of is, how are we going to stave off a genocide? Right now, we are struggling merely to make the case that Palestinians have a right not to be killed en masse.
Even across university campuses, administrations are issuing statements echoing Israel’s warmongering language. Individuals are being punished for their social media activity, and their personal information is being shared. On October 9 the beat writer for the Philadelphia 76ers was fired by the franchise because he tweeted, “Solidarity with Palestine always.” I have had a number of scheduled interviews canceled myself.
We’re in a moment where we’re being incapacitated from saying very basic things, because it’s being seen as—as one hate letter told me—a lack of empathy on my part. My concern for Palestinian civilians becomes seen as a lack of empathy for Israeli ones. And now, the only way to demonstrate empathy for the Israeli people is to sign a blank check for the destruction of Palestinian lives.
DC: What can be done?
NE: We U.S. residents have always been a source of the solution. This country is the primary provider of military, financial, and diplomatic support for Israel. It has blocked forty-three UN Security Council resolutions that would have held Israel to account. And they have provided Israel with weapons technologies, intelligence, and funding—around $3.6 billion of it a year. But for the United States, Israel would not be able to do what it’s doing. We’ve always been a source of change because as U.S. taxpayers, we are a pillar of the problem. We are not merely observers.
We could always engage in demanding that our tax dollars not be used in this way. The imposition of weapons, sanctions, boycott resolutions in our local establishments, whatever we’re a part of: we have always been that source of change. And even after this is done—I don’t even know what that means right now—our resistance might catalyze us to find ways to dismantle apartheid, because that will remain the primary framework, the primary crime, the primary harm.
DC: A year ago, you wrote an essay in these pages prefiguring what a postapartheid Palestine might look like. Can we still speak of a liberated Palestine? How should we look toward its immediate future?
NE: At this point, I have no idea where the dust is going to settle. There are many different things I can hypothesize. Right now, it seems like there is no room to talk about a non-genocidal approach to the conflict: how Israel, for example, could engage in a form of combat that is clean and ethical to bring back their civilian hostages. The other very likely scenario is that the pendulum could swing the other way as Palestinian casualties mount and as Israel, backed by the United States, uses excessive force. And in that scenario, we will still remain in a holding position and holding a ticking time bomb.
One thing that I do see as a trend, though, is that there’s a reticence to deal with the root causes. There’s a reticence to know. Liberals and their concerns over Israeli civilians are shifting to side with the militaristic response and with Israel. Why not stand with Israeli civilians and not with Israel, for example? What is especially frightening is that most people don’t even know how to respond. The de facto response has become unquestioned support for Israeli militarism.
What we do know from history is that Israel does not want to resolve the Palestinian question diplomatically, to say nothing of the Palestinian demands for decolonization. They will not integrate Palestinians as citizens, because that would disrupt the Jewish demographic majority. Nor do they do not want to recognize Palestinian sovereignty and give them their own state. Instead, the solution has been to architect a system that contains Palestinians violently in open-air prisons across 224 ghettos in the West Bank and one huge ghetto in the Gaza Strip, and to make sure that Palestinians never have the capacity to protest and to resist. Get rid of as many as possible and then put as many in cages. And now all we’re hearing them say is to put them in tighter cages. The support for decimating Palestinians and removing them en masse, in many ways, fulfills what has been the major calculus for Israel: how it can get rid of an entire population while not appearing as if it’s committing outright genocide.
Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli Minister of Finance, has said that his benevolent solution is that Palestinians can forever live as privileged residents in Israel in a Jewish state, they can leave, or they can die. And this is Israel’s objective: it’s not just Netanyahu. It was Barak, it was Olmert, it’s been the liberals, it’s Likud, and it’s Labor. It’s like trying to make a distinction in the removal of Native Americans between Andrew Jackson, who was outright racist and hell-bent on Indian removal, and Thomas Jefferson, who was more kind about it on the surface. They both had the same objective. It simply doesn’t help us to think about individual personalities.
DC: I don’t know if you saw this piece by the Israeli activist Yuval Abraham in +972 magazine. He wrote about how he grieves the losses and the murders of people he knew, but he argues this is a political problem, not a moral problem, and that he still thinks it can be solved.
NE: It is the only thing I see for us in the future. There’s no military resolution to this question. Syria and Egypt, who have the largest Arab armies since 1973, have made clear that they are not going to fight a conventional war against Israel. And Palestinians can’t defeat Israel on its own. Israel, too, cannot defeat Palestine because its people will never relinquish their right to liberation and their thirst for freedom.
The only way that Israel can defeat the Palestinians is through total genocidal elimination, which we’re now on the brink of. Assuming none of this is going to be successful, we only have two options: we either all die in mutual destruction, or we all survive. The only way for all of us to survive is to achieve a political solution. And that political solution, in accordance with a moral framework, is the dismantling of a racial colonial regime.
But in this particular moment, I don’t know what will happen. As with everyone else, I’m quite anxious. I have heard that the United States is going to create a humanitarian corridor for Palestinians to exit Gaza, to allow Israel to decimate the Gaza Strip. And this may very well be another catastrophe for Palestinians on the level of the Nakba of 1948. One Knesset member has called for precisely that. Where do we emerge after that? How do we collect ourselves? And how can we convince people that not only do we deserve not to be in cages anymore, but that we deserve full freedom? We are doing our best to navigate the way forward despite the catastrophe around us.
