ABC: Last Friday sixteen Palestinian protesters killed by Israeli soldiers after a mass protest by Gazan residents. Since Friday the death toll has risen to eighteen and there are widespread calls for a UN inquiry. The U.S. military says they had no choice but to defend their borders and the Israeli defense minister has rejected any need for an inquiry. To get a Palestinian perspective on the protests and the their political impact, we welcome to Late Night Live Noura Erakat. She’s a Human Rights attorney based in the U.S. where she’s acted as a legal advocate for U.S. Palestinian NGOs opposed to Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank and she’s also an Assistant Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax Virginia. Noura joins LNL from her home via Skype and I welcome her to our little wireless program. Noura the March of Return protest that began last march in Gaza couldn’t have been a surprise to the Israeli’s because they’d planned or had been planned for months. Can you please explain to the listener why it was called the “March of Return?”
NE: Absolutely, and thank you for having me on your program. Palestinians have— this is not the first time Palestinians have been in such a march. This is predicated on memories. The forced removal of a native population in Palestine. First in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war under the pretext of military necessity. About 80% of the native population was forcibly removed. 400 of their villages were destroyed. Those that were removed were then prevented from return in contravention of a customary law for refugees to return. Israel justifies their forced exile on the bases that the return of Palestinians would undermine a Jewish demographic majority within Israel hence they’re after defining its own existence as maintaining the demographic majority which is why when refugees say “we just want to go home,” Israel then says we “want to destroy Israel,” because they have equated their return and their demography with their existential status, which really undermines their status as a democratic state for its citizens. That’s one. Number two, within Israel the 160,000 Palestinians that were not forcibly removed remain forcibly displaced from their original homes. Israel, in order to establish Israeli-Settler dominion needed to erase the history of their existence and memory and therefore prevented even Palestinians who remained and became citizens from returning to their villages and on March 30, 1976 these Palestinian citizens of Israel organized a march to basically demand the right to return to their villages and to protest Israeli confiscation of their lands and building of new settlements within Israel. And so this idea of settlements and Palestinian removal has existed inside Israel and it expands in the Gaza Strip only after 1967. In 1976, during that march, Israeli police shot to kill six of the unarmed Palestinian-Israeli citizens. Citizens of their own state ,shot to kill them. And since then, Palestinians all over the world have marched on March 30 in order to commemorate their exile, to commemorate the loss of their land, and to demand, to assert that they exist. And that is really what is really so scary for Israeli. That Palestinians will not just disappear and assimilate into other Arab countries and just become nondescript. It’s their insistence that they are a nation and a sovereign people. And I’m sure Australians will understand this well with its own history or settler colonialism and its own reconciliation with native populations, what is at stake here.
ABC: Noura, as usual, crises involving Palestinians and Israelis there is an intense media battle to control the narrative. As a Palestinian, what’ve you thought of Israeli explanations?
NE: Well I think what’s really unfortunate about the media cycle in general is that the discourse that its set up is so predicated on a discourse of violence and warfare that it is not equipped to understand or explain these types of civil protest that pals engage in every single day. The only moments the media notices are when there is kinetic violence and in those instances the media immediately reverts to a framework of Israeli self-defense and what will happen next and violence in the Middle East and it’s just ill equipped to be able to understand what it means for a people to engage in a struggle for liberation. On most days, 365 days of the year. Doing so through non-violent demonstrations. This was the largest kind of civil protest. 30,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who have been who have literally been in an open air prison for the past eleven years and the siege and the naval blockade – who march—they didn’t even get to the border, which Israel didn’t declare, they were in a seem zone within the Gaza Strip and Israeli soldiers opened fire. And the media should be describing that as executions and instead they’re saying that there’re clashes when there are no clashes.
ABC: Noura, I have to ask you this. To what extent are the political forces between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority also a contributor the frustrations of the Palestinians in Gaza?
NE: The Palestinians in Gaza have a right to be frustrated with an entire international community that’s turned it’s back on it. The World Health Organization said that the conditions of the Gaza Strip will leave it unlivable, akin to mars, by 2020, which is only – you know this is a horizon of less than five years. There’s a hygiene problem. In the last onslaught Israel destroyed the only electricity generator in the Gaza Strip and has kept the population on a 2,000 a day caloric diet just to keep them above starvation. And yet the world watches this and has normalized these conditions of collective punishment in ways that really stunned any observer and especially in 2018 and all the strides we’ve made since 1948 to enshrine a human rights framework as a matter of conventional law. In terms of Fatah and Hamas, they’re also part of the Palestinian’s problem. They are vying for political control of the Gaza Strip. And Hamas, which has come to governance in 2006 has never been given its mandate to govern, which is why it has never relinquished its control. Instead has been subject to sanctions and the siege instead and Fatah vying for that control, and is now willing to take over the strip, Fatah is willing to relinquish control of the strip, and yet doesn’t want to lay down its arms and they have become at a stand still also.
ABC: It’s interesting, the New York Times Editorial Board came out yesterday with a relatively strong criticism of the Israeli position saying that “Israeli cause catastrophe at length its response to protests and the Gaza tinderbox and risk an escalation. Neither it nor the Palestinian leadership can contain” that seems like a reasonable comment.
NE: Yeah, but notice even there that the concern is for the escalation to come, not for the devastation and the structural violence already meeded daily. There should be an unequivocal call to end the land siege and the naval blockade on the Gaza Strip’s two million Palestinian population for over eleven years that has lead to untold devastations. People on the Gaza Strip have literally died because of overflowing sewage that they have literally drowned in. We’re talking about Palestinian patients that can’t get access to cancer care. We are talking about basic food needs that are inaccessible and so even the NY times in this moment warns Israel “temper your response and your treatment so that it doesn’t go beyond the pale so that this doesn’t overflow and escalate into violence and yet what we’re missing and what we’re normalizing is that Palestinians are living in conditions of violence, certainly in the Gaza Strip and acutely for eleven years. But since 1948 more generally as a result of Israel’s establishment of the international community’s inability to resolve the refugee crisis and to establish that there should be Palestinian sovereignty within the mandate of Palestine as indicated since 1917.
ABC: Noura there was a time when Edward Said was a regular on the program and I know you share his skepticism on the Oslo peace accords. Can the two state policy survive?
NE: The two state policy has been dead. The two state policy has been long dead and the only reason that politicians and international community keeps it up on stilts as a walking dead is because of a lack political will to resolve this any other way and the inability to stem its death in the first place. The Oslo accord signed in the 1993, what Edward Said referred to as the Palestinian treaty of surrender, the Palestinian Versailles, established an autonomy framework that has basically frozen in time Israeli’s control in the West Bank that we have not been able to escape from. And the Palestinian authority, in its own quest for political control, has acquiesced. Israeli, for decades of land policy and settler colonial expansion in the Oslo Accords and what they got in ‘93 was Palestinian acquiescence to that arrangement. And since then Israel has increased its settler colonial encroachment, has torpedoed the two state solution, has tripled its settler population from 200,000 into 600,000 since 1993, has entrenched its presence, wants to annex the territories that built a wall that goes through 80% of the West Bank, and now is deliberating full out annexation of 62% of the West Bank on the grounds that Oslo is dead.
ABC: Noura, sorry, sorry we’ve go to move this along. The UN Secretary General and the European Union have once called for independent investigation of the deaths in Gaza but what you’re looking for is a greater support of economic boycott of Israel.
NE: What I’m looking for is for policies that actually result in some shift in this devastating status quo. The EU—its great that there are calls for investigations, but there’ve been investigations before that have languished and died on the shelf. Like the investigation into Israel’s onslaught of the Gaza Strip in 2008 and 9 and in 2012, in 2014. There’s been little accountability. That lack of accountability reflects the lack of political will that in part stems from the US’s role within the United Nations in order to paralyze it as well as the work the peace process that has been placed as mutually exclusive with the legal accountability process. As a result of that incapacitation, what Palestinians have done is launched a civil society campaign calling for boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel that are economic, cultural, and economic boycott in order to overcome that diplomatic intransigence. If their were other solutions we would all support them and do and yet this solution or this tactic so to speak is one that seeks to circumvent this intransigence and even because of that this has become criminalized within the United Kingdom and the United States as being anti-Semitic by equating anything that criticizes Israel with being bigotreic against Jews which is absolutely unfair and is precisely why this issue has been such a taboo and so difficult to discuss merely for the inability to be able to have that discussion without accusations of being anti Jewish.
ABC: Meanwhile Netanyahu and Trump have shown very little serious interest in the two state solution and meanwhile of course Trump is planning to move the embassy from Tel Aviv. How do Palestinians feel about that decision?
NE: So I mean I think that in of itself indicates for you that the two state solution has long been dead whereas the two state stipulated that Jerusalem would be the capital of a nascent Palestinian State. Here you have a U.S. President who has explicitly said there will be no Palestinian capitol but instead they will be administering themselves under an autonomic framework. There will be no sovereignty. There will be no state. Palestinians for their part are less concerned about the lack of a state and sovereignty because that’s been torpedoed by Israel now since at least 2001 and since the eruption of the second Palestinian Intifada. The real warning amongst Palestinians in this announcement is the fact that Palestinians do not have the right to belong. That those Palestinians that have always lived in Jerusalem that are already subject to force removal in the erasure are going to have that policy accelerated against them without the ability to belong or remain there.
ABC: Noura we’ve got to wind it up. I thank you for your time. Noura Erakat, Human Rights Attorney, legal advocate for Palestinian NGOs, and her day job as Assistant Professor at George Mason University.
