Join us for a lecture by Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and Assistant Professor of Legal Studies, International Studies, and Social Justice/Human Rights at George Mason University, September 14, 6pm, Carpenter B21. 

Introductory remarks by President Kim Cassidy

In late July 2018, Israel passed a Nation-State Law declaring Israel as a state for Jewish people and making it legal obligation to ensure their global immigration and settlement. The new law does not recognize the presence or right of residence of its Palestinian native population, including its Muslim and Christian Palestinian citizens who constitute 20 percent of the nation’s population. Israel enshrined the religious and racial supremacy of its Jewish nationals as a constitutional principle making its discriminatory regime unequivocally explicit. Even after this development, the international community hesitated to declare Israel’s legal system as tantamount to Apartheid and dubbed the new law as merely “controversial.” This lecture will explore the historical legacy of understanding the Palestinian struggle as a racial question and consider how recent renewals of Black Palestinian solidarity implicate the future of this struggle. 

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at George Mason University. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Prior to joining GMU's faculty,  she served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is the coeditor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN.  More recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine, which includes a short multimedia documentary, Gaza In Context, that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, Black Palestinian Solidarity. Noura’s media appearances include CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, PBS NewsHour, BBC World Service, NPR, Democracy Now!, and Al Jazeera. She has published in the Nation, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, Jezebel, IntlLawGrrls, The Hill, and Foreign Policy, among others. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law in the Question of Palestine (forthcoming Stanford University Press, 2019).