Justice For Some: Law and the Question for Palestine with Noura Erakat (Episode 59)

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Justice For Some: Law and the Question for Palestine with Noura Erakat (Episode 59)

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How has international law been strategically deployed to shape the Palestinian struggle for freedom across a century-long arc, from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza. Join host Sahar Aziz in conversation with Noura Erakat about the promise and risk of international law in the pursuit of Palestinian freedom and the broader relationship between law and liberation.

Our discussion examines the concept of "legal work"—the deliberate efforts by powerful actors to bend legal doctrine to their objectives—and how this has transformed international law to advance certain interests over others. We delve into the "sovereign exception" framework that has enabled the creation of exceptional legal categories excluding Palestinians from otherwise applicable protections, from the British Mandate period through Israeli occupation and colonization. Legal strategies have been used to consolidate territorial control, facilitate dispossession, and legitimize military tactics that compromise civilian protections globally, while also exploring moments when weaker actors have leveraged law's emancipatory potential through strategic and tactical ingenuity.

Professor Noura Erakat’s groundbreaking work demonstrates that the law's current outcomes were never inevitable—that law is politics, and its meaning depends on political intervention by states and people alike. Through original interviews with principals from Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and comprehensive historical analysis, she reveals how Palestinian leaders gained significant legal victories at the UN before eventually exchanging hard-won international recognition for a bilateral peace process that accelerated their dispossession. Her work shows both the profound limitations of international law when serving the powerful and its counterintuitive utility when mobilized in support of political movements seeking liberation.

Biography

Noura Erakat is Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is a legal scholar with research interests in humanitarian law, human rights law, critical race theory, national security law, and Palestinian Studies. She has published over two dozen academic articles and book chapters, including in the American Journal of International Law, American Quarterly, and the Oxford Bibliographies in International Law.