April 22, 2013
The
United Nations General Assembly was on the eve of its historic vote to
recognize the State of Palestine. But, for this Palestinian American, it was no
cause for rejoicing. “The facts on the ground,” she told a packed lecture hall
at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in November, “have killed the
possibility of two states.”
Such is
the unsentimental wallop of Noura Erakat, 32, a lawyer who has emerged as a
leading voice in the United States for Palestinian rights. She has debated
conservative Fox television host Bill O’Reilly on “The O’Reilly Factor,”
appeared on the liberal “Up with Chris Hayes” program on MSNBC, and spoken in
countless university halls and protest gatherings across the country.
The
boycott Israel movement is what first put Erakat in the limelight. In 2001, as
an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, she helped launch a
divestment in Israel campaign by Students for Justice in Palestine. That led to
an active part in building Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or BDS, the global
movement launched in 2005 that aims to isolate Israel by cutting economic,
cultural and academic ties.
In an interview following her talk at AUC, Erakat recounted
how growing up in a household where her immigrant parents granted her fewer
privileges than her three brothers first fired her understanding of injustice.
“It was that same lens that lent itself very well for me to analyze what was
happening in Palestine and Israel,” she says. She happened to be doing a
semester abroad at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2000 during the Second
Intifada. “I became much more vocal and confrontational,” she recalls. Her
Israeli classmates, as Erakat saw it, “lived in a bubble.”
That
launched her involvement in trying to build a mass movement that would aid
Palestinians by applying international pressure on Israel. Besides her work
with the BDS movement, she worked on the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli
Occupation. A stint working on Capitol Hill reinforced Erakat’s instinct that
change will ultimately come from people, not governments. A main focus now is
to help balance the narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The goal
is to crack open a space in the American discourse to discuss an otherwise
un-discussed topic,” says Erakat, who teaches law at Georgetown University and
Temple University. “We can’t be polite about this. Israel’s not polite in its
violence in order to forcibly displace Palestinians on a daily basis.”