“If you normalize genocide, you will have nothing left” Professor Noura Erekat at the 77th Commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba

15 May 2025

Commemoration of the 77th Anniversary of the Nakba

UN Headquarers, New York

Statement delivered by Noura Erekat, Professor of Africana studies and Criminal Justice

I. Ongoing Nakba:

Today is day 585 of genocide. Every day is a day of unprecedented atrocity. Two days ago, we saw a baby in a red onesie, not yet 1, have both of her tiny legs amputated. We witnessed a missile rip through a hospital to kill a renowned journalist receiving treatment and learned of the assassination of a 12 y/o boy who witnessed the massacre of 15 paramedics and their burial in a mass grave. Israel has destroyed 92% of Gaza’s residential buildings, incapacitated its 36 hospitals, and prevented the entry of food and basic goods. In doing so, Israel is not only killing Palestinians now but threatening the possibility of a Palestinian future. A campaign that seeks to obliterate the future of a people is a genocide. Yet, despite these chilling statistics and an ICJ decision indicating its plausibility, there remains controversy as to this basic fact. Why?

The most pervasive talking point is that Israel is not targeting Palestinians as a people but only targeting Hamas. Putting aside significant issues in law and fact that militate against this point, let me just share with you some statistics:

What we know, so far, is that at least two percent of the Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, (52,400), including over 20,000 children buried anddisappeared. The names of those under the age of one fill the first 14 pages of a 649-page document. So far, 1200 entire families have been wiped off the civil registry. Three months into the war, the UN 1 humanitarian chief described Gaza as “uninhabitable,” and since then the situation has only gotten worse. This certainly exceeds Hamas militants.

According to Israel, these horrifying numbers are irrelevant because they are the result, they say, of deliberate human shielding by Hamas. Again, putting aside significant issues in law and fact, let me just share with you the tactics of the Israeli Army itself. It has:

• Sniped children twice above the waist
• Used quadcopters to shoot injured children sprawled on the floor
• Destroyed the largest (Al Basma) in vitro fertility clinic, including 4,000 embryos
• Executed Palestinian patients with their hands zip tied and thrown into mass graves
• Sexually assaulted detainees captured without charge or trial
• Bombed safe routes where Palestinians were ordered to flee
• Bombed safe zones where Palestinians were ordered to shelter
• Tortured medical doctors to death
• Destroyed more than half of Gaza’s desalination plants undermining access to clean water
• Leveled all 4 major universities, attacked factories, libraries, bakeries, heritage sites, 247 mosques, 3 churches, and bulldozed 16 cemeteries

As put by Professor Sherene Seikaly, “Any honest observer of this war understands that the target of Israeli force and US-supplied weapons is the Palestinian civilian. Hamas combatants are the “collateral damage.”

The purpose of this campaign is the destruction of the Palestinian people for the sake of achieving long-term Israeli security, what I call “Nakba Peace” a violent oxymoron that predicates Jewish-Israeli safety on the elimination of Palestinians. In pursuit of its territorial ambitions to achieve unchecked Zionist settler sovereignty, Israel has removed Palestinians for 77 years and counting; it has imposed a permanent military occupation on the West Bank and Gaza for 58 years and counting; and it has besieged 2.3 million Palestinians for 17 years and counting. What we have been witnessing for the past 585 days is the cruelest and most violent episode of the ongoing Nakba.

On November 12, 2023, Agricultural Minister Avi Dichter, told us plainly, “This is Nakba 2023.” A campaign that is evidenced across Palestinian geographies, including in the northern West Bank where some 40,000 Palestinians have been removed this year. The Trump administration has adopted this goal in its current bid to build a Gaza riviera and remove Palestinians to the Sudan, Somalia, or Syria. And most recently, on May 4, 2025 the Israeli cabinet unanimously voted to reoccupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse its remaining inhabitants.

That is why the return of more than 300,000 Palestinians to their homes in North Gaza in early 2025 was so incredible. It was the first time in nearly 8 decades of ongoing Nakba that we witnessed the return of Palestinians en masse, a return that embodies the national 3 aspirations of the Palestinian people. As chronicled by Ahmed Abu Artema who marched home,

On that day, I walked as I had never walked before – about 15 km non-stop. I entered Gaza City, a dream long cherished during the days of war, now realised.

Despite unprecedented cruelty, Palestinians refused to surrender and marched home by foot. This is precisely why Palestinians are racialized as a security threat- because they/we refuse to disappear. The Nakba is ongoing and so is Palestinian resistance to their/our elimination.

II. International Law

There is sufficient law to end the genocide, to lift the blockade, to end the occupation, and to realize the self-determination of the Palestinian people. Had international law ever been enough, Palestinian refugees would be growing their families and their gardens on their original lands rather than be searching for the remaining flesh of their babies beneath the rubble.

Remarkably, the time of genocide has also been a moment of significant judicial strides furthering Palestinian liberation.

In January 2024 – the International Court of Justice determined that Israel’s campaign was plausible genocide.

In May 2024, it issued another provisional measure ordering the withdrawal from Rafah; and

That same month, the International Criminal Court finally issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

In July 2024, the ICJ issued an Advisory Opinion determining that Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza is unlawful, ordering it to withdraw its settlers and military from the territory, and to provide reparations to the Palestinian people.

Last month, the ICJ heard an argument on the legality of banning UNRWA, the UN refugee agency responsible for humanitarian relief – and now banned amid a starvation campaign that has killed 57 children in two months.

This is not a legal controversy; it is a political one. The United States, among other states, has wrung its hands behind judicial rulings. But this is selective deference to the court.

In its last days of office, the Biden administration recognized there is a genocide of the Masalit ethnic tribe in Darfur by the Rapid Support Forces. When asked whether they could use the same standards to make that decision to adjudicate Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the US Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice said “it will ultimately be for (ICJ) judges to decide” – with zero irony that they did not have to submit their evidence on Sudan before the ICJ.

This is not a legal controversy but a political one. The selective deference to the ICJ on the question of genocide of Palestinians is an attempt to deflect responsibility. And the ongoing counterrevolution against activists globally is an attempt to revise a history of the present. 5 Since 2020, an emerging consensus among legacy human rights organizations as well as the world court, have defined Israel as an apartheid regime. Rather than boycott, divest from, and sanction apartheid Israel, the global community has attempted to normalize it. Five years later, we see the danger of allowing that exception.

Apartheid and genocide are on the same continuum. Three of the specific acts conducted to maintain apartheid are identical to the acts conducted to commit genocide. In the former, they are done with the intent to dominate, in the latter, with the intent to destroy. Genocide is the logical outcome of any project to conquer and settle the land upon which another people live, unless it is checked.

Many of you have either experienced colonialism directly, or have ancestors who have experienced it. You are painfully aware of its legacies.

That is why in 1974, this body firmly resolved that Palestinians are a juridical people, Palestinians exist and deserve to exist. By relegating Palestine to a bilateral political issue beyond the reach of international norms, you have steadily normalized occupation. By failing to apply sanctions and engage in boycott, many of you normalized apartheid and now by failing to act, you are at risk of normalizing genocide.

But if you normalize genocide, you will have nothing left.

If it is permissible to deny a people exist, to cage them, subject them to systematic warfare, then to use AI to bomb them at unprecedented rates in their homes, to burn them alive in tents, to experiment on them with suicide drones, to deny them medical care, to 6 allow premature babies to rot in NICU units, and mamas to be denied anesthetic to have c-sections, to starve them while their food decays in miles of aid trucks, all without consequence and worse, while insisting that their lives are secondary – if not altogether insignificant – relative to Zionist settler sovereignty, then I promise you that no one is safe. As put by Colombian President, Gustavo Pietro, “Gaza is a rehearsal for the rest of the world.”

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said that victory in the war would mean the full destruction of Gaza and the displacement of its residents. He has also boasted that Israelis “are finally going to conquer the Gaza strip. We are no longer afraid of the word, occupation.” Smotrich’s audacity is our failure.

You must make it impossible for Smotrich and anyone else to boast of conquest through genocide in the 21st century, make those who speak it have to say it in hushed whispers.

III. Incapacitation of a Global System

Let us speak honestly, most of you fear U.S. retribution. The genocide in Gaza is one of the major atrocities of our time, and most people in the world are against it. Our inability to stop it reflects an international system where the equality of nation-states remains an aspirational principle.

It might be good for us to remember: the United States is an empire but the United States is not the world. In this precise moment, US lawmakers welcomed the international war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu into the White House. US lawmakers and universities welcomed Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, who was disqualified from military service because of his affiliation with the Kahane movement, declared a terrorist organization by the US and Israel.

Can you imagine being so extreme that you cannot serve in the Israeli army? The same army that sprays 5.5 year old girls with 335 bullets and executes 15 paramedics and buries them along with their ambulances in a mass grave? The Israeli army wouldn’t have Ben Gvir, but US lawmakers and several U.S. universities embraced him, just as they colluded to kidnap, disappear, and deport students. Do not look west for moral or political leadership. The United States has long absconded on that position. Do not let the United States and Israel upend the global system.

In its defense of Israel, the United States threatens the entire legal structure established since the Second World War:

• The US has vetoed 5 ceasefire resolutions to end this genocide, despite the extraordinary invocation of Article 99 by the UNSG and two invocations of Uniting for Peace Resolutions twice
  • US vetoes at the UNSC – five times to prevent a ceasefire (49 times total since 1967) + US vetoes to protect apartheid – 15 US vetoes between 1963 and 1988
• Both the Biden and Trump administration have denigrated the ICJ – US National Security Spokesman, John Kirby described the ICJ case on the Genocide 8 Convention as “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact, whatsoever.”
• The U.S. is not even a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, but the Trump admin has passed an EO to place sanctions on the Prosecutor and anyone who cooperates with the court
• In October 2024, 107 members of Congress threatened to cease financial support to the UN if it unseated Israel. Literally threatening its budget for doing its job.
  • What is the purpose of the UN, if it cannot stop a genocide and prevent a calculated starvation of 2 million people?

The international community has failed many times before, and, at great cost. One of the most significant times was in 1936 when the League of Nations allowed Mussolini’s fascist Italy to invade Ethiopia, an independent member state of the League. Then, the League imposed cosmetic sanctions rather than an oil embargo to stop the war. It tolerated Italy’s use of chemical weapons and described Ethiopia’s people’s war as human shielding. The consequence of racist imperialism was ultimately the dissolution of the League of Nations. The UN was born of this failure. It was born of the commitment to not let the atrocities of genocide from Namibia to the Armenian Genocide to the Holocaust, happen again. It is that commitment that is at stake today. If you do not stand up and speak out, this very system will be a casualty of the US-Israel genocidal war on Palestine and the Palestinian people.

Today, we do not need the United Nations to be a powerful symbol of international cooperation, we need your collective action to simply be powerful.

IV. Closing

In this moment, we have many choices. We can acknowledge Israel’s campaign as genocide and impose an arms embargo, block the ports, sever diplomatic ties, sever all civilian and military trade, impose cultural and academic boycotts, and unseat Israel for its obstinate transgressions.

If genocide is too much, you can confront this atrocity as a war, specifically, a colonial war against a racist regime and alien occupation, regulate it with the Additional Protocols and customary laws of war that recognize the captives as POWs, ensure them humane treatment, recognize Palestinians militants as combatants, and permit third party intervention. We can use the law to protect hospitals and schools and shelters, to protect the journalists and doctors and aid workers, to forcibly open the humanitarian corridors, and abide by the ICC arrest warrants to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant upon arrival.

If war is too much, you can confront this atrocity as a humanitarian tragedy, you can send in a peacekeeping mission to protect Palestinians who have been denied their right to self-defense for nearly eight decades.

If humanitarian tragedy is too much, you can find a way to have mercy on the Palestinian children – the ones who have been pulled from the rubble with two limbs and no family and find themselves in a cage without food or water.

Do not sit in the seat of power and do nothing. The United States is an empire but the United States is not the world. You are the world- each and every one of you has the capacity halt this charade and to fulfill the minimal mandate of protecting a people’s right to exist.

Individually, you are each someone’s ancestor and you will be an ancestor to someone. Our time on this earth is ephemeral, I implore you to give it meaning. As the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish reminds us: “We are not the most chosen people in the world but no one is more chosen than us.” You cannot abandon Palestine without betraying your legacy, your progeny, and yourself. May we transform this world into a place worthy of our children. May you be protected, may you be strong, may we be victorious. Free Palestine and may Palestine free us all.