"In This Moment": Noura Erakat's Speech at the Palestine Literature Festival

Speaking Out of Place

On Wednesday, 1 November, the Palestine Festival of Literature held an event in New York titled, "But We Must Speak: On Palestine and the Mandates of Conscience." On that occasion, Noura Erakat delivered a powerful and stunning speech entitled “In This Moment,” in which she spoke on the genocide in Gaza from her perspective as a teacher, a legal expert, a Palestinian, as a mother, and as an activist. We are grateful to Noura Erakat, to PalFest, and to Jadaliyya for permission to feature this speech on Speaking Out of Place.

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Noura is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.
Her book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between international law and politics during five critical junctures between 1917-2017 to better understand the emancipatory potential of law and to consider possible horizons for the future.
Her research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, social justice, critical race theory, and the Palestinian-Israel conflict.