The past two years of the Israel-Hamas war hit home for Noura Erakat ’03, J.D. ’05, who sees the people in Gaza as her kin. Of images of Palestinians pulled from rubble, she says, “I’m mindful that that could have been me, but for the fortune of my father having left at the time that he did.”
A human rights attorney, author, and daughter of Palestinian refugees, the Berkeley Law alum is now a professor at Rutgers, where she teaches classes on race, international law, and human rights. This past October, she spoke at the United Nations Security Council about the plight of Palestinian women and girls. In recent months she’s been on NPR, CBC, and written for the Boston Review, where she has argued that repression against Palestinians fuels domestic authoritarianism in the U.S., eroding civil liberties nationally.
Much of Erakat’s intellectual and activist work started as an undergraduate at Berkeley, where she focused on development in the Middle East as an interdisciplinary studies major, and continued at Berkeley Law.
California talked with Erakat about her activist years at Berkeley, the professors who shaped her thinking, and her work today.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To start, tell me about your time at Cal.
I didn’t want to go anywhere besides Berkeley. I’m born and raised in the Bay Area, and I only wanted to go to Berkeley because of its activist reputation. I wanted to be part of that legacy.
As upset as I am with the university for its investment in weapons in our endowment portfolio, its harassment of students and protesters, as disappointed as I am in this administration handing over a portfolio of faculty and students to this Trump administration without even putting up a fight based on basic constitutional norms and defending academic freedom, none of that mitigates how Cal-strong I am because my experience at Cal is constitutive of the thinker, the activist, the advocate, the organizer that I am today.
When I get to Berkeley, I realize I’m a girl. Before I realized that I’m Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, immigrant, anything else, I just knew I was a girl. And so I ended up developing what we now call intersectionality before I knew there was a word for it.
Did that come from your parents or did that come from the classes?
It came from being a girl in the world.
Realizing that I’m the only girl among three brothers, the disparate treatment and responsibilities based merely on that gender identity. And I wasn’t having it. God didn’t create us this way. And that framework allowed me to see the treatment of Black communities in a very similar way. It allowed me to understand poverty in a very similar way. Like now it was this critical lens: whatever exists, we have created.
What classes were you taking that influenced your perspective?
It was both inside and outside the classroom. I studied with the most brilliant scholars. I only regret not knowing how brilliant they were while I was in their classes. Gillian Hart, Michael Watts, Alain De Janvry. And later at the law school, I studied with Ian Haney Lopéz, and most significantly in my life, Richard Buxbaum.
They started to put all of these feelings that I had into literature and into a global context.
My first reaction was I went kind of nuts. I had this moment in my freshman year where I thought I’m gonna go off the grid, I’ll shave my head, I’ll live in a forest, and just have the least possible bad impact that humans can have.
It was a lot. I’m very intense, so that was consistent [laughs]. And then I have to walk myself back and think, okay, well, if I’m not going to go off the grid, how can I be here and actually make this better? So I ended up in my freshman year volunteering in a Palestinian refugee camp.
How did that happen?
I had to lie to my parents because they would have never let me do this. My parents weren’t the Palestinian parents that taught us [about] Palestine. They were fleeing Palestine. They wanted me to just figure out a different life, find the refuge and the exit. I had been to Palestine with my family at age 7 and 14 with my mom. But it was the first time I went by myself.
I got a scholarship and used the money to buy a ticket to Palestine. I just said, ‘Oh, I got a job.’
When I went there, that was the most eye-opening because I realized that the cleavages that we have aren’t just between settler and native, but they were internal. I was so taken. We have some internal racism. And I think that we’re a classist people. All these things just became apparent to me.
Where was this?
In Bethlehem and Jericho.
This was winter of my freshman year. When I came back from that trip, and I looked around the dorms, I was like ‘There’s a lot of people working on a lot of topics I care about. Women’s rights, the environment, racial justice. But there’s really almost nobody out here doing Palestine.’
Then I was a junior and I was in a study abroad program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to my chagrin. I was like, ‘Why don’t you send me to a Palestinian university?’ And the response from the travel abroad program was, ‘We can’t put our students in danger.’ And I was like, they don’t realize how much more danger I [felt] at Hebrew U than I would at Birzeit [in Palestine].
Did people know you’re Palestinian?
Absolutely they knew. I’m not quiet about a thing! I was up in there using my best Hebrew describing how they stole our homes.
How did both of these episodes play into your identity?
The time in the refugee camp offered nuance. The world got much bigger. And then my experience at Hebrew University was formative because it scarred me. What happened was the intifada [started] and on the first day, September 20, 2000, Ariel Sharon entered the Al Aqsa [mosque] with a thousand troops in an act of total provocation.
That was Friday prayer and among the pious was my neighbor in Abu Dis—he was shot and killed on that day. So I went to the house to pay my condolences. His young wife was fainting from the shock of it and his daughter was holding on to a picture of [him].
When I got there I had intended to do an oral history project as part of my work at Berkeley for my classes. I then readjusted my oral history project to now collect the stories of the surviving members of the families of those who were being killed. The killing rate is nothing like it is right now in Gaza. But there were a lot of people killed. And so I was traveling from Old City Jerusalem to Ramallah to Jericho and interviewing all in the West Bank.
One day, when I was collecting these stories, Israel imposed a curfew. And it meant that I couldn’t access a phone line to tell my family where I was, and there was no transportation to get back home. And so I had to spend the night at an auntie’s house. My family lost their minds because nobody knew where I was.
That was when my father and his brother, my late uncle basically got on the phone and were like, Noura needs to come home. So I was forced to leave. And the survivor’s guilt possessed me.
How old were you and what year was this?
I was 20 in the year 2000 and I just didn’t understand how I was going to survive while everybody else might die because I had some blue passport. I didn’t tell anybody that I was back when I got to the United States because I was positive that I was going to go back to Palestine.
By the time I came back [to Berkeley], I started organizing with people and I was very clear. I was like, y’all, this is apartheid. We have different roads. We are subjugated as a class of people, even if I’m in Hebrew University. And then I joined the Students for Justice in Palestine that had formed. And we launched our divest from apartheid Israel in February 2001. When I see what the students are doing now, wow, we didn’t do anything like that. We occupied buildings, we blocked freeways. Netanyahu couldn’t speak in Berkeley. We wouldn’t let him. That was how I started speaking publicly. I traveled the country. And then I went to law school.
What were your law school days like?
I’m miserable. I hate it. I’m usually at the top of my class, and all of a sudden I feel like the dumbest kid in the bunch. I feel like everybody’s speaking Mandarin and I didn’t figure out how to speak Mandarin. I don’t know how to keep up. I lose a lot of weight and I start losing my hair.
And I had cystic acne. Being stubborn and the shame of quitting were the only reasons I stayed. And I’m so glad I stayed. I graduated with an award and a scholarship for being one of two of the most successful student activists with the Francine Diaz Memorial Award. I almost didn’t even go to that graduation. My girlfriends dragged me.
Could you share a moment in law school that shaped who you are?
There were two experiences that really did it for me. One of them was in Ian Haney Lopéz’s class. Ian Haney Lopéz is a leading critical race theory scholar, and he calls on me. It’s probably the second class I’ve taken with him. I admire this professor so much so I really want to make him proud, and I’m struggling to make it through. And he won’t stop. He’s gonna make sure I’m putting my feet to the fire. Afterwards, I approach him, and I tell him ‘I promise I can do better. Please call on me again.’ And he says to me, ‘I know you can do this, but you also have to be overprepared and better than everyone else because they’re expecting you to fail.’
And he was right. As a Middle Easterner, I’m categorized as white. So there is no affirmative action for me. But everybody thought I was an affirmative action baby. And I’ve been overprepared since then.
The other really formative experience was with Richard Buxbaum, my corporations professor. We developed a lovely relationship and I came to learn his family perished in the Holocaust. It’s not like these things are at odds. I hate that the narrative of Holocaust and Palestinian Nakba are antagonistic. If we really appreciated humanity, we would understand them as a continuum.
But here’s what happens with Buxbaum. As I’m writing [a] law paper, we want to discuss what is the applicable law. And so I’m just rattling off. I was like, obviously occupation law. I just feel like it’s matter of fact. And he says, ‘But how do we know the [Palestinian] land is occupied?’ I was like, obviously there are soldiers there and they took it away and my family’s being driven off of it. And he’s like, ‘No, they say that it didn’t belong to anybody.’ And my mind is now in somersaults because I trust this man. I know he’s not being political. We’re intellectual friends. I know he’s mentoring me. So if he’s asking me this question, it is imperative that I take it seriously.
My journey of answering that question becomes a decade-long journey, and becomes the seed of intellectual inquiry that culminates in my first book, Justice for Some. But I never stop interrogating that very same inquiry, which is basically, what is the relationship between law and power?
Fast-forward to this year: What was your initial reaction to the October 10 ceasefire?
My initial reaction was the reaction of all Palestinians, which is finally we might be able to eat and sleep. They can have a night where the sky is not gonna fall on top of them. But then mixed in with this reaction is, this isn’t going to work, this isn’t a ceasefire agreement, this was a document that was negotiated mostly between Israel and the United States that was imposed on the Palestinians under duress, that neither involves them nor does it have any terms of accountability.
The risk of it is the fact that this agreement will also be weaponized in order to force people into impotence. Don’t protest because you might undermine this fragile peace.
Do you think we’re at an inflection point for Palestinian rights?
There’s this duality that I’ve had to embrace. Israel is losing. But at the same time, Palestinians aren’t winning. The situation on the ground is only getting worse. The genocide is expanding in the West Bank, where settlers are basically engaging in pogroms right now of burning olive trees during harvest season, of attacking elders, of burning cars and attacking neighborhoods in the middle of the night with the cover of Israeli law enforcement.
How can Palestinians endure so much and still come out after two years? There’s no reparations. There’s no tribunal. So how do we hold that together? The way that I got through the despair of this reality and the thing that I’m reminded of is that I am continuing a legacy that my ancestors started. They were continuing what their ancestors started, and after me there will be generations that will continue the legacy that I’ve maintained. And knowing that all freedom struggles are intergenerational, but are inevitably victorious because liberation is insatiable and irresistible.
