Dr. Noura Erakat:

I thank the Chair and members of the committee for inviting me and for the patience in fixing the technical problem.

I begin by affirming what my colleagues have said. I emphasise that Palestinians continue to struggle against settler colonial removal and erasure. What we are witnessing in Sheikh Jarrah is merely the most recent flashpoint of this struggle, which is not about home evictions, not about a real estate dispute, and not about expanding development in the city of Jerusalem. It is the condition against the ongoing nakba.

We are witnessing the creation of new refugees. Israel's goal is to take as much Palestinian land, with as few Palestinians on the land as possible, and to concentrate the greatest number of Palestinians onto the least amount of land possible. This is evidenced in, and explains, the 29 contiguous bantustans in the West Bank, the concentration of Palestinians in an open air prison in the Gaza Strip, the concentration of Palestinians even within Israel proper in the north in Galilee, and the impending removal from the south in the Negeb, or the Negev Desert. This is in evidence throughout historic Palestine and is representative of our condition. This context needs to be emphasised so that we do not dismiss this latest episode as skirmishes or as a conflict or a need of just removing the violence. Instead, as my colleagues have said, we need to emphasise the root cause.

Israel's matrix of laws and policies are meant to facilitate removal and territorial taking, cement preparations that are tantamount to an apartheid legal regime, cement segregation and the racial superiority of Jewish nationals, and suppress protests. This has been found by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, UN ESCWA, and Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations such as Badil, Al-Haq and B'tselem and, most recently, Human Rights Watch. Annexation is one feature of this process and phenomenon. I will examine that using case studies of Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.

Israel's establishment is predicated on the removal of Palestinians and the assertion of uninterrupted Jewish-Zionist spatial and temporal presence throughout historic Palestine. This is why the committee is likely to hear from its other witnesses this week that there is no occupation, that there was no Palestinian sovereignty prior to 1948, that this is a sui generisoccupation, and that this is Judea and Samaria on what is disputed territory. This is simply a legal argument that the international community has long rejected, and which should not be given any air time now 70 years onwards.

Israel achieved its initial mass removal of Palestinians in the course of the 1948 war, between December 1947 and 1949, when it forcibly exiled some 80% of the native Palestinian population. Upon its establishment in 1948, Israel continued this process in West Jerusalem where it forcibly removed 80,000 Palestinians. The 1967 war offered a significant opportunity for Israel to continue its expansionist projects under the framework of sui generisoccupation law and the myth of temporality and military necessity. Immediately following the close of the 1967 war, Israel annexed East Jerusalem despite international opposition and two UN Security Council resolutions that were supported by Israel's primary allies at the time, namely the US and the UK.

Nevertheless, Israel expanded Jerusalem's municipal boundaries by roughly ten times, annexing some 17,000 acres of West Bank lands. Rather than reverse these takings, the Oslo accords legitimated them as it recognised 54% of the settlements as Jewish neighbourhoods. Since 1993, Israel has continued to use a mix of martial and administrative law to pursue its territorial ambitions and the removal of Palestinians through policies, including tenuous residency rights, state lands, absentee lands appropriation, the route of the annexation wall, development of nature reserves, impunity for settler violence, and discriminatory planning and home demolitions. All of this is done separately so that we cannot see it as an holistic whole that merits outright condemnation and national action such as sanctions.

Similarly, Israel's leadership has historically marked the Jordan Valley as being of military, economic and political significance. In 1968, the then labour minister, Yigal Allon, included the area within the scope of Israel's defensible borders, and thus within the scope of the State's permanent borders. Multiple Israeli leaders, from the dovish Yitzhak Rabin, to the more hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu have reiterated that the Jordan Valley, or the easternmost border along Jordan, which constitutes 30% of the West Bank territory, is part of its "security border". Israel will not withdraw from it under any circumstances. Israel declared 60% of the Jordan Valley as a closed military zone in 1967. It built its first settlements there in the early 1970s, and consolidated its control during the Oslo accords when it declared 90% of the Jordan valley as Area C under full Israeli civil and military control, under the Oslo II framework. Since 1967, Israel has reduced the Palestinian population in the Jordan Valley from 320,000 Palestinians to 60,000. It limits Palestinian access to less than 1% of Area C. It has settled approximately 11,000 settlers across 37 settlements in the valley. What they continue to say has not been subject to de jureannexation is in fact annexed today, and off limits to Palestinians. Are members aware that the Dead Sea, which is one of the wonders of the world and is adjacent to and literally within driving distance of Palestinian families, including my own in Jericho, is off limits to Palestinians? Any member of this committee can travel today to visit that wonder of the world, can spread that mud on your body and can float in that water, but my own family who live there cannot access that same water and wonder of the world, specifically because we are marked for removal and Israel tells the world that this is necessary for military purposes and only temporary. In fact we are marked for removal. It is a matter of time. What is happening in Sheikh Jarrah will happen to us too in the valley. The territory is a significant source of water, underscoring Israel's intransigent refusal to withdraw from it.

In 2001, Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, underscored Israel's permanent ambition when he was asked whether Israel would withdraw from the Jordan Valley and replied:

Is it possible today to concede control of the hill aquifer which supplies a third of our water? Is it possible to cede the buffer zone in the Jordan Rift Valley? You know, it's not by accident that the settlements are located where they are.

Despite everything that Israeli leaders, officials and people's empirical evidence have demonstrated to us, we keep reverting to the fictions of temporality, military necessity, occupation and peace process when the writing has been on the wall that Palestinians are marked for settler colonial erasure, that Israel intends to cement its apartheid regime and that it is a matter of time before Palestinians are all made refugees, where they can remain as nondescript Arabs on the land, but not as a national people or a juridical people with the right to self-determination.

I hope that Ireland will help to break this pattern and inspire the rest of the world to take a different course. I look forward to members' questions during the discussion.