Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Professor Nora Ericott. She is Associate Professor of

Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She is also the author of Justice for Some Law and

the Question of Palestine available from Stanford University Press. Professor Erica, thank you so much

for joining us on current affairs. Thank you for having me, Nathan. I want to start with recent events

in Gaza. In August 2022, there were new Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, which resulted in a number of civilian casualties before a few days later a ceasefire agreement was reached.

There was a reprisal rocket fire.

The United States issued a statement defending the Israeli airstrike, saying that it believed

in Israel's right to defend itself.

But as far as I understand it, these particular strikes on Gaza were launched under the justification not of defense against an attack that had actually happened, but on the grounds of preemption of the possible theoretical future attacks.

So I would, as a legal expert on Israel, Palestine, I wonder if you could first tell us, you

know, what exactly happened earlier in August and how it was, and first,

how it was, how it was justified, and then perhaps we can analyze those, those justifications.

So yeah, Nathan, what I hear you saying is, I would respond in three parts, right? There's the

question of the recent, recently what happened in Gaza right? There's the question of the recent,

recently what happened in Gaza. Then there's the question of the use of force and the legal

regulation of the use of force, both in two parts. One as a form of preemptive self-defense

and then the question of self-defense writ large. So let me go through those one at a time.

In regards to the first,

the Gaza Strip has, is part of, of Palestine. And what Israel has tried to do very explicitly

since, you know, leading up to what we know as the Oslo peace process is to set Gaza apart

separate from the question of Palestine, has erected a militarized perimeter

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