The Palestinian-American lawyer, activist and academic Noura Erekat gave an address entitled “In This Moment” on 1 Nov 2023 to the Palestinian Festival of Literature in New York City. The Balfour Project is running this excerpt of her “address to our ancestors” as it gives a vivid and moving outline of rural and peaceful Gaza, before the Nakba of 1948 and in the years of Palestinian exile that followed. During 1948, 180,000 Palestinian refugees fled the Jewish , later Israeli, forces into Gaza, tripling its population. From 1967, the Gazan experience was one of increasing Israeli brutality, siege and isolation, culminating in the all-out military assaults of the past 17 years, including the devastating, ongoing one of autumn 2023.. Noura Erekat is also co-founder and co-editor of al-Jadaliyya, The Controversy, or Dialectic, produced by the Arab Studies Institute. She is also an associate professor at Rutgers University, in New Jersey.