Palestinian-American rights lawyer arrested over Israel-bonds protest

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (MNTV) — The prominent Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat was arrested and charged with trespassing after she spoke against a Florida county’s billion-dollar investment in Israel bonds at a public budget hearing — a case experts call an attempt to criminalize protected political speech.

Erakat was released on bond hours later and is due in court, she said.

Erakat — a Rutgers University professor and one of the best-known scholars of international and human rights law in the United States — was among more than 100 residents who came to a Palm Beach County commission budget hearing to oppose the county’s more than $1 billion holding of Israel bonds, government-backed securities that fund the Israeli state.

Commissioners limited public comment to one minute per speaker, and the hearing descended into disorder after several people spoke, prompting a recess as sheriff’s deputies cleared protesters from the chamber.

Mayor Sara Baxter said the bond investment fell outside the scope of a budget hearing and could not be discussed. Erakat was detained by deputies in an elevator at the county government building and charged with trespassing, according to the Miami New Times; the sheriff’s office had not released an arrest report detailing the circumstances.

Erakat said afterward that she had been released on bond at 1 a.m. and given a court date. “I’m fine,” she wrote on Instagram, describing what she witnessed as “alarming and terrifying.”

She said organizers had come to press the county to divest bonds that expire Nov. 1, at the second of three scheduled hearings, but that commissioners introduced new rules limiting comment until they barred any discussion of the bonds at all.

When constituents spoke anyway, she said, the commissioners called a recess and left, after which “cops swarmed the room” and ordered anyone who had come to speak on the bonds to leave. “I refused,” she wrote, calling the scene “a glimpse into how protecting Israel requires the sabotage of democratic norms.”

The county’s Israel-bond holdings had drawn scrutiny before the hearing.

Its investment reached $1 billion in January after a $350.5 million purchase that month by the county clerk, Mike Caruso, who has since been suspended, the New Times reported.

Experts argue that public pension and treasury funds should not be used to buy the bonds of a foreign government accused of grave rights violations in Gaza, where a genocide has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians; Erakat also called the holding “a losing investment” that violates state and local law “on several grounds.”

During the hearing, a commissioner told a protesting military veteran that he was “an embarrassment” to his uniform.

Muslim and civil rights organizations swiftly condemned the arrest. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), its Florida chapter, and the Internationalist Law Center called Erakat’s detention unjust and demanded the charge be dropped.

“Noura Erakat was arrested unjustly for speaking out against a horrific policy,” said CAIR-Florida communications director Wilfredo Amr Ruiz. Advocates framed the arrest as part of a broader pattern of US authorities and institutions restricting pro-Palestinian advocacy — from campus protests to public meetings — even as opposition to the war grows.

Erakat, who teaches at Rutgers and sits on the editorial committee of the Journal of Palestine Studies, is the author of the widely cited book “Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.”

She said the county organizers “have no intention of stopping” and that she was “honored to support their efforts.” For human rights monitors, the sight of a law professor arrested for a one-minute statement at a public hearing crystallized a central concern of the moment: that ordinary avenues of dissent over US and local support for Israel are increasingly met not with debate but with removal and arrest.