It’s a Test of Whether International Law Applies to the West
Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday at 1 PM Eastern, our new regular time.
Our guest will be the renowned, Israeli-born, Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, who teaches at Brown University. In August, he described returning to Israel and encountering students whose “rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history.” This month he concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. We’ll discuss the genocide debate, the ICC warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders, and the use and misuse of the memory of the Holocaust.
Paid subscribers will get an email with the Zoom link Thursday, and the video itself after it airs. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Rebecca Traister, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader recently recommended Naomi Shihab Nye’s young adult novel, Habibi, about Liyana, a Palestinian-American girl from St. Louis whose family returns to West Bank, a place she struggles to make home.
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
Gaza’s record number of child amputees.
An early estimate of the number of children killed in Gaza versus Ukraine.
How the African National Congress held the line against targeting civilians.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane details the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on campus speech.
The speech that Ayman Odeh was not allowed to complete last week in the Knesset.
Senator Jon Ossoff’s speech in favor of restricting arms sales to Israel.
A Chabad rabbi is killed in the United Arab Emirates.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
The decision of the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leader Mohammad Deif, is a really, really crucial moment, I think, in this struggle about whether international law means anything. The United States had created these institutions, and the West had created these institutions, starting after the Holocaust, and then kind of updating them in the 1990s in a kind of unipolar world to apply to always to countries that were basically America and the West’s enemies, whether it was in the 90s, it was the former Yugoslavia or in Rwanda or other African leaders.
And the question about these institutions, and about this international law in general, has always been, is it just a project of Western hegemony and domination, essentially a fraud to go after America’s enemies? This is what someone like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping would say. Or, actually, do these institutions have a deeper meaning? Are they actually aspiring in however kind of imperfect a way towards some universal norms about the way that states can treat human beings?
And that’s why what South Africa did by bringing the case about genocide, and why these warrants are so important because they offered the possibility that these institutions—even though the Biden administration doesn’t want them to be universally applicable, it doesn’t want them to apply to the United States, it doesn’t want them to apply to America’s ally Israel—this creates the possibility, in fact, that these will, that these mean something more than just a fig leaf for the domination and the agenda of one particular superpower and its allies. And that’s why it’s so important that some countries in the West and elsewhere have agreed to abide by this. Canada, for instance, have said they will abide by this because they’re actually taking seriously the principle that international law and international institutions matter.
It’s very striking when you see the critics of these warrants, they basically generally say something like, you know, why is Israel being singled out? In fact, Israel isn’t being singled out by any reasonable measure. The level of destruction of civilian human life in Gaza is just astonishing. There are more child amputees in Gaza now than in any other conflict in modern history. And this is in a territory with only two million people. Many, many more children have been killed than in Ukraine, which is a country 20 times the population. So, if you apply a universal standard here, then you have to apply it to Israel.
And so, essentially what the critics are saying is this should not apply to Israel because Israel is an American ally and the West, or sometimes they make some version of because there should be some kind of permanent exception for a Jewish state because Jews are history’s permanent victims of these kind of human rights atrocities and cannot be its perpetrators. But Jews are human beings. And states that speak in Jews’ name are just as susceptible to the abuses of power as any other states in the world, nor is there any kind of moral perfectionism or kind of superiority to countries that happen to be aligned with the United States. And that’s the fundamental principle that’s on the table here, and I think in this horrifying, horrifying last year or more, this is one of the few rays of light: the fact that actually international law and international institutions and the principle of human rights could actually still mean something.
I think the other really critical thing about these warrants is the implementation, the potential implementation, of a legal non-violent effort to basically hold Israel accountable and to create the possibility of moving towards justice and freedom for Palestinians. This is one of the really important lessons of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The African National Congress was not a non-violent organization. It did use violence in its struggle against apartheid, but it tried to limit those military attacks to military and industrial sites, not to target civilians. And that was not always easy politically for the ANC to do. It had internal critics.
And one of the reasons that I think the ANC was able to hold to that very, very important kind of moral position in a way that Hamas has not is because the ANC could tell Black South Africans that actually these efforts were in accordance with international law. That they were actually getting somewhere. That a global Anti-Apartheid Movement, which was imposing sanctions, which was boycotting, which was kicking South Africa out of international sporting events, which was passing resolutions at the UN and through other international institutions, that could show Black South Africans that there was an alternative to violent resistance that targeted civilians.
And I think one of the things we have to do is show Palestinians that these kind of efforts have a chance of success. The US and Israel have done their best to try to ensure that these efforts always fail. But I think there is now a little bit of a glimmer of hope that there are forces in the world that actually give them a better chance of success.
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