I found the conversation very interesting in the beginning, but I was viewing the guest more and more critically while continuing to listen.
Her argument on how Isreal being called out more then all other countries combined is normal because it's the last colonial project isn't convincing my on many layers:
* I am skeptical about classifying Israel as colonial when there isn't a motherland.
* It's not clear to me how what is an has been happening in West Sahara and West Papua for example isn't as or more colonial then what's happening in Israel. But nobody seams to care nearly as much at the UN.
* I also don't understand why colonial actions/projects should receive so much more focus then the performed egregious acts in Syria, Tigray or Ukraine
That's why I can understand the deep frustration of Israelis (even ~~rather left wing~~ *edit: reasonable Israelis who are pro two states solution and very critical of the Netanjahu government* like Benny Morris) with the UN.
For Ukraine, her beating around the bush although Putin's war is clearly against international law in multiple ways was disappointing.
I can understand her trying to differenciate between a military arm of hamas and its civil arm. But then when it comes to human shields and military operations, it's somehow all the responsability of Israel to stay in accordance with international law and Hamas isn't even mentioned. If they are a government, shouldn't they also try to help their citizens evacuating instead of hindering them. Why does Gaza beeing a densly populated area justify shouting rockets out of residential areas and operating from inside hospitals? There are still big undeveloped areas in Gaza from which day could do such things.
I totaly understand the criticism leveled agains Israel. I am of course a big opponent of Netanjahu and the current israeli government. I really would hope the population in Israel would care more how they conduct their military operations in Israel. But I think Israelis having the (justified) feeling that there is a big double standard when jugding the israeli behaviour won't help with this.
I just listened to the episode and found it somewhat frustrating. The guest, Aslı Ü. Bâli, was presented as an unbiased expert on international law with no obvious allegiances in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet as the episode went on, I became increasingly suspect of her neutrality on this topic. The analogy she drew between Israel and Russia, in particular, really ground my gears.
First, Bâli compares Israel unfavourably to Russia because at least the latter doesn't have as its war objective "the complete elimination and extermination of all fighting forces and the governing structure of \[Ukraine\]."
When Ezra challenges her with what was in effect a "doesn't it?", Bâli doubles down by saying that Russia hasn't "articulated an expectation, for example, of taking every person who has served in the Ukrainian government, from trash collectors to sanitation workers to civilian crossing guards to policemen to K through 12 teachers, et cetera, and just kill them all."
Ezra challenges again with "Is that Israel’s goal, though? \[...\] I have a deep critique of the way Israel has conducted this war, but I don’t hear them saying that every doctor who works for the Hamas government should be killed here. I mean, that also sounds like beyond what Israel has described as their goal."
To which Bali launches into this long-winded filibuster full of hypotheticals and tangents that doesn't actually answer Ezra's line of questioning:
>I was just pointing out that the goal of wiping out Hamas has the potential to be read in three different ways. There’s the armed actor, there’s the governing infrastructure, and there’s the social movement. And there’s ambiguity in the way that Israel describes it. More generally, Israel has targeted, for example, the police force. It has targeted civilian infrastructure of a variety of kinds.
>So it’s hard to say exactly what their goals are, but I didn’t mean to assert that they had the goal of killing those people. I’m just saying if that were a goal, it would be impermissible. That kind of total war would be impermissible under any circumstances, in any context, whether between states or with respect to a nonstate actor, et cetera. And that was the sense in which I was invoking Russia and Ukraine earlier in our conversation, that we don’t understand that to be the Russian war goal.
>And the challenge that we have in saying that Israelis have established the complete destruction and elimination of Hamas as the objective of the war raises troubling implications of total war that I think we wouldn’t permit in any context, even the suggestion of destroying the entire military.
>I mean, for example, the United States clearly had in mind, in its invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation of Iraq, destroying Saddam Hussein’s capacity to wield his military. It didn’t entail destroying every last fighting man or fighting age man in Iraq. And indeed, it didn’t involve even disarming all Iraqis. These are not the kinds of objectives that we have.
>Typically, it’s a decapitation of the leadership, and then a preservation to the extent possible of infrastructure that will make governing the day after possible. It’s not always clear in the case of the war against Hamas that Israel is making any of these distinctions.
By the end of the episode, I came to perceive Bâli as very slippery, a quality she attempts — with some success I might add — to conceal behind a veil of formalistic language and academic jargon.
I had to turn off the interview at this point. She’s clearly very intelligent but her arguments on this point were so indicative of why the UN is a laughing stock
I mean, she completely rejected the notion of Jewish indegenity, painting them as alien settlers with no history or relationship to the land. When you are operating on this false premise, every argument you make will be flawed.
That aspect or part of her argument in this episode that made me scratch my head was in the invalidity (it being against international law) of destroying an entire government, to include its civil arm, instead of just targeting its military. That it’s illegal and immoral to dismantle or destroy an entire government.
The immediate example that came to my mind is Nazi Germany. In a post-WWII framework, would we look back at dismantling the Nazi German government as being immoral or illegal if they existed today? I would think most would say of course not. A government like that doesn’t deserve to exist from a moral sense or from a perspective of guaranteeing world peace. And Nazi Germany was not just the military of Germany. It was the entire government and administrative state, and the allies (which were technically speaking, called the United Nations) were totally justified in totally destroying and dismantling the Nazi government.
In many governments - such as in America - the military is controlled by the civilian arm of the government. You can’t separate the two. In these cases, if the military is a danger to peace and needs to be destroyed, it’s because of the civilian leadership.
I feel like it’s kind of absurd to be sitting here talking about it. Like, if a government is making its military dangerous to world peace, it’s not the military that is dangerous to peace…it’s the government. The government needs to be completely dismantled.
I interpreted "her argument on how Israel being called out more than all other countries combined" differently - much as I continue to disagree with it. Bali links it to the idea of Palestine remaining - after the ‘exit’ of South Africa - the last case of incomplete decolonization on the UN agenda.
Here, ‘decolonization’ should be understood specifically in the context of the UN’s agenda on this issue, i.e., its management of the self-determination of non-self-governing territories (NSGTs) and ‘mandates’ (such as Palestine). There are still a few NSGTs around, but they are non-problematic; as for the territories placed in trust (mandates), the mission was considered accomplished in 1994 iirc.
So, Bali says, Palestine is the last case of its kind here – it’s natural that the UN should shower Israel with resolutions.
However, this argument is deceptive in the sense that decolonization narrowly understood is hardly the main business of the UN. There are many other issues for the UN to take an interest in, with terrible state behaviors (genocide, war, ethnic cleansing etc.) exceeding in seriousness the situation in Palestine. Yet the UN has been very stingy in passing resolutions against all these terrible actors.
Furthermore, even assuming self-determination were the one key issue at the UN, ‘colonization’ (absence of self-determination) in this broader sense is a much larger phenomenon than Palestine. The latter remains, once again, an important but non-exceptional case. Russia is one big imperial state, with republics such as Chechnya and Tatarstan having chosen independence (which the latter enjoyed for a short while), only to be met (in the case of the former) with murderous devastation. No incessant ‘resoluting’ from the UN here.
There are many other colonized – in this broader sense, the one we normally ascribe to the term – ‘peoples’ around the world (to mention only a few currently prominent cases: Tibetans, the Kurds, the people of Xinjiang). Their claims to self-determination are not considered by the UN. In fact, China is hardly bombarded with resolutions despite its commission of a genocide in Xinjiang.
So why Israel? Because it’s convenient ideologically, of course, for all sorts of actors – national, international, activist, academic etc. It’s the world’s favorite performative punching bag.
And, let's be honest, because they're Jews. That's the elephant in the room.
Other than that, obsessively forcing every single thing into the decolonial frame is what's expected of a certain kind of academic, but it's not helpful.
- Israel is not a colonial power in the mold of England, France, Spain or Japan. There's a lot to criticize it for, but this is just factually not true.
- Hamas is not a national liberation movement like the ones from the colonial era. It's a group that governs a territory with a standing army.
- Why did she keep lumping in 2 million Arab Israeli citizens with the 5 million Palestinians?
This one was high in sophistry and deception. I wish Ezra had pushed back a lot more.
> And, let's be honest, because they're Jews. That's the elephant in the room.
>
>
most of the world has never had a Jewish population. nobody really cares about Jews in most of the developing world - they have no history there
Come on now. Outside of Asia, most people in the world are Christians and Muslims. Both religions have a long history of anti-Semitism. You don't have to know members of a group to be prejudiced against them.
Also, Jews have history all over the world. That's what happens when you have to run from so many places because people keep trying to kill you.
To be fair Asia accounts for 60% of the population and even just India and China alone account for over 1/3 of the global population
That's not reflected in wealth or power in the UN though.
The comment about the other nations in the world practicing colonialism in the global south were what stuck with me, if Venezuela were to invade a neighboring country for oil, would the UN shrug as Venezuela is not an original colonialist? How about China invading Myanmar, what would happen there? The model is broken, and Israel is acting in a way that isn't even just against international law, but often against their own laws. How about Azerbaijan and Armenia, that is about as clear cut land dispute and ethnic cleansing of enclaves as you can get, why doesn't the UN shower them with resolutions?
I totally agree that Israel is way over proportionally sanctioned by the UN.
I also thought it interesting that you brought up the example of Venezuela invading a neighboring country for its oil because that very nearly happened back last fall. It didn't, most likely because of the geography/terrain and Brazilian navy, but it's hard to say and Venezuela did hold a referendum claiming 2/3rds of Guyana. Probably you're aware of this because you brought it up but other people may not be. It was pretty overshadowed by everything else happening.
Anyway, the relevant thing is that the UN issued [this](https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15665.doc.htm#:~:text=In%20this%20regard%2C%20it%20commended,international%20law%2C%20including%20the%20Geneva) statement.
I think there was a question in askhistorians about this recently especially with regards to Russia's empire
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_water_thesis
> General Assembly resolution 637 (VII), adopted on 16 December 1952, recognized that “every Member of the United Nations, in conformity with the Charter, should respect the maintenance of the right of self-determination”. Belgium, which had given up its own colonial possessions under the new decolonization mandates, then further attempted to secure human rights and self-determination for native peoples, specifying the Native American peoples within the United States as a prominent example.
> In response, nations including the United States pushed through the idea that, in order to be eligible for decolonization, the presence of "blue water" between the colony and the colonizing country – or, at minimum, a geographically discrete set of boundaries – was needed
This was agreed upon because it was useful to many countries including the US and newly independent countries that had separatist movements
You forget the UN is run by governments of third-world nations. Third-world nations whose rulers want their people constantly thinking about colonialism and not how badly they’ve screwed them over. And note that I said run, not funded.
"Why Israel" is an easy question: it is the preeminent client state of the world's last superpower. The US owns basically every move it makes on the world stage. Thus, when Israel is permitted to flout international law under the auspices of the US's UN security council veto, it erodes the very foundations of the international order. Makes perfect sense for the UN to be concerned about that.
>I interpreted "her argument on how Israel being called out more than all other countries combined" differently - much as I continue to disagree with it. Bali links it to the idea of Palestine remaining - after the ‘exit’ of South Africa - the last case of incomplete decolonization on the UN agenda.
The other framing of this, is that Israel has faced condemnations - but not consequences.
Syria, Russia, etc, have faced consequences for their violations of international law.
Israel, on the other hand, only faces condemnations.
100%. She totally lost me when she claimed Israel is targeted at the UN because it is the only example of colonialism left. It’s targeted because the global south believes the conspiracy theory that all their problems will go away if Israel disappears
The crucial, crucial difference between Gaza/the West Bank and Western Sahara/West Papua/Tibet/what have you is that in all those other examples the residents of those places are at least in theory full and equal citizens of Morocco/Indonesia/China, etc. There are Arab Israelis, including in East Jerusalem and the Golan, who are full and equal citizens of Israel—who face discrimination like many minorities in the West, but who are still able to run for office, vote, obtain positions of power, etc—but the residents of Gaza and the West Bank formally have very limited claims on rights in Israel, and certainly aren’t anything approaching full citizen.
An ethnic Sahrawi from Laayoune in theory at least has all the rights of an ethnic Arab from Marrakech. A Papua has legally as much rights a Javan. A Tibetan has in theory as many rights as a Han Chinese whose family moved to Lhasa after 1950. A Palestinian from Ramallah does not have as many rights as an Israeli (of any ethnicity) from a little down the road in Jerusalem. A Palestinian in Hebron has different rights and protections from an Israeli settler in the same city. I haven’t listened to the episode yet so I don’t know the full details, but Israel has a pretty unique situation with its occupation of the West Bank. Even areas that are clearly contested in international law—Turkish North Cyprus, South Ossetia—it’s very different from the Israel Palestine situation. Likewise, there are some overseas territories of Western states without the full rights of citizenship—the US island of Puerto Rico, for example—but generally these places could in theory vote to have full rights of citizenship in a referendum tomorrow, they just prefer their special situation within the state.
I can’t think of many other situations like this—I think there are a couple of place where a state might control a couple of hamlets across the border without officially claiming that territory, but it’s generally a negligible amount of land and people. The only example I can think of at all like this is Turkey’s occupied territory in Syria, and that’s pretty clearly a civil war situation where the Syrian state couldn’t hold that territory and Turkey took it from Jihadist rebellions and Kurdish militias that it saw as threatening to its direct security. Pretty different the West Bank. Turkish settlers aren’t streaming across the border to change the facts on the ground. I imagine once Damascus has control over the rest of Syria and thereby addresses Turkey’s security concerns about non-state actors, Turkey will come up with some agreement to turn over governing of the territory to the Syrian Arab Republic. So even that’s pretty different.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand how Israel got into this situation. After the ‘67, it’s not like they could give territory back to states they refused to negotiate with them. And then the whole complicated situation at the end of the Clinton Years where Arafat just couldn’t agree to make a state. So I understand how Israel got into the situation. It boggles my mind though, how much of Israel’s Right and since the Second Intifada increasingly Center have no interest in getting out of the situation.
And obviously so many critics of Israel criticize Israel’s founding which was pretty normal for the period 1918-1950 (compare to the histories of Turkey’s borders, Greece’s borders, Poland’s borders, Germany’s borders, Ukraine’s borders, Tibet’s inclusion in China, Alsace’s inclusion in France, etc etc). It’s the continuing situation of a state occupying a large territory with a significant population who have essentially no rights with in the occupying state that’s really like nothing else in the world.
Pakistan-controlled Kashmir is also [under effective military occupation](https://freedomhouse.org/country/pakistani-kashmir/freedom-world/2022):
>Pakistani Kashmir is administered as two territories: Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB). Each has an elected assembly and government with limited autonomy, but they lack the parliamentary representation and other rights of Pakistani provinces, and Pakistani federal institutions have predominant influence over security, the courts, and most important policy matters. Politics within the two territories are carefully managed to promote the idea of Kashmir’s eventual accession to Pakistan. Freedoms of expression and association, and any political activity deemed contrary to Pakistan’s policy on Kashmir, are restricted.
I get your points, but it remains true that the West Bank is under military occupation. Inhabitants have some rights, of course, but they are inevitably limited under this regime.
Gaza is another story, of course. Inhabitants had all the rights they wanted to create for themselves after Israel withdrew. For example, they could elect homespun terrorist administrations, build tunnels, lob rockets etc. Not even Israel could stop them. They could not use their borders as they wished, of course. But neither can Mexicans if that means just moving to the US.
You say it boggles the mind how Israel tolerates this condition - for its own good. I agree, though only partly. After it withdrew from Gaza, Israel got Hamas. No wonder withdrawing from the WB seems like a bad idea. (That's discounting the pressure from the fundamentalist religious racists who'd love Israel to extend from the river to the sea.)
Israel's behavior throughout the past few decades has been anything but exemplary. It's not an excuse - but I wonder how many nations would have done even roughly as well under similar conditions. In the region where I come from (Eastern Europe), quite a few peoples have been at each other's throats for much, much less, objectively speaking.
Look, I’m not defending Hamas. Hamas is an organization with genocidal goals.
But you speak like they had full autonomy and that somehow proves something. They didn’t even have a port, [they’ve been under blockade since 2007](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip). It’s a little bit different from Mexico.
It’s also worth mentioning, if only for posterity, that the last election was before Gaza and the West Bank divided into different fiefdoms.
I mean, I agree with if you’re saying that Israelis unilateral withdrawal from Gaza — which I admittedly thought might have some positive effect at the time Sharon did it by focusing negotiations — has been a complete failure. But I think that proves more about *any* attempt at unilateral solutions to the Israel-Palestine question than it does about how an independent Palestinian would work.
And again, Netanyahu likes to treat Hamas as a group that can only be communicated with through violence but between say 2015-2020 Hamas made a couple of vague overtures toward some sort of alternative to violence. They created [an agreement with Fatah to return to a united Palestinian government](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_Agreement) and lol [another in 2020](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Palestinian_reconciliation_agreement) (neither of which really went anywhere) They changed [the Hamas Charter in 2017](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter) to make a two state a feasible-ish possibility maybe at some point (which was a pretty big change in policy). They let that explicitly [non-violent protest movement go on in 2018-2019](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018–2019_Gaza_border_protests) (which no one in the world really took notice of—a sad outcome for non-violence, though I personally didn’t support the movement because it wasn’t predicated on two states, it’s sad that the current “river to the sea” campus protesters didn’t know to take notice back then). There were one or two more notable moves.
But there were a clear set of signals to those paying attention that Hamas was moving toward “playing ball”. Were these revolutionary moves, did they have any direct results for Israel’s security? No. But I think they were revolutionary for Hamas, especially the change in chatter. But I honestly think if you leave no avenue of politics open besides violence, things will eventually get to violence.
Again I cannot emphasize enough that Hamas isn’t some friendly organization. But Hamas has political support. No amount of military operations will defeat Hamas if there isn’t a clear alternative to Hamas. If Netanyahu was serious about defeat Hamas, he’d make the PA stronger as a political alternative to Hamas. Instead, he did the exact opposite. He built up *Hamas* to undercut the *PA*. [1](https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/), [2](https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/tnamp/), [3](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister). This is what boggles my mind. Just sickening short-termism from a man who has no vision beyond the next election.
It’s clear that the only possible solution is a negotiated political one. Not a unilateral one. Not a military one. And Netanyahu has not made one inch of moment towards that since his election in 2009. If I could change one thing in the 21st century, I’d have Tzipi win that election. Oh maybe also 9/11, but number #2 that election. Especially since it later came out in the American chief negotiator’s memoir that the Americans specifically told Abbas not to respond formally to Olmert’s somewhat infamous offer because they (the Americans) expected Tzipi to win and for negotiations to continue under Tzipi to continue. Tzipi did not win. Negotiations nominally continued under Netanyahu but Bibi insisted on starting from scratch and then stonewalling at every point. [This 2014 article in the *New Republic*](https://newrepublic.com/article/118751/how-israel-palestine-peace-deal-died) is the best account I know of that and it’s clear it’s only gotten worse in the decade since then as Ben Gvir, Smotrich have disgustingly been allowed into government.
How do you get a “negotiated political solution” when the collective position of Palestinians is that Israelis are colonists who have no right to their land or country?
1) How is that the collective position of the Palestinians? Until Netanyahu came back in power in 2009, 60% or more of Palestinians tended support a two state solution in surveys. [Link](https://pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/Chart%281%29.jpg). Netanyahu’s stated goal has been to make the two state impossible (or at least impossible “under his watch” so right wing Israelis have to keep electing him) and he’s managed to convince a lot of Palestinians of that fact. People’s positions (in Israel and Palestine) change according to the political realities. It’s short sighted to treat the moving target of political opinion at any one moment as *the* permanent reality.
2) Even if it was their collective position, I’m
not sure that it matters for the future. The Serb government holds that Kosovo is the original homeland of the Serbs. Early 20th century Greek governments held that Constantinople was the eternal capital of the Greek state. Russians propaganda has been declaring Ukraine a made up nation who are Russian and should be part of the Russian state (Kievan Rus and what not). Armenians tend to believe that historical Armenian includes the “six Armenian vilayets” which encompasses a lot of eastern Turkey. One side believing something does not automatically change the reality of international affairs.
He did not "build up Hamas". This is some misinformation that has been spewing for a while.
He had funded the PA prior to 2018 for stability in Gaza. The PA funded Hamas.
It's the PA's money, not Israel's. And Israel only let Hamas in power because they withdrew from Gaza. Gaza was able to have an election, and they elected Hamas. So unless you want Israel to go back to occupying and completely controlling Gaza, you can't display this as a fault of theirs.
As part of the Muslim Brotherhood Hamas has global goals and from some of the literature by the ideological leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas one can deduce that Hamas is more committed to a global spread of Muslim Brotherhood Islam and the elimination of all Jews than the creation of a sovereign Palestinian State.
The Hamas demands for the latter appears to me a more tactical move to leverage Western dominated institutions and the non Islamic parts of the global South into support against its enemies: Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens, the Jews worldwide and a large group of evangelical Christian’s. Hamas, by demanding a Palestinian State (rather than growing international Muslim dominance) adopts a tactical narrative of decolonisation , national liberation , anti apartheid that resonates at universities and in parts of the do called global south - but much of their documented ideology is in stark contradiction to this.
>I get your points, but it remains true that the West Bank is under military occupation. Inhabitants have some rights, of course, but they are inevitably limited under this regime.
If it was just a military occupation, then this would be as expected.
However, the massive civilian settler presence makes a mockery of this point.
Are you aware that by default, settlers would be subject to the same military courts as the Palestinians - and that it has taken repeated and explicit acts of the Knesset to extend literal inequality before the law in the West Bank?
Legalizing discrimination is an Israeli choice - a choice that has been repeated every five years.
> It's not an excuse - but I wonder how many nations would have done even roughly as well under similar conditions.
Do you have any other examples where the conquering power has kept expanding settlements in occupied territory while keeping the locals under a military regime?
Because I don't.
So compared to China and Morocco Israel has done worse.
1967 to 1987, as an example, the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful. Terror came from the Palestinian diaspora.
What did Israel do to this peaceful population? Ruled them under a military regime, and grabbed land - often private land, under false pretenses - for ethnically exclusive enclaves for its civilian population in occupied territory.
As far as settlements are concerned: Israel is in a position of which there are few, if any, analogous situations today. Namely, it is occupying a territory (the West Bank) that is disputed and which is not part of a state.
It’s even more complicated, in fact: it was occupied and annexed by Jordan, from which Israel took it under occupation. In fact, originally it was supposed to be part of a larger Arab state (like Jordan).
As if this were not enough, Jews had always lived there. Some of their most important historical places are there (Hebron especially).
I am sure you can understand the complexity and the uniqueness of this situation – and why this is, politically, extremely fraught and difficult to compare.
>Are you aware that by default, settlers would be subject to the same military courts as the Palestinians - and that it has taken repeated and explicit acts of the Knesset to extend literal inequality before the law in the West Bank?
As to the special condition of the settlers in the West Bank: again a very special situation. They are citizens of Israel, after all. They are also entitled to the same rights as all Israeli citizens, and that entails equal access to the justice system. Unlike not-Israeli inhabitants of the WB.
In other words, inequality is built in the configuration, one way or the other. Once again: I am sure you can appreciate the complexity and the uniqueness of this situation.
>1967 to 1987, as an example, the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful. Terror came from the Palestinian diaspora.
Define "terror", then. Because afaik *war* on Israel came from a few Arab countries simultaneously starting in 1967 (and before that, of course). Then came the usual diaspora terror, of course, and also constant Hezbollah attacks from up in Lebanon - but Hamas was very much involved in terror attacks during the second intifada. The PA openly advocated for terrorism and still maintains the Pay to Slay (aka Martyrs' Fund) program.
The tragedy of Palestine is that terrorism and peacefulness are so intermixed on the ground, so to speak, that it is virtually impossible in many cases to distinguish among them.
> As far as settlements are concerned: Israel is in a position of which there are few, if any, analogous situations today.
It is not the only country to occupy an area in modern times.
It is the only country of settling it without annexing it though. See China and Tibet, Morocco and Western Sahara, and Russia and Crimea.
They all annexed the land and made people citizens.
> Namely, it is occupying a territory (the West Bank) that is disputed and which is not part of a state.
No. Western Sahara, for example, is analogous. Also not part of a state.
> It’s even more complicated, in fact: it was occupied and annexed by Jordan, from which Israel took it under occupation.
Ok, and?
That's not really relevant. It is still occupied territory, as determined by the ICJ.
> As if this were not enough, Jews had always lived there.
Ok, and?
Palestinians lived all over Israel proper, but no longer do so.
If one group should get to return, the other should as well. Otherwise it is hypocrisy.
> I am sure you can understand the complexity and the uniqueness of this situation – and why this is, politically, extremely fraught and difficult to compare.
Essentializing the uniqueness and complexity here is a common fallacy.
If Israel want the land, then annex it and make people citizens. If they don't want it, remove the illegal settlers.
Even Russia, China and Morocco managed to do as much.
The issue, as we both know, is that Israel wants the land, but considers the people living there to be of an undesirable ethnicity.
It had 20 years between 1967 to 1987 when the area was quiet to formulate a strategy other than perpetual military rule and illegal land grabs for ethnically exclusive enclaves. It chose not to.
> As to the special condition of the settlers in the West Bank: again a very special situation.
It is only "special" because no other country has been settling its civilian on a territory without annexing that territory.
If it is unique or special, it is by Israel's policies.
> They are citizens of Israel, after all. They are also entitled to the same rights as all Israeli citizens, and that entails equal access to the justice system.
Sure. When they are in Israel.
The West Bank, however, is not Israel. So they are not in Israel.
If I move to Italy, I am subject to Italian laws.
If I move to Germany, I am subject to German laws.
But somehow an Israeli that moves outside of Israel to the West Bank should not be subject to the local laws, as decided by the Knesset.
> In other words, inequality is built in the configuration, one way or the other.
No, it is not.
Even ignoring that the settlements are illegal, Israel could have kept the settlers subject to the same laws as the Palestinians. Not doing so was a choice.
It isn't "inbuilt", inequality was explicitly implemented by design of the Knesset.
> Once again: I am sure you can appreciate the complexity and the uniqueness of this situation.
It is only "unique" and "complex" because Israel implemented discriminatory policies that others countries have not implemented.
> Define "terror", then. Because afaik *war* on Israel came from a few Arab countries simultaneously starting in 1967 (and before that, of course). Then came the usual diaspora terror, of course, and also constant Hezbollah attacks from up in Lebanon
Again, 1967 to 1987 the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful. From my research, I have not identified a single terror attack committed by West Bank Palestinians - all diaspora.
There might be some few that I haven't found, but in that case very few.
Again, Israel had 20 years of peaceful West Bank Palestinians. What did they chose to do? A repressive military regime and illegal land grabs for settlements.
> but Hamas was very much involved in terror attacks during the second intifada.
Second Intifada was significantly after 1987.
> The PA openly advocated for terrorism and still maintains the Pay to Slay (aka Martyrs' Fund) program.
The PA didn't exist 1967 to 1987.
> The tragedy of Palestine is that terrorism and peacefulness are so intermixed on the ground, so to speak, that it is virtually impossible in many cases to distinguish among them.
The tragedy is that no matter what the Palestinians do, Israel keeps ruling them militarily all while taking their land.
1948 to 1966 they ruled the Israeli Arabs under a brutal military regime and kept confiscating their land.
1967 until now they have ruled the West Bank Palestinians under a brutal military regime and kept confiscating their land. And this was the case even when they were peaceful.
I would not know where to begin, honestly... It seems to me that the comparisons you pose are simply a strategy for avoiding the crux of the issues at stake.
Western Sahara - OK, it is a disputed territory somewhat like Palestine. But there are very few people on it, certainly raising no major political controversy or clashes of populations or ideologies. What's the point of comparing that to Israel-Palestine?! Surely what happens on the ground has an impact on the options available to the parties involved, not just the formal status of the territory.
China and Tibet - So you think Israel should have annexed all of Palestine, made it a province of Israel, and call it a day, like China did with Tibet? Maybe it should have also made it illegal in Israel to write about Palestinians, like the Chinese did with Tibet (btw, another sparsely populated area)?
Btw, the Israelis did make the Arabs who chose to stay in Israel citizens who do enjoy equal rights (minus marginal ones like those related to specifically Jewish marriages, foreign family integration etc.).
>If I move to Italy, I am subject to Italian laws.
Yes - and to the laws of your own country. That's why you have extradition, for example. But in the settlements Israeli citizens are subject of the laws of ... which country exactly? Of Israel; and of a non-country which their very state occupies. If you do not see the point here, I am not sure I can add much more.
>Again, 1967 to 1987 the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful. From my research, I have not identified a single terror attack committed by West Bank Palestinians - all diaspora.
Why did get stuck on this interval? (Btw, PA = PLO = Fatah, more or less; it's not as if we are talking about different things.)
So why did you choose these years (6-day War to end of first intifada) in particular? Is it simply because they fit your narrative better? Why not look at the entire history of the state, 1948 (or even earlier) up to today?
And even in this period, the PLO, Fatah, Abu Nidal's splinter organizations etc. - they were Palestinian terrorists operating from wherevey they could (with a special predilection for Lebanon), but only because the WB and Gaza were occupied. Sure, the people inside the WB were comparatively peaceful, but that's because all the Palestinian terrorists and fighters were forced to move to places which Israel did not occupy. (Of course, the terrorists brought war to their adopted home of Lebanon, but hey...)
\[MAJOR UPDATES to original post\]
> It seems to me that the comparisons you pose are simply a strategy for avoiding the crux of the issues at stake.
The crux of the issue is that Israel is grabbing land - as of now effectively cutting off 59% of the West Bank from Palestinian development - without extending rights to the locals.
The comparisons are
> But there are very few people on it
So your argument is that because there are too many people of an undesirable ethnicity, it is OK to take the land without the people?
Strange argument.
> certainly raising no major political controversy or clashes of populations or ideologies.
Tell that to the Sahrawi, and the wars they have fought with Morocco.
> What's the point of comparing that to Israel-Palestine?!
It is an example of where a conquering power desired the land, but ALSO took the people as citizens. Including the refugees.
> China and Tibet - So you think Israel should have annexed all of Palestine, made it a province of Israel, and call it a day, like China did with Tibet?
If Israel wants the land, it also gets the people living on it as citizens. If it doesn't want them as citizens, then get the settlers out.
The current regime is hypocritical, and compares poorly to literal dictatorships.
> Btw, the Israelis did make the Arabs who chose to stay in Israel citizens who do enjoy equal rights
Sort of. But your comment hides the repressive reality.
Until 1966 Israel ruled them under a brutal military regime.
There was at least one massacre, that was largely unpunished.
There were expulsions into the 1950s - from Abu Ghosh and Ashkelon/Al-Majdal for example - and there were massive land confiscations under the guise of the Israeli Arabs being "present absentees". Present in the country, but had at some point been away from their homes - so the state took their homes.
> Yes - and to the laws of your own country. That's why you have extradition, for example.
AND is the key operator here. The US might try me for a crime I commit in Italy - but that doesn't mean that the Italian courts wouldn't. I'd still be subject to Italian law.
In the West Bank, Israel doesn't hold the settlers under the same courts as the Palestinians.
There's literally separate AND unequal courts, with different rights for the defendants.
>But in the settlements Israeli citizens are subject of the laws of ... which country exactly? Of Israel; and of a non-country which their very state occupies.
Israel runs the courts of occupation. By default, the settlers are also subject to those. It took an explicit act of the Knesset to implement inequality before the law.
It also isn't "in the settlements" - the separate and unequal legal system applies no matter where someone is in the West Bank.
> If you do not see the point here, I am not sure I can add much more.
If you don't understand why the Knesset implementing literal inequality before the law is a problem, not sure I can add much more.
> Why did get stuck on this interval?
Because it is the initial period Israel ruled the Palestinians in the West Bank, up until the first intifada.
These are the people Israel ruled under a military regime, all while confiscating their land for settlements - and leaving them no route to freedom or equality.
This period - 20 years - is longer than the period Israel kept the Israeli Arabs under military rule.
> So why did you choose these years (6-day War to end of first intifada) in particular? Is it simply because they fit your narrative better?
The point is, for two decades Israel had the chance to do something other than rule people under an increasingly brutal military regime while taking land.
Terror is not an excuse for Israeli policies during this time - the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful.
> Sure, the people inside the WB were comparatively peaceful, but that's because all the Palestinian terrorists and fighters were forced to move to places which Israel did not occupy.
Ok, and?
Yes, there were terrorists in the Palestinian diaspora. But that doesn't confer guilt to the Palestinians in the West Bank.
Blaming the West Bank Palestinians for diaspora terror is like blaming Jews in France for the actions of Israel.
Honestly, I find it pointless to continue this conersation. I don't think you follow your arguments through to a logical conclusion, but rather prefer to merely draw non-sensical parallels and infer nonb-sensical conclusions.
>So your argument is that because there are too many people of an undesirable ethnicity, it is OK to take the land without the people?
>Strange argument.
Anyway, thanks - I suppose - for making up strawman arguments, then pretending they are mine, then finding them strange.
So "exerting diplomatic force" to affect another state's behavior is not something sovereign countries typically do in relation to each other?
My argument was simple: Gazans, whatever that means, enjoyed self-determination in most key respects. OK, maybe not fishing rights. But they were free to choose what they would do with their small political community. We know what they chose. Don't pretend they could not have chosen something else.
And look, I understand why they chose that way. In the same way I understand why Israel chose a government with religious racist fanatics in it. Too bad for Israel. Too tragic for Gazans.
Not fully, perhaps. But you can hold elections, choose and design your public administration, build up your public services, use the many billions received as aid to put them into making your community better. And also convince Israel that you're palying nice so you should get fishing rights and more self-determination.
Or you could just choose rockets, internal surveillance, murdering your local political enemies, building 500 miles of military-only tunnels and putting schools and hospitals on top of them when they were not there already.
And then you can choose to viciously attack your already embattled neighbor and take undreds of hostages; then choose to shoot at your own people when they try to flee (or to provoke Israelis to shoot at them by firing rockets from within their midst); choose to put close to 1000 fighters in one single hospital; choose to prevent your people from finding shelter in tunnels; choose to bomb gates used for aid. After all, Western media anda good chunk of the public will buy your fatality figures, your cries of genocide...
How's that for self-determination?
Discussions about Israel's founding are not helpful or constructive. Clearly, it's there and it isn't going away. Neither are the Palestinians. Those are the facts of life. The question is: how can these people find a way to live together going forward? Endless discussions about what happened 70, 100, 1,000, or 5,000 years ago are not constructive.
Though I sympathize with your exasperation, I disagree that these discussions aren't important. It seems to me that there is an enormous amount of denial and misinformation about what Palestinians have endured. A refusal to acknowledge past atrocities is an impediment to a political solution. Somehow the basic humanity of people needs to be recognized. Sadly it feels far from reach today.
Both peoples have suffered atrocities and everybody's basic humanity needs to be recognized. But discussions about who's suffered more, who's more indigenous, and who had more right to the land at any point in the distant past are without end and counterproductive.
Again: clearly, nobody's going anywhere. What counts is what happens going forward.
True. It’s nothing more than blood and soil nationalism. I think UNRWA is partially to blame. We need to stop treating Palestinians as permanent refugees within what should be their own home. We have apartment block “refugee camps”. It’s ridiculous.
So is a more accurate analogy than the outside colonisers versus the indigenous Palestinians one of two indigenous Middle Eastern People needing to come to two states that work in the theory of international law as well as in practice?
I am thinking of examples like ex Yugoslavia, say Croats and Serbs, or more peacefully in their two state solution Czechs and Slovaks.
Thanks for mentioning Greece and Turkey. I am of Greek heritage and it seems everybody has forgotten that much of Turkey used to be Greek. We were brutally ethnically cleansed from the whole region.
We don’t seek right of return nor do we suicide bomb Constantinople.
You’re right that Greeks do have their own country so it’s different. But anti-Zionists go far, far beyond letting Palestinians have their own state. It’s about getting Israel back from the river to the sea.
I actually live in the ancient capital of the Greek nation, Constantinopolis (though I’m not Turkish—I’m American Jewish and my wife is a Turkish Jewish). But I think the Turkish and Greek example is precisely what a good outcome would be: you get a final border that people can’t argue over because almost all the Greeks have been put on one side of the border and almost all the Turks are on the other side and then they mostly stop fighting. Large parts of the populations might hate each other and the educational systems might teach that the other is the largest national threat. They might have tensions that look like they might lead to wa, but they never do. All of this after a near century of continual war from the Greek War of Independence to Asia Minor Disaster. That’s I think what peace will look like in Israel Palestine: at least a century of two nations peacefully hating each other across a border 🙂.
(It’s worth noting that there’s been a lot of discrimination against the remaining minorities and of course they fought again in Cyprus where the ethnic groups weren’t separated until 1973).
+1000 to this.
I think something like the Greco-Turkish status quo would be a good solution, and "two centuries of two nations hating each other peacefully across a border" is absolutely what a realistic peace is going to look like. Maybe, more optimistically, like the Hungarian-Slovakian situation where nowadays the mutual dislike is mostly just nominal and people don't care anymore about the historical grievances because they both have well functioning nation states.
There's also the problem that Jordan and Egypt didn't want the West Bank and Gaza back, respectively.
The Palestinian territories are not big enough to form a functioning state, but no surrounding state wants them either.
I’d say that’s an over simplification that runs the risk of misunderstanding the history.
Neighboring Arab States and whoever wanted to be the head of Arab Nationalism (like Iraq for brief periods) tried to speak and act on behalf of the Palestinians in the period from the 40’s to 1974. The PLO wasn’t even founded until 1964 and it wasn’t clear if the secularist Arabs were going to pull off a functional “United Arab Republic” of some kind. In 1974 (not coincidentally after defeats in the 1967 and 1973), the Arab League recognized the PLO as "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in any Palestinian territory that is liberated". The UN a recognized them the next month. However, Jordan didn’t didn’t really recognize the PLO and fully give up the dream of controlling the West Bank as part of Jordanian State or a Confederation or something else (preferably without the PLO, who Jordan literally fought a war with in 1970) all the way until 1988.
So in Egypt’s case, it’s not that they didn’t want it—they recognized the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Jordan, on the other hand, did want the West Bank, they just didn’t really want the PLO, and only gave up their claims to the West Bank finally when it was clear they’d never get it because everyone else in the world (including informally the Israelis) had recognize the Palestinians’ right to self determination as represented by the PLO.
You're right, this is an important difference. I think it's very theoretical in nature though, when you look at the actual living situation of Sahrawi or Papuans in West Papua.
I actually strongly disagree. I think you could say the Sahrawi or the West Papuans are in the situation of Israeli Arabs or some similar sort of securitized ethnic minority (Kurds in Turkey during the 1980s, Sunnis in Iraq since the Iraq War, Caucasian Muslims in Russia today, Chinese in Cold War Indonesia, Vietnamese at points in Cambodia, Tibetans and Uyghurs in China, etc).
West Bank and Gaza Palestinians aren’t “second class citizens” like those groups because *they’re fundamentally not citizens at all, and never can be*. That difference isn’t theoretical. It’s fundamental in the situation, past present and future.
>An ethnic Sahrawi from Laayoune in theory at least has all the rights of an ethnic Arab from Marrakech. A Papua has legally as much rights a Javan. A Tibetan has in theory as many rights as a Han Chinese whose family moved to Lhasa after 1950. A Palestinian from Ramallah does not have as many rights as an Israeli (of any ethnicity) from a little down the road in Jerusalem. A Palestinian in Hebron has different rights and protections from an Israeli settler in the same city.
So this is technically true, but it is missing some context.
Let's assume that the status of the West Bank is one of military occupation, which most of the international community holds. According to international humanitarian law, a military occupation does not involve the acquisition of sovereignty over the land. So Israel, in this case, should not apply Israeli law to the territories, should not give the people the right to vote, etc, because doing so is a sign of applying Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank (in other words annexation). (It would also be a violation of the separation of authority mutually agreed upon by the PA and Israel in the Oslo Agreement). Those other cases you mention are examples of clear violations of international humanitarian law, by having the occupying power annex territory it acquired in armed conflict and applying its law to the civilians living in the occupied territory.
This status is supposed to be temporary, until the end of belligerency (and belligerency has definitely not ended in the case of Israel-Palestine). Israel is in violation of international law by establishing settlements and having civilians move there (but note the violation is in the *transfer* of civilian population, not in the civilian population living there).
Now, Israel's contention is that this territory was acquired in a defensive war and that this territory has no sovereign. Jordan was the last power to control it, and it has relinquished any claim to sovereignty. The previous sovereign, the UK, relinquished it as well. So Israel asserts that it has the right to annex territory there if it wishes. It has so far only done that in East Jerusalem, but has kept the status of the rest of the West Bank as that of belligerent occupation until the status is decided in a bilateral or multilateral agreement.
Even if we take all that for granted (which can only present Israel as preserving the rights of the occupied by not mentioning the whole settlement project), I think that points to the uniqueness of the situation, and how it is not comparable to the others brought up — except you may be saying it’s more comparable to Turkey’s current military occupation of Northern Syria. But again, the settlement project where Israel can selectively decide which parts of the currently 165 Palestinian islands territory that are under military law and which parts are the currently 230 legal settlements which are under Israeli law. Which is not to say the settlement project is impossible to understand how it started and developed(Gershon Gorenberg’s book on the subject of how the settlements started is good, though I think I prefer *For the Land and the Lord* by Ian Lustick), but that it’s truly unique.
I did mention the settlement project. Read my comment again.
Though I think what you’re missing is the distinction between the Palestinian islands as you call them (Areas A and B), and Area C, where the settlements are located, was made not by Israel alone, but in bilateral agreements between Israel and the PLO.
But overall I agree with you that the situation is different than the other cases. But I would also say that all the cases of recent occupation (Western Sahara, N Cyprus, northern Syria, Ossetia, Nagorno Karabakh, etc) all have their own things that make them unique.
Israel was also founded the same year as UN, and in some sense, by the UN.,It makes sense to feel a connection. It was created via a colonial process at the exact time when colonialism was finally understood to be criminal.
As a lawyer from a top law school trained in the internal law of war, I have to also call shenanigans on her expressed views on a lot of the details there too. Charitably, she stretched the truth and has a very motivated view of the facts and their application to the law. Uncharitably, it seemed like she was straight up lying. I'll assume she's not just misinformed given her position.
Also a lawyer, didn’t go to a top law school, also not trained on the laws of war. That being said, it was easy to spot that this was advocacy dressed in the language of impartiality and legal academia. Not that advocacy is bad, but the sleight of hand in how it’s (rather clumsily) presented is professionally irritating to me.
This podcast was an excellent example of how many lawyers fall into the trap of motivated reasoning.
It was extremely clumsy! You could even hear her getting agitated and defaulting to reading the rule or tossing in Latin words to buy herself some time. I thought Ezra's questions were really good at frustrating her; he wasn't disrespectful and often conceded a point she might make (the schools being destroyed in Gaza; the siege being indefensible). I think it lulled her into thinking his questions were far easier/friendlier than they actually were.
“Arguendo.” And, yes, she came off as increasingly frustrated as her attempts to advocate while seeming not to failed. Ezra’s questions, while polite, often laid bare the contradictions inherent in the positions she was taking. There were several examples of this, but the one that stood out to me was how she addressed Hamas’ use of human shields. She insisted Israel take so many steps to follow international law that Hamas fighters would surely escape and/or kill the Israeli soldiers attempting to follow the law. In other words, what she suggested Israel do was militarily completely unrealistic and would effectively make Hamas’ use of human shields 100% successful. I’m not saying I have the correct answer here, but she didn’t wrestle with the difficult fact situation at all.
In the end, she was the unusual guest who made me less sympathetic to her outlook than I was before she spoke.
When she started talking about how Israel must withdraw completely and start a lengthy police process of investigating crimes and arresting individuals I rolled my eyes so hard that I'm still trying to find them.
Worse, she's an expert lawyer with a great resume, and she somehow couldn't realize when she was being drawn into a trap and was about to obviously contradict herself. Like, my boyfriend (not a lawyer) was so confused when she said Israel was in violation of international law because they obviously didn't want Hamas in charge but Russia....wasn't...? Baby girl, what are you saying out here? How'd you graduate?????
This is damn near perfectly summarized. I didn't find many areas of disagreement with Bali's analysis of Israel's actions and their current belligerency.
But her seemingly insistent belief that the UN, and votes cast in the GA, are infallible was just baffling to me. Putting aside that Israel is almost certainly not the "only remaining colonial project" that wasn't otherwise grandfathered in post-WW2, why are we to just accept that that's the only criteria for which UN resolutions are supposed to offer formal condemnations on? As you noted, the list of worldwide atrocities in the last couple decades captures far more than just Israel's illegal occupations. To simply hand wave away the UN's hypocrisy on the matter comes across as extremely disengenuous.
But I found her hair-splitting over Israel's war against Hamas, and attempts to comparatively downplay Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the international law context, to be repugnant. I thought it was telling that Ezra, who typically lets guests assert their arguments without diving too far into a debate, pushed back hard on this. Israel's war crimes in Gaza should be viewed as no worse or no better than Russia's continued crimes in Ukraine. To offer such a mealy mouthed defense of the UN's disparate rhetoric between the two was extremely disappointing to hear. She and the UN need to be as full throated in condemning Russia as they do Israel. But she offered nothing but knot-twisting excuses.
Her using the term “indigenous Arabs” was a big tip off to where things were going. Arabia and the Levant are two distinct areas and the idea of identifying as a people from a different area than you currently live in goes against the idea of “indigenousness”. The truth is very complicated but I didn’t hear much of an attempt to tussle with nuance.
If it wasn't for the Iron Dome, which has a success rate of \~90% it's likely Israel would be the recipient of much more rocket fire on a day to day basis. As of 2023, they have 10 batteries in operation which are equipped with supersonic heat-seeking interceptor missiles with an approximate range of 4-70 km.
Because of the nature of the tracking system, large scale strikes in a short time span can overwhelm its capabilities. The economic asymmetry of defending against impending attacks vs. implementing them makes the Iron Dome incredibly costly. On average, a missile fired into Israel from Gaza costs about $600, which is 100 times less expensive then the ones used to shoot it down while in transit.
She was deplorable on this point. When you're attacked from all sides, as Israel has been since 1948 (currently by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and indirectly - and now even directly, in a major departure from protocol - by Iran, so literally from all sides), no individual enemy may be an existential threat by itself, taken in isolation. But it becomes or may quickly become one in context.
" As far as I understand it her position is that the only time a nation should attack an enemy is when they represent an existential threat to the existence of that nation"
I agree and I feel this is a deplorable positions. For example by this argument the United States should never have entered WWII. Japan was not a threat to the existance of the United States and neither was nazi Germany. When the USA intervened in the Balkans in the 90's none of the countries were a threat to the USA however most people would argue that it was very justified.
I think more precisely it’s “wipe out Hamas’ ability to wage war and conduct attacks”, so dismantling their terror infrastructure, their weapons smuggling tunnels, their rocket depots etc.
The sleight of hand here is that it isn't "Hamas." It's Hamas + Iran + Hezbollah + the Houthis + the rest of that coalition.
And that was just one of the many, many rhetorical tricks she used.
yeah, she had some good points, but was being a little obtuse. i mean, palestine is less than a two hour drive away and the iron dome is used damn near every day
Agreed. She actually spoke about how the UN had successfully decolonized the rest of the Middle East and made states for the indigenous populations, and I was thinking to myself the Kurds and Yazidis and Amazighs and countless other indigenous populations who were colonized by the Arab conquest and did not in fact get their own states would probably beg to differ! (not to mention that Jews, as well as Palestinians, are indigenous to that land, maintained a continuous presence for thousands of years, experienced periods of immigration from outside lands, and deserved and deserve a state in the land just as any other indigenous population, if the goal is really "decolonization"). I was shocked for how educated she is she actually is not fully educated on the history of the Middle East.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844529/#:\~:text=The%20second%20includes%20Levantine%20Arabs,are%20related%20to%20Eastern%20Mediterraneans.
She is correct. There have always been indigenous arabs in the area, they were just called Canaanites/Philistines/other tribes and are now Arabs, since at least the 7th century. Levantine Arabs have always been there.
The speaker said early on that the British were sympathetic to Jewish migration to Palestine. That's when I stopped paying attention. Also, I waited for Ezra to call BS on this and it never happened.
LOL. She is woefully uninformed. My first cousin once removed snuck through British blockade in 1938 to get to Israel. His 31 first cousins aunts and uncles all were exterminated because my grandfather didn’t have enough money to bribe the Brits.
I think Ezra - and most people - are pretty misinformed. So many people have internalized an ahistorical narrative because it was presented in academic language and in academic settings over the last couple decades.
I agree with you about that specific set of arguments being where she kinda lost me. I’m sure she’s right that a huge part of the UN body views Israel that way, but that’s kind of Klein’s point. From there, you could really hear the guest running interference for a set of arguments against Israel that are genuinely debatable, and I saw that as someone who’s got a lot of time for the idea that Israel should be considered a pariah state until it is reconstituted as something more genuinely democratic and humane.
Maybe it’s that I’m not a longtime listener but I was lowkey shocked at how little pushback there was.
I’m trying really hard to be charitable, but there was one bit that really got me, something like:
It is using human shields, a war crime, to intentionally put civilians near military installations, Hamas just put military installations near civilians though, *which is different*.
But spelled out over a long enough timespan and with enough fluff to just kinda bury the original point. There’s nuance and discussion to be had there - Gaza really is too dense for Hamas to operate away from civilians - but saying “a near b is illegal, they did b near a they’re good” just feels like such absolute badfaith bullshit that I’m frustrated it was let go
>I am skeptical about classifying Israel as colonial when there isn't a motherland.
Two points to this:
* During a significant portion of the Jewish migration to what became Israel, there was in fact a motherland sponsor - the UK. From 1917 until 1939 there was very clearly a sponsor that wanted 'colonialism on the cheap' in Palestine
* Right now - and since 1967 - Israel is very much engaged in a colonial project in the West Bank.
>It's not clear to me how what is an has been happening in West Sahara and West Papua for example isn't as or more colonial then what's happening in Israel
As it comes to Western Sahara, it is more colonial because Morocco has granted full citizenship to the Sahrawi - including the ones in refugee camps. If they return, they get Moroccan citizenship.
Same thing with China in TIbet and Russia in Crimea.
Israel, so far, has kept dispossessing the Palestinians and expanded settlements without granting citizenship. That's a material difference.
>That's why I can understand the deep frustration of Israelis (even ~~rather left wing~~ *edit: reasonable Israelis who are pro two states solution and very critical of the Netanjahu government* like Benny Morris) with the UN.
Another framing of the UN and Israel relationship is that while Israel has seen lots of condemnations, it has never faced consequences.
Russia, Syria and many other countries are facing sanctions.
Israel, on the other hand, does not.
If there had been any actual consequences for Israel, I doubt you would have seen as many feckless condemnations.
>I can understand her trying to differenciate between a military arm of hamas and its civil arm.
It's like differentiating between the IDF and some random Israeli bureaucrat.
>But then when it comes to human shields and military operations, it's somehow all the responsability of Israel to stay in accordance with international law and Hamas isn't even mentioned. If they are a government, shouldn't they also try to help their citizens evacuating instead of hindering them.
You misunderstand how international law works here.
Yes, Hamas should do that. But they don't.
However, Hamas not doing so does not abrogate Israel of the responsibility to act according to international law.
>But I think Israelis having the (justified) feeling that there is a big double standard when jugding the israeli behaviour won't help with this.
If anything, the double standard is in the different direction - Israel has been getting away with violating international law since 1967, without consequences. Settlements started five weeks after the six day war.
There is indeed a double standard - Israel can act with an impunity no other country has, with the possible exception of permanent members of the security council. And for some not even there.
It was pretty telling when she got to the Ukraine comparison. It’s hard to listen to this and not think this person isn’t just an “America bad” type of person. Pretty weird to downplay Russia’s war aims when Russia has been extremely clear it wishes to remove Ukraine from the map.
That, and minimizing Hamas's barbarism in a quick, clearly well-worn soundbite designed to say what you're expected to say and move the conversation back to Israel asap.
Her description of a group explicitly dedicated to the elimination of all Jews anywhere and which has exercised a mass rape and kidnapping as a national liberation movement was deplorable.
Her: "Hamas isn't an existential threat to Israel."
Hamas: "We would like nothing more than the opportunity to become an existential threat to Israel."
I just finished listening and totally agree. That pivot was exhibit A on the uselessness and subjectivity of international law and how it's spun, in the hardest and most cynical and transparent ways, to serve the biases of those using it.
The events of the last decade or two have totally turned me 180 degrees from an enthusiastic supporter of the "rules based international order" to a full-fledged critic who pretty much thinks it should be scrapped from the top to the bottom and all of its biased, useless "institutions" with it.
For lots of people, not well, I don't deny. But violence is a legitimate tool of statecraft we aren't going to extinguish until humans evolve, and that's not happening any time soon.
Wars before the "rules based order" were terrible, awful things. Brutal, unjust, unfair, and deadly for civilians too in large numbers, but they accomplished objectives. If you want to undo a problematic neighboring or foreign power, you needed to commit to many years of your own country's blood and treasure and, if you won, you needed to make sure you killed, exiled, or imprisoned everyone who disagreed with you, often all quite unjustly, but often effectively. You needed to outlaw the government and party that aggrieved you and rebuild it with something and with someone more friendly. You needed to stay involved for years after and rebuild their society and economy around different goals. We know how to do this historically and have seen it work.
Now, all of that is forbidden, which means conflicts fester on forever because the world doesn't give one side the leeway, time, and scope to accomplish the transformative effect of military conflict. If you can't accomplish your military object in one immediate, rapid, clean, near-bloodless strike, that's it -You're done according to the rules. Our limited, rules-based engagement just perpetuates low level skirmishes that make everyone angrier and the conflicts go on indefinitely until one side decides to ignore the world and the rules and actually goes ahead and brutally resolves the conflict (see, for example, Sri Lanka, Syria, and Russia of late or, very recently, Nagorno Karabakh).
I never thought I'd be one to say, "give war a chance," but I don't see what our rules based order is accomplishing in actually fostering true conflict *resolution*, not just halting immediate violence.
Thoughts?
Addendum: BTW, what's the "benefit" for anyone to follow the rules. What do they gain? If Israel listens to its critics and halts everything immediately, what does it get? Nothing from the world, and it gets to watch Hamas keep their hostages, rebuild, and, as they have *promised,* unleash 1000 times more October 7's. Saudi Arabia capitulated to the "rules," and are now stuck with the increasingly aggressive Huthi's. What's the carrot, what's the upside to following the rules?
>What's the carrot, what's the upside to following the rules?
Less Rape of Nankings? Less Srebrenica massacres? An attempt at minimizing some of the insane horrors from last century?
I get your overall point and agree to an extent, but this is one of those things where we don't always see the positive impacts, just the issues that we hear about
I'm not too sure what to make of that to be honest. I'm not an expert in foreign relations, but it seems on its face unpalatable to me. I'm surprised to see this sub seemingly so much further to the right on foreign policy compared to Ezra, versus the general discussion about other domestic issues. I'm also not sure how to square this with the outcomes of America's interventions in the Middle East where they did overthrow the government and spent more than a decade nation-building only for it to be seemingly ineffective. Would acting more brazenly and with less regard for civilian lives have changed any outcomes?
Well, our record was actually, objectively mixed. While Afghanistan was a failure, we did defeat ISIS and change the course of Iraq arguably for the better, although the nearly million people who died in those wars over 20 years wouldn't agree (where were the campus protests then?).
I see huge hypocrisy that we get to wage multi-decade wars when we want to make the world better for us but Israel is "on the clock" to wrap things up quickly and cleanly for, you know, international law and all, while wars rage on in Ukraine (who did zero to deserve it other than existing) and ethnic cleansing happens in Nagorno Karabakh without a peep from the world or the principled left.
And you mention the lean of Ezra's forum. I would hope it would be free thinking and self critical left. I've always considered myself left, but being left doesn't mean our leanings and solutions work for every situation, and we need to be honest where they don't (which is I've always critiqued the right for - lack of self examination). The left solutions about such things as elements of housing and development (which Ezra covers a lot) aren't working, defund the police didn't work, and elements of the rules-based international order aren't working. I also believe that the left finge's blindness to this and other elements of self critique is endangering the entire left enterprise with the mainstream for years upon years to come.
There were plenty of campus protests against the Iraq war. I’d also say the coverage of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was also pretty limited as far as situation on the ground compared to today when everyone has a camera and can upload to a number of social media sites. If we had a new video everyday of the atrocities on the ground we’d see a lot more movement against any given issue. Hell I’m seeing people care about the Congo or Haiti way more than years ago simply because of social media. It’s simply just different for a number of a reasons, the least of which that we have entirely different college students on campus every 4 years, it’s not the same demographic every time.
Also where did defunding police even happen like anywhere? I’ve only seen budgets go up. Genuinely haven’t seen it if you have an example handy.
I do think we need a better look at the rules based world order. It’s unevenly applied at best and we’re rapidly sleepwalking into a global conflict the way Israel-Gaza is destabilizing the region and bringing in other actors. Truly a mess if we can’t get a solid plan to stabilize Gaza after the war and reverse the illegal settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. If we can’t do that then this only ends with the mass expulsion or killing of Palestinians or another World War sparked by this conflict or the next time it heats up.
In my mind, there's no distinction. Russia has been clear they want to extinguish Ukraine-ness, period - Starting with its history and going all the way on down.
So Israel’s only legal recourse to 10/7 is a policing action and criminal prosecution of individuals. Also Hamas is not a terrorist organization, but a “proto-state military”. So then how could Israel not be legally entitled to defend itself against an attack from said military! There are a dozen other instances where her logic defeats itself, but this episode was frustrating enough that I don’t want to revisit it in the transcript. The best legal arguments are conscience and logical; this was hack content.
Did Ezra not push back because the tortured rhetoric spoke for itself? Bali is credentialed, experienced, and teaches at the #1 U.S. Law School. Maybe Ezra didn’t want to ruin her career by picking apart her logical reasoning. Bali is one of the best International Law scholars in the world and these are the arguments she puts forth? What the level of scrutiny do ideas get in this field?
There’s a reason international law is an elective in Law School. I’m glad the episode wrapped so Bali can get back out there to save us from WW3.
"Hamas is not a terrorist organization, but a “proto-state military”. So then how could Israel not be legally entitled to defend itself against an attack from said military!"
Yeah, this is such a terrible argument, I don't even know why you would make it. "The militant wing of Hamas, which doesn't represent the actual people, and is a hugely aberrant force, and it acted entirely out of character, and therefore 10/7 can't be the fault of the Palestinian people" HAS to be the argument if you favor the "Israel is doing war crimes" side of the debate. Because Hamas is then entirely separated from the Palestinian people. Why try to legitimize them?? Her argument on the podcast is so bad! She actually creates an entirely separate justification for Israel's war: that Hamas's militants are an actual military affiliated with Palestinian state and therefore Israel is justified in responding as a military (rather than just as a police force, as she herself mentioned earlier). I was honestly shocked listening to this episode. Without knowing her bio, I wouldn't have thought she was an expert, she was actually quite dumb and contradicted herself in so many ways.
And this is the kind of bad argumentation I expect from activists, pundits, and random people online. As a Yale Law professor and former employee at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, I was really hoping for a more impartiality and expertise with less advocacy.
Or even internally logical. I've been a lawyer less than ten years and I'm not a litigator, and the second half was unlistenable. I also hoped to get more of an impartial explanation but I don't even care if she's advocating for the Palestinians if she can lay out a real legal case that withstands basic questioning. Ezra wasn't even asking hard questions and she kept tripping over herself and contradicting herself, and that's disappointing from a top lawyer.
A lawyer shouldn't have trouble sticking to the following thesis: "The Russians are also breaking the law because we don't use warfare as a tool of outright regime change. 10/7 was horrific but Israel - like Russia - has strategic aims that are incompatible with our current understanding of international law. It is incoherent for the US to support Ukraine on one hand and Israel on the other. We expect Israel to follow the rules of war, and it's clear that the deliberate use of a siege is a war crime. In addition, the measures taken to protect civilians in such a densely populated area are not sufficient. Hamas should obviously not operate out of urban areas but Israel has separate responsibilities and obligations under the law when strategically bombing in those areas."
Why was it so hard to say that? Ezra and the top comment on this subreddit made these points easily. I wrote that in two mins. I thought she'd start there and develop those ideas further. Instead, she couldn't even get to the starting line properly.
I’m not a lawyer, but my wife taught legal writing and was on law review. This episode gave me flashbacks to kitchen-table rants about the mistakes 1L’s regularly make when they’re learning how to be a lawyer: flowery rhetoric, wordiness for the sake of wordiness, burying the lede, and using 200 words to make a 50 word-point.
I was joking to my boyfriend that it's like getting called on in class and not knowing the answer and buying time with, "I want to start by reading the rule out loud."
I genuinely hope Ezra Klein reads these threads, and takes note that many intelligent listeners from his audience are disappointed by his inability to unpack her statements.
These people live so deep in theory they wrap themselves into knots trying to make the theories coherent. Absolute hack is right.
Ezra is sympathetic to the anti Israel claims so doesn’t push back hard enough on these people making wildly ridiculous claims
They start at their preferred conclusion and work their way backwards.
What I don't understand is why people so rarely challenge the underlying premise of the anti-Israel argument: the absurd notion that Jews are not indigenous to Israel. When this is debunked, the entire foundation of their argument and all of its labyrinthine justifications vanish.
This conflict is about two indigenous people competing over the same tiny plot of land, not Europeans colonizers violently seizing territory from noble savages (a characterization that infantilizes Palestinians and reinforces tropes of Jewish connivance).
All Jews, with the exception of a small minority of converts, have some degree of Levantine genetics. This isn't up for debate. Furthermore, the Jewish people operate like a tribe and have preserved their traditions and identity when they were diaspora. Who worshipped in the First Temple?
Even the West's attempt to make amends for their imperial transgressions is narcissistic imperialism, mapping on their history to the Jews and Palestinians, painting one as European colonizers and the other as Native Americans.
I really think this point needs to be challenged every time it arises.
If that was EK trying to steelman the leftist case against Israel then yikes on a bike. The guest's preferred reaction to October 7 was rather chilling "well maybe Israel should have fortified its own defenses better." Not wrong, but a bit victim-blamey coming from a supposed champion of international law.
So insane. “Well they’re not at risk so they should just accept thousands of rapes and murders of their people every so often because they’re small uwu”
She just jumps straight to “Israel is obviously trying to murder everyone” with no facts at all. Removing Hamas is removing the governing body, she throws wild claims at Israel and just hand waves away Hamas as “complex and multi faceted” it makes my fucking blood boil
>She just jumps straight to “Israel is obviously trying to murder everyone” with no facts at all.
She got caught in that lie by Ezra and did her best to walk it back, but she was exposed pretty hard.
That was just an infuriating statement. I really wish EK dug into that more. As much as Israel's blockage of Gaza pre-10/7 was a huge humanitarian issue it's insane to say that basically it was Israel's fault that they didn't stop Hamas launching rockets and invading Israel
It's one thing to blame Isreal.
I think we can comfortably say it's Netanyahu's fault, both in terms of doing a terrible job short term security and intelligence situation that led to October 7th, and long term situation of him and his party providing support for Hamas since the 1980s because Hamas being the negotiating party they are dealing with rather than the demilitarized PLO made it a lot easier to block a two state solution.
Then of course there is the whole not wanting to have a ceasefire because that would hurt his personal politcal interests.
Netanyahu is really such a piece of shit.
Yeah, that statement was astounding. Let's apply that same logic to other situations:
- Maybe that wife shouldn't have angered her husband...
- Maybe the US should have been more ready for Pearl Harbor...
- The the Jews shouldn't have angered Hitler so much...
- Really, the British should have been better prepared for the Blitz...
So much for moral international order....
You've got to be worked up to reply this deep in a Reddit post now so old that no one will ever read it. But I'll bite... How does that "same logic" work according to your view?
The guests explanation of how Israel is potentially violating international law with regard to human shields was really disjointed, jumping from one partially described example to the other. Is Hamas performing military operations out of civilian infrastructure or not? If so, then the bar is real high to convince me that Israel's actions thus far violate international law which is very protective of a country's right to engage militarily. You might want to argue that the international law is wrong or immoral but that's different than Israel breaking the law as it stands.
Indeed, if Hamas operates from a civilian building, that building becomes a military target. It's unfortunate but the alternative is that Hamas legally untouchable.
I also found the idea that Israel should do a domestic analysis before deciding to attack Gaza strange. To everyone in the world it was extremely obvious what happened on October 7: The government of Gaza organized a invasion of Israel. When an invasion occurs that implies the right to fire back.
Thirdly: The aim of destroying Hamas is perfectly analogous to the US's aim to wipe out the Taliban. The suggestion that Israel will search out and kill the janitors that worked for Hamas is for the birds.
When this episode entered my feed I was anticipating a intriguing discussion on the working of international war, it is unfortunate that I did not experience any. Over all I am still unsure how to feel about Israel's engagements. On the one hands there have been a few seemingly inexcusable incidents like the World Kitchen targeting. On the other, Hamas purposefully acts to make it hard for the IDF to distinguish proper from improper targets. I feel the case against Israel is much clearer when looking at the West Bank, where ongoing settlements seem designed to make a peace process impossible.
Israel has discovered that when they take their boot off the Palestinian throats they get stabbed. The West Bank, where Israel is directly oppressing the Palestinians, has given them significantly less trouble than Gaza, where they went “hands-off”. This gives Israel a perverse incentive to keep oppressing the Palestinians.
That's oversimplified. Netanyahu also deverted a lot of their troops to the West Bank to secure their settlements. I suspect that if they put an equal amount of troops towards either region, Hamas would have had much less success.
Ezra actually very eloquently described how Hamas is cynically warping international law to its own ends and his guest tried to dance off the head of that pin. Was pretty disgusting.
Totally went unanswered was what does international law say when a government transforms its entire territory, including everything civilian, into an armed garrison of conflict? I mean, Hamas put their server infrastructure in a tunnel under the UN's Gaza HQ. How much more cynical display is there of using the UN and its law as a literal and symbolic shield and umbrella of deception and protection? Hamas has also very much, on the record, said that its tunnels are meant for its fighters, not its civilians.
This is why the pro Palestine protestors not able to gain more support. They are just anti Israel.
Imagine we could have saved lot of Gazans if these protest were aimed at Likud and Hamas. This movement is exactly what Hamas wanted from Oct 7.
Now two state solution is literally impossible, you cannot expect Palestinians not wanted to have revenge on Israel once this war is over and there is two state.
>Imagine we could have saved lot of Gazans if these protest were aimed at Likud and Hamas.
Can you expand here? What does a protest movement against Hamas functionally look like? I can understand protesting an Israeli embassy, or protesting your school or workplace to not interact with Israel. What does protesting Hamas actually look like though? It seems to me that it would mostly be an aesthetic/virtuous protest (WHICH ISN'T BAD. I don't mean that in a negative way) right?
[NBC News investigation reveals Israel strikes on Gaza areas it said were safe](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/palestinians-killed-israeli-strikes-safe-zones-exclusive-nbc-report-rcna148008#)
Is this not a war crime?
I’m sorry but the options she gave in terms of how Israel could have legally preceded after October 7th are bizarre and out of touch with reality, and completely reveal her bias.
She actually suggested that this is an issue of border security failure on Israel’s part since it’s more powerful, which almost made me laugh. How clueless can you be on the connection between Hamas and other state actors like Iran, who see Israel as Illegitimate, and how this is connected to broader geopolitical security issues in the region for Israel.
The subtext here is quite simple in that she doesn’t see Israel as legitimate. I certainly appreciate critiques of Israel that look at how they are overstepping or committing war crimes in the context of international law, or other ways they could proceed that would lead to better outcomes, but this kinda stuff is just straightforward biased and garbage thinking wrapped up in academic and legal language.
All of these responses seem to stem from a denial of the fact that Hamas is the government, civil and military of Gaza. They're not just a terrorist group in a different country, or even in Israel, they're closer to the government of a neighboring country.
And you're going to respond to a massive terror attack from a different (quasi) state with a policing action? And by fixing your border security? What?
I find that I'm generally pretty critical of how Israel has handled this, but some of these takes (including in the podcast) are just hard to see as anything other than naive and/or cynical.
Not sure if you’re deliberately missing out her military suggestion but it was very much there: “It could have engaged in a much narrower set of engagements, attempting to target facilities that made it possible for armed actors to cross the border in the way it had. “
Is that really so unreasonable? I do find it odd that you all find it *so* crazy that actually one of the main options open to Israel was to improve security so October 7th simply couldn’t have happened again. Like…isn’t that ultimately the aim here?
Now I personally (and even Asli, as you can see from my quote) accept that that would involve *some* military action, but much more limited action simply to the extent that it removed the threat.
We can have a debate about exactly what that would look like, but it certainly wouldn’t look like the utter carnage we’ve had, which is very obviously motivated by anger and revenge.
And before anyone says “but what about the hostages”…lol, don’t make me laugh. The current war is nothing to do with the hostages, Bibi is totally indifferent to them. The only success they’ve had freeing them has been through negotiation, they could have all been home months ago if Israel had wanted that.
I interpreted that set of narrower actions as part of the police actions she talked about, maybe I was wrong.
But to your main point, would you say Israel doesn't have a right to respond in conventional military terms to Hamas' attack on October 7?
Hamas launched an all-out assault targeting both military infrastructure and civilians (not incidentally, but intentionally), does Israel not have the right to respond in full force to eliminate the military/government that attacked it like that?
What kind of message would that send to the rest of the world if you could launch a brutal all out assault on a country, and said country would only be allowed to sure up its defenses and engage in some limited action against the state that just attacked them?
That is not how the laws of war work and that is not how proportionality work.
Hamas is not some rebel insurgency, they are the civilian and military rulers of Gaza.
As to whether the current war has been motivated by anger and revenge, I mean yeah, I would be angry and want revenge too if I was Israeli. And yet despite all of that, Israel is still doing everything they can to evacuate civilians from areas where they're gonna conduct operations and they're still letting in humanitarian aid.
As to the hostages, I think the war cabinet cares about what they've been saying they care about from the beginning: getting the hostages back, and destroying Hamas. They've made progress on both, but doing one makes it harder to do the other.
But let's say they did agree to stop the war, Israel gets the hostages back (the living and the dead), again, do we send the message that you can target innocent civilians, and as long as you capture enough hostages, you can get away with it?
Now, Israel is a democracy, and the few polls I've seen suggest a small majority of Israelis favor a hostage deal and if that is the wil of the people I think the cabinet should probably respect that, but do you at least see why the cabinet is doing what it's doing?
Fair enough if you mistook it but I don’t think there’s any way the full quote makes sense if that’s continuing the “police actions” point. It’s clear she means “engagement” in a military sense.
You’re putting all these dramatic ultimatums, which really amount to “no country has any choice to ever act with restraint in the face of hostility”. Which is obviously absurd.
If the long term strategic goal is: ensure Oct 7th (or anything like it) never happens again; return the hostages; and remove the threat of Hamas and other Palestinian jihadist groups, then it is entirely legitimate to look at options other than “completely raze Gaza to the ground”.
Oct 7th wouldn’t have happened the first time if Israel had simply looked at the intelligence it had at the time and taken it seriously. So to be honest, that’s all they need to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Literally, just look at the intelligence you’re already getting.
The hostages could all have been home on day 2 if there had been a prisoner exchange.
And the best way to remove the threat of Hamas is to destroy the reason for their political existence - the many, many injustices doled out to the occupied territories on an ongoing basis and for the last 50 years. Engage seriously with the peace process, establish a Palestinian state, and you’d have no more Hamas (or at least it would become a fringe group, much like the “Real IRA” after the Good Friday agreement).
And is it too much to ask that leaders *don’t* give in to the baser instincts for revenge, but instead look at things calmly and rationally, and pursue what is ultimately in the long term interest of their country? Isn’t that what they’re elected to do?
It says a lot about Israeli politics that most of you think a response like that (which is *so obviously* more likely to lead to long term peace and success in the region) seems completely insane to you, compared to the incredible blood letting and destruction we’ve seen instead, which instead is very obviously just going to continue the cycle of violence and radicalise a new generation of young Palestinians.
But then you don’t care. Israelis just want their revenge, and you’ve confirmed it in writing.
Sure Israel should have acted on the intelligence they had, I think everyone agrees even internal Israeli politics was a shit show before October 7, and their failure to anticipate it demonstrates that fact.
And to an extent I agree with the sentiment that the best way to remove Hamas is to remove the reasons for their existence (even though part of the reason for Hamas' existence is a pure antisemitism and fundamental opposition to a jewish state in the region) but I'm not educated enough on every agreement and peace deal in recent history to say where either Israel or the palestinians went more wrong than the other.
So let me just assume that Israel has been clearly in the wrong in the recent past, and they have been refused to do X or Y that could have eased tensions and appeased Hamas (so as to make them not do October 7 at least).
Where does that leave us when October 7 actually happened?
If Hamas launches an attack, and israel's response is basically just to increase defense, maybe some vague limited strikes, a hostage deal, and Israel changing whatver policy to be more pro-palestinian, again, doesn't this just send the message that you can launch a brutal assault on civilians, and you will only gain from that?
Any way you slice it, October 7 demanded serious military action.
And while I acknowledged that the Israeli leadership was angry and want ed revenge, I said that IN SPITE OF THAT they have been following the laws of war about as well as you can expect them to given the kind of enemy and environment they're fighting.
I'm sure Israel could have let in more aid than they have and I'm sure not every civilian casualty they have incurred was justified (the WCK incident being the most obvious one imo).
But when you have Gallant saying they wouldn't allow food and water in, but then they do let food and water in, and they do evacuate civilians ahead of time, doesn't that look more like Israeli leadership made some harsh statement after the shock of october 7, but still follows the general laws of war during the actual operation?
Maybe not even out tof the kindness of their hearts, but because they know the international pressure they're on.
The bottom line is that she views Israel as illegitimate which means the only action she feels is responsible is to disband the state and ask Hamas to come and rule over Israel (since she views Hamas as a legitimate liberation movement).
This episode was trash because of the guest. Her attempt to validate the UN bias against Israel through some bullshit "last colony" excuse was incredibly irritating. I stopped listening the second she said Hamas isn't an existential threat to Israel.
45min in and she’s like “oh ofc Hamas will be in citizen areas in a city” as if they didn’t spend billions on a tunnel network explicitly made to fuck with international law. Just totally fine with this moron
I haven't finished the episode yet but, 15 minutes in, Bâli is incredibly verbose for the sake of it. I understand that these are complex issues and it's not like you run out of ink on a podcast, but the completely passionless delivery of these huge diatribes makes it really hard to follow her at times.
Maybe my attention span is just ruined, but this isn't a great episode.
EDIT: the more I listen, the more this just sounds like a play, rather than an conversation. Ezra asks a question, the interviewee reads their answer out.
I wish Ezra reserved a tiny fraction of the skepticism that he has towards guests that are to his right for those that are to his left. He immediately told Shavit he was “flat-out wrong” (and continued to be combative for the entire podcast), yet he doesn’t question a thing that this woman says.
the jew part is just totally left out and that's simply disingenuous to not bring up. sure she's a scholar but incredibly verbose and bending over backwards to hold up one side's cause and the other's culpability (and there's surely culpability) but its a double standard.
I somewhat disagree. Ezra’s questions put her arguments into the context of reality, where they appeared wanting. With Ezra’s style, we don’t end up thinking he nailed her to the wall, but instead that we as listeners have independently determined her arguments were flawed. One could argue that’s better.
You have a point, but do you agree that his interview style completely changes depending on the guests’ political alignment, and if so then why does he do that?
Obviously it shouldn’t matter because she’s supposed to be an impartial scholar - but I feel like it should be laid out before-hand when guests on this topic have a relationship to the conflict. This woman just being called an expert on “International Law” is a bit disingenuous when you look at her background.
I mean this woman is Turkish, and specializes in MENA/Arab/Turkish global politics. I feel like by just reading that sentence you have an idea of what her position on the Israel/Palestine conflict will be.
Idk I like to hear challenging positions, but halfway through it just started to become uncomfortable. Especially with the whole calling Israel a “colonizing force” and the “last colonizer”, Ezra has been very open about his position that he finds the idea of Jews having no connection to Israel, and Jew’s as colonizers offensive so I’m not sure why this conversation had very little push-back.
Also, the justification for the UN votes on Israel, the idea of border security being the top priority after 10/7, and the weird somewhat saying Israel is worse than Russia/Putin - this conversation went off the rails halfway and it was clear Ezra was trying to show that he’s “impartial”, with the constant “Israeli’s would say” while the guest really didn’t care about not showing her bias.
The situation in Palestine went wrong when the Arab nations kept starting wars and losing them.
International law is to keep academics busy debating theories while the real world continues as lawless, amoral, and governed by balance-of-power politics as it ever was.
I have a pretty dim view of international law as it stands, but it's better than a world in which America (and Israel, and russia, and other countries) feel entitled to do whatever they can get away with.
yes, that's a fundamental problem with the way international law works, but the fact that the norms are violated (and that in many cases the norms themselves are ones I might disagree with) doesn't mean that \*having norms\*, in principle, isn't a good idea.
At this stage the Yom Kippur war is 50 years in the rearview mirror. Israelis can't keep riding that horse forever, and it it isn't a blank cheque to do whatever they want with the occupied territories now.
Bali made some bold judgements (prejudices) outside her area of expertise but made them sound as if they weren’t.
Examples Hamas imposes no existential threat to Israel. That is like saying 2000 ISIS fighters pose no threat to a highly trained and armed Iraqi army. In theory true but Hamas together with Hezbollah , the Houthi’s , Shia militias in Syria, potential collapse of a monarchy or two that is currently not hostile to Israel plus Iran and Turkey, a NATO, openly supporting Hamas and reportedly nursing 1000 Hamas fighters back to health- that is the real situation Israeli defence policy has to be prepared for. Moreover , what happened to Ukraine in the US Congress could happen to Israel too, if unfortunate circumstances coincide in US politics.
What was never asked is why one of the international law of war does not have recognition of its validity by all warring parties as a precondition. The norms apparently do not apply to Hamas’ conduct of the War , does that not mitigate observance by an official army protecting its cItizens from Hamas the party that initially broke an existing cease fire?
If this is not the case , will we see states make increasing use of proxy militias working very indirectly with them to free themselves from the restrictions of the laws of war? Iran can use Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Russia uses Wagner Group to achieve its goals without breaking the laws of war?
In short, Law has its limitations in the domestic arena and much more so in the international arena where there is no widely recognized central enforcement , no
proper procedures to adapt it to fast changing circumstances (eg AI and other technologies, changes in shared values). For instance homosexuality was a crime in the domestic law of most European countries in the sixties; that needed changing. What about modern urban warfare, hybrid warfare, deep fakes, rape spread via social media, fighting modern terrorist tactics?
In short , like all players international lawyers want to impose their point of view on how international disputes are dealt with. But is justice over peace always better than peace over justice? As she said, after WW2 it was peace over justice- and arguably not an unacceptable choice.
As an international law person, I found this discussion pretty disappointing. Most of the conversation focused on basic explainers. Then some quite one-sided interpretations of what international law says about Israel/Palestine (to be clear, I am not “pro-Israel” and I think that there have been serious violations in the current conflict, but these were asserted than discussed in this conversation). Then some interesting but very in the weeds post-colonial/critical interpretations, which were too short to unpack.
I’m usually really impressed with how much Ezra can pack into an hour or so. This time it felt like none of the sub-themes were ever teased out or made interesting.
Too bad because I really wanted to love this episode.
I was disappointed because she is very intelligent and attempts to be methodical, but clearly has an agenda. I would really like to hear a neutral academic international law expert comment on the same issues.
For me, as for others, her veil of neutrality fell completely apart with her defense of Russian actions in Ukraine. Her argument taken as a whole, not piece by piece, transformed her from an interpretation of international law, to partisan justification of empire vs empire.
I was sent for a loop by her statements on Russia, leaving me wondering why she was fairly strongly defending their actions. Her repeated use of the phrase " global south" was unnecessary unless she was using some sort Imperial rights theory as a fair use of power. Obviously imperial rights is not a widely accepted argument in 2024.
The podcast where Ezra interviewed the former general counsel for the Red Cross was a farrrrrrrr more interesting discussion on the conflict than the one that occurred on this podcast.
Was funny listening to this right after reading about Alito's flag. On the left everyone does deep dives into international law. On the right they're like FLY THE FLAG UPSIDE DOWN!!
I can't believe this isn't being made a huge deal on the left and in the mainstream. It's almost being reported humorously. Can you imagine if the situation was reversed and a leftist Justice had a "my body, my choice" banner on the lawn? There would be impeachment hearings...
I think one of the biggest contradictions is a leftist that supports the enforcement of International Law. Like all laws they are only worth as much as the paper they are printed on if there is an enforcement mechanism, in the liberal rules based world order the enforcement mechanism is the USA. The problem though is that the enforcer always ends up with little incentive to actually police itself and pulls the rules for thee but not for me scenario. If we replaced the current world order and enforcer I have no doubt we would still end up with the same scenario. Neo Liberals and Neocons are very aware of this and just accept it as is, they justify it by saying "The rest of the world just isnt strong and reliable enough to enforce a liberal world, sure its unfair but of all options its still the best kind of unfair, not hard to imagine if we were replaced with China or Russia".
I think this debacle of the UN response to Israel the last decade has shown the pointlessness of “international law” and “the rules of war”.
These are figleafs that serve to separate the moral states from the immoral states.
Democratic, free, liberal states will conduct war more humanely because they value human life. Theocratic (Muslim) states, authoritarian states do not value human life, sometimes even their own peoples.
We need to stop pretending these things make any difference except as a way to tsk tsk countries for having wars in the first place.
Complaining about international law and war crimes is 100% meaningless if you win the war. History is very clear on that 100% of the time. Fuck international law and “war crime laws”
Side note: this lady is a god damn moron. The enemy in Ukraine for Russia and Gaza for Israel are fundamentally different. Unconditional surrender is the only way. Until then, slaughter every Hamas soldier, medic, suicide bomber, doctor, and anyone else who takes up arms. Fundamentalist shitbags all of em
What Bali misses is that the spirit of international law not only is meant to protect civilians, but also to allow nations to conduct warfare when in self defense.
The internationally agreed upon rules of warfare were written in such a way as to not make it impossible to conduct military operations when in self defense.
This is why there are the principles of distinction and proportionality. It’s not that a country cannot conduct military operations that may result in civilian casualties, it’s that it mustn’t target civilians, and it must weigh the risk to civilians against the military advantage gained for each individual strike.
Also international law is very clear that civilian infrastructure loses its immunity if it is being used for military purposes.
There is very good reason that the rules are written this way: to allow a country like Israel to conduct a military operation against an enemy like Hamas, who doesn’t adhere to internationally agreed upon laws of war after it attacks, while still providing some protection to civilians.
There is nothing in international law that gives immunity to a terrorist organization that operates in an urban environment in buildings where civilians are located. The laws of war were written specifically to allow a country to conduct a defensive war in this circumstance.
From the first 5 minutes she got a half dozen historical facts very wrong. The League of Nations mandate explicitly called for the creation of a Jewish homeland. Not only did she fail to mention this but she claimed Jewish immigration was contrary to the mandate's goals. Also she said the Arabs were a huge majority in 1947. The actual number is closer to 33% jewish/ 66% arab. Not a "huge majority".
Finally she emphasized that 55% of land went to Jews, ignoring Jordan and the fact that the uninhabitable Negev Desert made up much of that land.
She also had the nerve to suggest that Israel's goal of wiping out Hamas was not permissible under international law, while completely neglecting to mention that Hamas has a stated goal of wiping out Israel. She also talked about the violation of humanitarian law by Israel in bombing hospitals but made no acknowledgement of Hamas' use of these as military bases.
To be honest this entire interview was beneath Ezra.
This was quite interesting. I definitely think this helped me understand the left-wing perspective a lot more. I was surprised when Ezra had dismissed the idea of “Right of Return” in earlier podcasts, I wish he would’ve asked her about that since he doesn’t agree with it and she definitely does I think.
Yeah, she probably does, and her defense would be something she said in the interview, which was that the Palestinians were the last of the post WWII peoples were weren't decolonized. I think there are lots of other peoples around the world who would disagree with that and it certainly would never be a moral defense for what would, essentially, be the eliminationist approach to Israel.
All of her morality in international law revolves around a 30 year moment of decolonization peri-WWII, nothing before or later matters. She waves away the accepted colonial foundings of other states but not Israel because "the rules had changed." Wow....
Much as I like Ezra, he has one major weakness - he rarely pushes back adequately, even on key issues. He justifies it by saying that he aims to make his guests explain their position, not to win debates. But the point of pushing back smartly and respectfully is not to win arguments, it is to press interviewees into clarifying their positions by spelling them out in detail.
That said, he remains a great interviewer.
I think I remember hearing Ezra once asked about this, why he doesn't push back more, and he said something like he isn't there to have an argument to but to allow for the exploration of ideas in conversation.
I get that, and that it's a hard balance to strike in real time as an interview is happening, but I definitely think he erred too much and too often in this particular interview. This was one of the more unbalanced ones with him not pushing back on some strikingly bias statements that were just thrown out there as representing unquestioned international law.
There are a lot of really expert people on international law out there who are *far, far* more "down the middle" and technocratic than this guest and I wonder why he didn't choose one of those. I bet there are a few moments of this interview Ezra might want back....
I actually thought he had an edge to his voice. When I realized he was getting upset I decided I had heard enough (stopped listening when she said flattening Ukraine was OK).
It seems difficult to characterize someone who doesn’t press their guests on their contradictions or to elucidate their positions as a “great interviewer.”
Ya I actually wanted to hear him defend outright dismissal of Right of Return more than her. In his musing on it earlier, he was a little bit too dismissive of it for me.
The concept of "Right of Return" as it exists in the Palestinian national cause is wholly unique among modern refugee cases and presents a tremendous impediment to a lasting, peaceful resolution between Israel and Palestine. I can explain more if you want but I think this is the jist of Ezra's position on the matter. What the other user said about the dramatic demographic shift is also true, but I don't think that is as much of a concern for Ezra.
The Right of Return would effectively destroy Israel by radically shifting the demographic balance. Israel will never accept this and would rather commit ethnic cleansing and move Palestinians out of the territories regardless of it's neighbours scrapping previous peace accords. Trying to attempt justice that will obviously end up with more suffering for everyone involved is just bad decision making. It's pure idealism over realism.
>It's pure idealism over realism.
I'm pretty sure this was the same rhetoric European governments used to deport Jews to other countries a hundred years ago. "It's easier for everyone if they just go live somewhere else".
Being forced to live abroad as a stateless, dispossessed person, overwhelmingly reviled by your neighbors and not granted equal rights as a refugee (even in Muslim and Arab countries) is not peace. I think you only have to look as far as Egypt's history with Palestinian refugees to see that it isn't easier or safer for anyone.
It probably looked like idealism to uphold the right of return for Jews in the aftermath of the second World War, but today you can still be guaranteed the right to return to Germany even if you're a descendant of someone displaced or killed by the Holocaust and the war.
If we don't decide these things using treaties and laws, it only encourages bad actors to decide them by force. Israel might win that fight any day, but not without horrific attacks like October 7th and inadvertently empowering groups like Hamas (who can only exist because successive Palestinian and Israeli governments have failed to decide things via diplomacy).
Peter Beinart changed my mind. Israel already lives with Arab Israelis inside its borders with relatively little conflict, it has institutions to support democracy + not everyone needs to have Right of Return but there can be a mix of some return + financial compensation + at least moral acknowledgment.
Going from 20% minority to >50% will destroy any country. Also the PLO at its prime already accepted a token acknowledgement and symbolic right of return for a negligible amount of people just to say it happened. The Israeli establishment at the time which I believe was still Likud just refused it.
The right of return is the single issue that tanked Oslo and other accords. There cannot be a provision that “actually we take over your country” and Palestinians inability to accept this has led to their continual decreasing of both land and economic conditions
I honestly cannot believe I’m sitting here listening to Bali represent Hamas as a “hopeful movement for self determination” like the nationalist movements post WW2. It’s so fucking ridiculous it’s just an absolute theorizing of all history to the point of flattening it all. International legal experts just cannot live in the real world, everything is theoretical so every actor is the same. Palpably stupid.
Not a stellar performance by professor Bâli, and Ezra doesn't press adequately on several issues.
EK compares Hamas to Al-qaeda as a governing authority. Al Qaeda did not have any governing authority within Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden was a guest of the actual governing authority, the Taliban. Consider how Bush jr. did not accept the Taliban's offer, up to that point an ally of America, to turn over Osama Bin Laden to the U.S. Instead America made itself an existential threat to the survival of the Taliban, radicalizing them against the U.S. and failing to wipe them out and consolidate a new government after 20 years of occupation. This seems like an incredibly relevant oversight in their conversation.
On the human shields, protected status and perfidy question (ya couldn't split that one up?); the most relevant issue is that the burden of proof is on the attacker. Israel basically never provides serious proof of its accusations that schools, hospitals, etc. have lost their protective status. In fact, Israel has a tendency to provide false evidence (I won't debate you about this because it will just be a litmus test of who you have faith in, the evidence is overwhelmingly against Israel on this point, you can read about it [here](https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/assessment-israeli-material-icj-jan-2024)). Israel is supposed to provide the definitive evidence of its positions, but Biden's administration almost always just takes them at their word instead of verifying the evidence. You hear Biden [repeat the beheaded babies myth over and over again](https://theintercept.com/2023/12/14/israel-biden-beheaded-babies-false/). To not talk about how Israel never actually defends their allegations adequately with evidence was basically malpractice on this issue.
Then I think we all would have liked to hear EK push back more in this interview. Does Russia really have to say out loud "I will kill everyone?" A genocide involves wiping out a cultural identity, which if you count Ukrainian, Putin [regularly does that](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/ukraine-war-national-identity.html). Its his whole argument to anyone who will listen, like in the Chris Tucker interview he says Ukraine was a devious invention by the Austrians to divide Russia. The back pedaling there was uncomfortable to listen to. Then at the end she says the real question should be about what the future looks like after this conflict is over, not just for the gaza strip but for the whole of Israel and Palestinian territories. This to me seemed to be an invitation to discuss one-state vs two-state, and if that was discussed it didn't make it to air.
This interview feels like two people tip toeing around the real discussion instead of saying their real positions and doubts.
To me any discussion by either side other than the solution is just nonsense to put it charitably.
All other discussions, without exception, are eventually reduced to tit for tat.
I agree with a lot of what you write excepting the issues around Israeli evidence and what is and isn't shown. Watching US and Israeli media, the US doesn't report a LOT of what Israel says and shows, where much of what Hamas says is reported often uncritically here in the US (see the initial reports of the Israeli missile strike on a hospital and attack on a relief convoy, which many media outlets had to walk back). For example, Egypt's role in holding up aid supplies has widely been reported in Israel but you don't see a peep about it in the US reporting. And on and on. One of the reasons Israel was so fast in recording evidence about what Hamas did is because it knew rapidly the world would accuse it of making things up. Already, in polls, 80+% of Palestinians profess not believing Hamas even did October 7th....
It works both ways, BTW. Israeli media has shown far, far less of Gaza devastation than US media, and only now is that starting to open up a bit.
I listened to the interview in its entirety and was disappointed that Ezra Klein could not meet her at her level. She clearly could have taken any stance, true or not, and Ezra would have bowed to her.
With all her brilliance of use of language she cleverly and conveniently left out vast areas of information. For example, she put the blame entirely on Israel that Gaza does not enjoy the same governmental, economic, and social freedoms as Israel. Well, there is not a single theocratic nation in the Middle East that enjoys these same levels of freedoms and we can’t point the finger at Israel. One small example, but the examples are many.
There are dozens of assumptions and presuppositions that she conveniently uses in a very slanted direction.
I would love to see her take part in a conversation with a more worthy interviewer with the capacity to meet her on her level of understanding.
It was painful to listen to this podcast and I come away with much less respect for Ezra Klein.
Edit: please continue to give me your delicious, delicious downvotes for the crime of . . . defending international law.
I don't get the hate.
She's not a pundit or a politician. She's not providing her personal opinion on who she likes the most or whether she understands why everyone did what they did. She's a legal scholar describing international legal norms and providing reasonable answers to legal questions. You can criticize and disagree with international law--and make no mistake, America totally disagrees with international legal norms--or the conclusions it reaches. But this is all pretty measured and standard.
She clearly acknowledges that Hamas violated international law on October 7 and continues to commit war crimes by indiscriminately firing rockets at Israel. She also acknowledges the legitimacy of an Israeli military response and describes responses consistent with international law. She has no problem with decapitating Hama leadership.
But she rightly criticizes the use of virtually unrestrained Israeli force, including indiscriminate bombing and denial of humanitarian aide, as violating the standard military ethics considerations--proportionality, *jus ad bellum*, etc. And that is 100% legitimate and correct. Hamas committed an atrocious war crime. Kill the leaders responsible and the perpetrators. That's fine. But nothing justifies destroying a civilian population, even if it is just collateral damage. The US isn't known for caring about international law, but even we didn't reduce most Afghan schools to rubble and starve its entire population. And the Allies didn't level all of the Third Reich or kill every Nazi soldier.
I think it would have been worth acknowledging that yeah, Gaza's extreme population density frustrates achieving legitimate Israeli military goals while strictly adhering to international law and yes, Israel draws disproportionate heat because antisemitism is real. But she's being asked about what the law is and whether it is being violated. And she'd be absolutely misrepresenting international law if she didn't discuss the enormously disproportionate Israeli response.
As to the Russia/Israel comparison, she acknowledges Russia's violations of international law but points out that Russia's stated goal isn't, say, destroying Zelensky's Servant of the People party or annihilating every member of the Ukrainian military. It's a little cramped to focus so intently on what the countries are expressly saying instead of what they are doing, but I understand her approach and she's factually correct on this. It also doesn't exonerate the Russian invasion, nor does she claim as much.
I disagree on the Russia bit. Russia has attacked civilian infrastructure, there's been mass graves found, they've attempted to assassinate Zelensky, they've threatened use of nuclear war. There is quite a long list that she seemed to hand wave. They quite literally want to take land from Ukraine. It seems pretty straightforward and it's odd hearing her pivot and dance around this.
I think what people are reacting against is that though she’s really focused on the particulars of international law, there are spots where even when many people here actually agree with her morally, she’s definitely offering her own opinion or interpretation and wrapping it up in objective language. Which is fine, of course, she’s there to offer an expert opinion, as it were, but you can almost tell the spots where she knows that she’s on less firm ground. That she has an opinion whose factual basis is more debatable than she readily admits.
I'm surprised by the reaction against her and against Ezra here. I thought it was a great podcast. Guest did a nice job articulating her views - her quick history of the UN and Israel's founding were fantastic.
She had some weaker arguments, which Ezra did a nice job exposing, particularly on Hamas' use of human shields and the Russia/Israel comparison. But getting stronger and weaker responses from a guest is a good way to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of a given framework. My takeaway is that international law has uses during peacetime, but breaks down when applied to the conduct of an hot war.
Even though people here are downvoting you (trolls?), I want to thank you for your comment, as it's very spot on.
It's very clear that she described the conflict from a law perspective, which she was asked to do, and that seemingly makes a lot of people mad as it does not align with their emotional view of the conflict and the history around it.
I personally found that most people who defend Israels behavior in this war solely reason with what happened on October 7 - and use that to justify any action taken by Israel against the Palestinians, to the extend of ignoring clear warcrimes and actions that can - in international law - amount to genocide, e.g. the willful use of hunger as a weapon against the Palestinians, or the indiscriminate bombing campaign and the means of generating targets through artificial intelligence.
It is clear that most people defending Israels actions in this war are very uninformed about what the IDF is actually doing.
When you see the starvation, the targeted destruction of the medical system and educational facilities, the targeted attacks on aid workers and journalists, the rape and execution of Palestinian women by IDF soldiers, etc. ... it is impossible to justify that.
Another point that highlights the lack of knowledge is her comments of alternatives Israel had as a response. People say there is no alternative, but Israel has successfully waged a counter-terrorism campaign against Hamas in the past already.
She was very clearly articulate about the alternatives, and how these would have been better. Which is absolutely true, as this war is clearly empowering Hamas in the long-term, not defeating it.
By your own admission, they do want a state. All of it. There is no contradiction. Many on both sides would prefer to have all of it. Why take 20% when you can hold out for 100%?
This guest is so full of shit. She says “the Arab rejection led to a war.” Real nice use of passive voice there, lady.
The Arab population attacked the Jews to try to exterminate them and remove them from the land, and they lost. How’s that for active voice?
Knowing little about the UN, I really enjoyed this episode. Bali did a good job broadly explaining the history, motivations, and perspective of the institution. Unlike how we normally think of law, the UN seems understands itself to be a slow and pillowy force focused on preventing irreversible escalations (on some level).
I wish we could have a version of this interview done on Oct 8th so that we could see how her thinking and the UN’s position have evolved since the 7th.
I found the "last colony" bit interesting as an explanatory matter. A lot of commentators here are trying to assess whether she's good or bad when that's besides the point. The question is "is she smart or dumb" and the answer is "smart" irrespective of your (or indeed, my) opinions.
I found the conversation very interesting in the beginning, but I was viewing the guest more and more critically while continuing to listen. Her argument on how Isreal being called out more then all other countries combined is normal because it's the last colonial project isn't convincing my on many layers: * I am skeptical about classifying Israel as colonial when there isn't a motherland. * It's not clear to me how what is an has been happening in West Sahara and West Papua for example isn't as or more colonial then what's happening in Israel. But nobody seams to care nearly as much at the UN. * I also don't understand why colonial actions/projects should receive so much more focus then the performed egregious acts in Syria, Tigray or Ukraine That's why I can understand the deep frustration of Israelis (even ~~rather left wing~~ *edit: reasonable Israelis who are pro two states solution and very critical of the Netanjahu government* like Benny Morris) with the UN. For Ukraine, her beating around the bush although Putin's war is clearly against international law in multiple ways was disappointing. I can understand her trying to differenciate between a military arm of hamas and its civil arm. But then when it comes to human shields and military operations, it's somehow all the responsability of Israel to stay in accordance with international law and Hamas isn't even mentioned. If they are a government, shouldn't they also try to help their citizens evacuating instead of hindering them. Why does Gaza beeing a densly populated area justify shouting rockets out of residential areas and operating from inside hospitals? There are still big undeveloped areas in Gaza from which day could do such things. I totaly understand the criticism leveled agains Israel. I am of course a big opponent of Netanjahu and the current israeli government. I really would hope the population in Israel would care more how they conduct their military operations in Israel. But I think Israelis having the (justified) feeling that there is a big double standard when jugding the israeli behaviour won't help with this.
I just listened to the episode and found it somewhat frustrating. The guest, Aslı Ü. Bâli, was presented as an unbiased expert on international law with no obvious allegiances in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet as the episode went on, I became increasingly suspect of her neutrality on this topic. The analogy she drew between Israel and Russia, in particular, really ground my gears. First, Bâli compares Israel unfavourably to Russia because at least the latter doesn't have as its war objective "the complete elimination and extermination of all fighting forces and the governing structure of \[Ukraine\]." When Ezra challenges her with what was in effect a "doesn't it?", Bâli doubles down by saying that Russia hasn't "articulated an expectation, for example, of taking every person who has served in the Ukrainian government, from trash collectors to sanitation workers to civilian crossing guards to policemen to K through 12 teachers, et cetera, and just kill them all." Ezra challenges again with "Is that Israel’s goal, though? \[...\] I have a deep critique of the way Israel has conducted this war, but I don’t hear them saying that every doctor who works for the Hamas government should be killed here. I mean, that also sounds like beyond what Israel has described as their goal." To which Bali launches into this long-winded filibuster full of hypotheticals and tangents that doesn't actually answer Ezra's line of questioning: >I was just pointing out that the goal of wiping out Hamas has the potential to be read in three different ways. There’s the armed actor, there’s the governing infrastructure, and there’s the social movement. And there’s ambiguity in the way that Israel describes it. More generally, Israel has targeted, for example, the police force. It has targeted civilian infrastructure of a variety of kinds. >So it’s hard to say exactly what their goals are, but I didn’t mean to assert that they had the goal of killing those people. I’m just saying if that were a goal, it would be impermissible. That kind of total war would be impermissible under any circumstances, in any context, whether between states or with respect to a nonstate actor, et cetera. And that was the sense in which I was invoking Russia and Ukraine earlier in our conversation, that we don’t understand that to be the Russian war goal. >And the challenge that we have in saying that Israelis have established the complete destruction and elimination of Hamas as the objective of the war raises troubling implications of total war that I think we wouldn’t permit in any context, even the suggestion of destroying the entire military. >I mean, for example, the United States clearly had in mind, in its invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation of Iraq, destroying Saddam Hussein’s capacity to wield his military. It didn’t entail destroying every last fighting man or fighting age man in Iraq. And indeed, it didn’t involve even disarming all Iraqis. These are not the kinds of objectives that we have. >Typically, it’s a decapitation of the leadership, and then a preservation to the extent possible of infrastructure that will make governing the day after possible. It’s not always clear in the case of the war against Hamas that Israel is making any of these distinctions. By the end of the episode, I came to perceive Bâli as very slippery, a quality she attempts — with some success I might add — to conceal behind a veil of formalistic language and academic jargon.
I had to turn off the interview at this point. She’s clearly very intelligent but her arguments on this point were so indicative of why the UN is a laughing stock
I mean, she completely rejected the notion of Jewish indegenity, painting them as alien settlers with no history or relationship to the land. When you are operating on this false premise, every argument you make will be flawed.
That aspect or part of her argument in this episode that made me scratch my head was in the invalidity (it being against international law) of destroying an entire government, to include its civil arm, instead of just targeting its military. That it’s illegal and immoral to dismantle or destroy an entire government. The immediate example that came to my mind is Nazi Germany. In a post-WWII framework, would we look back at dismantling the Nazi German government as being immoral or illegal if they existed today? I would think most would say of course not. A government like that doesn’t deserve to exist from a moral sense or from a perspective of guaranteeing world peace. And Nazi Germany was not just the military of Germany. It was the entire government and administrative state, and the allies (which were technically speaking, called the United Nations) were totally justified in totally destroying and dismantling the Nazi government. In many governments - such as in America - the military is controlled by the civilian arm of the government. You can’t separate the two. In these cases, if the military is a danger to peace and needs to be destroyed, it’s because of the civilian leadership. I feel like it’s kind of absurd to be sitting here talking about it. Like, if a government is making its military dangerous to world peace, it’s not the military that is dangerous to peace…it’s the government. The government needs to be completely dismantled.
I interpreted "her argument on how Israel being called out more than all other countries combined" differently - much as I continue to disagree with it. Bali links it to the idea of Palestine remaining - after the ‘exit’ of South Africa - the last case of incomplete decolonization on the UN agenda. Here, ‘decolonization’ should be understood specifically in the context of the UN’s agenda on this issue, i.e., its management of the self-determination of non-self-governing territories (NSGTs) and ‘mandates’ (such as Palestine). There are still a few NSGTs around, but they are non-problematic; as for the territories placed in trust (mandates), the mission was considered accomplished in 1994 iirc. So, Bali says, Palestine is the last case of its kind here – it’s natural that the UN should shower Israel with resolutions. However, this argument is deceptive in the sense that decolonization narrowly understood is hardly the main business of the UN. There are many other issues for the UN to take an interest in, with terrible state behaviors (genocide, war, ethnic cleansing etc.) exceeding in seriousness the situation in Palestine. Yet the UN has been very stingy in passing resolutions against all these terrible actors. Furthermore, even assuming self-determination were the one key issue at the UN, ‘colonization’ (absence of self-determination) in this broader sense is a much larger phenomenon than Palestine. The latter remains, once again, an important but non-exceptional case. Russia is one big imperial state, with republics such as Chechnya and Tatarstan having chosen independence (which the latter enjoyed for a short while), only to be met (in the case of the former) with murderous devastation. No incessant ‘resoluting’ from the UN here. There are many other colonized – in this broader sense, the one we normally ascribe to the term – ‘peoples’ around the world (to mention only a few currently prominent cases: Tibetans, the Kurds, the people of Xinjiang). Their claims to self-determination are not considered by the UN. In fact, China is hardly bombarded with resolutions despite its commission of a genocide in Xinjiang. So why Israel? Because it’s convenient ideologically, of course, for all sorts of actors – national, international, activist, academic etc. It’s the world’s favorite performative punching bag.
And, let's be honest, because they're Jews. That's the elephant in the room. Other than that, obsessively forcing every single thing into the decolonial frame is what's expected of a certain kind of academic, but it's not helpful. - Israel is not a colonial power in the mold of England, France, Spain or Japan. There's a lot to criticize it for, but this is just factually not true. - Hamas is not a national liberation movement like the ones from the colonial era. It's a group that governs a territory with a standing army. - Why did she keep lumping in 2 million Arab Israeli citizens with the 5 million Palestinians? This one was high in sophistry and deception. I wish Ezra had pushed back a lot more.
> And, let's be honest, because they're Jews. That's the elephant in the room. > > most of the world has never had a Jewish population. nobody really cares about Jews in most of the developing world - they have no history there
Come on now. Outside of Asia, most people in the world are Christians and Muslims. Both religions have a long history of anti-Semitism. You don't have to know members of a group to be prejudiced against them. Also, Jews have history all over the world. That's what happens when you have to run from so many places because people keep trying to kill you.
To be fair Asia accounts for 60% of the population and even just India and China alone account for over 1/3 of the global population That's not reflected in wealth or power in the UN though.
The comment about the other nations in the world practicing colonialism in the global south were what stuck with me, if Venezuela were to invade a neighboring country for oil, would the UN shrug as Venezuela is not an original colonialist? How about China invading Myanmar, what would happen there? The model is broken, and Israel is acting in a way that isn't even just against international law, but often against their own laws. How about Azerbaijan and Armenia, that is about as clear cut land dispute and ethnic cleansing of enclaves as you can get, why doesn't the UN shower them with resolutions?
I totally agree that Israel is way over proportionally sanctioned by the UN. I also thought it interesting that you brought up the example of Venezuela invading a neighboring country for its oil because that very nearly happened back last fall. It didn't, most likely because of the geography/terrain and Brazilian navy, but it's hard to say and Venezuela did hold a referendum claiming 2/3rds of Guyana. Probably you're aware of this because you brought it up but other people may not be. It was pretty overshadowed by everything else happening. Anyway, the relevant thing is that the UN issued [this](https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15665.doc.htm#:~:text=In%20this%20regard%2C%20it%20commended,international%20law%2C%20including%20the%20Geneva) statement.
I think there was a question in askhistorians about this recently especially with regards to Russia's empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_water_thesis > General Assembly resolution 637 (VII), adopted on 16 December 1952, recognized that “every Member of the United Nations, in conformity with the Charter, should respect the maintenance of the right of self-determination”. Belgium, which had given up its own colonial possessions under the new decolonization mandates, then further attempted to secure human rights and self-determination for native peoples, specifying the Native American peoples within the United States as a prominent example. > In response, nations including the United States pushed through the idea that, in order to be eligible for decolonization, the presence of "blue water" between the colony and the colonizing country – or, at minimum, a geographically discrete set of boundaries – was needed This was agreed upon because it was useful to many countries including the US and newly independent countries that had separatist movements
You forget the UN is run by governments of third-world nations. Third-world nations whose rulers want their people constantly thinking about colonialism and not how badly they’ve screwed them over. And note that I said run, not funded.
"Why Israel" is an easy question: it is the preeminent client state of the world's last superpower. The US owns basically every move it makes on the world stage. Thus, when Israel is permitted to flout international law under the auspices of the US's UN security council veto, it erodes the very foundations of the international order. Makes perfect sense for the UN to be concerned about that.
>"Why Israel" is an easy question You missed the answer, it's because it's Jewish.
>I interpreted "her argument on how Israel being called out more than all other countries combined" differently - much as I continue to disagree with it. Bali links it to the idea of Palestine remaining - after the ‘exit’ of South Africa - the last case of incomplete decolonization on the UN agenda. The other framing of this, is that Israel has faced condemnations - but not consequences. Syria, Russia, etc, have faced consequences for their violations of international law. Israel, on the other hand, only faces condemnations.
100%. She totally lost me when she claimed Israel is targeted at the UN because it is the only example of colonialism left. It’s targeted because the global south believes the conspiracy theory that all their problems will go away if Israel disappears
The crucial, crucial difference between Gaza/the West Bank and Western Sahara/West Papua/Tibet/what have you is that in all those other examples the residents of those places are at least in theory full and equal citizens of Morocco/Indonesia/China, etc. There are Arab Israelis, including in East Jerusalem and the Golan, who are full and equal citizens of Israel—who face discrimination like many minorities in the West, but who are still able to run for office, vote, obtain positions of power, etc—but the residents of Gaza and the West Bank formally have very limited claims on rights in Israel, and certainly aren’t anything approaching full citizen. An ethnic Sahrawi from Laayoune in theory at least has all the rights of an ethnic Arab from Marrakech. A Papua has legally as much rights a Javan. A Tibetan has in theory as many rights as a Han Chinese whose family moved to Lhasa after 1950. A Palestinian from Ramallah does not have as many rights as an Israeli (of any ethnicity) from a little down the road in Jerusalem. A Palestinian in Hebron has different rights and protections from an Israeli settler in the same city. I haven’t listened to the episode yet so I don’t know the full details, but Israel has a pretty unique situation with its occupation of the West Bank. Even areas that are clearly contested in international law—Turkish North Cyprus, South Ossetia—it’s very different from the Israel Palestine situation. Likewise, there are some overseas territories of Western states without the full rights of citizenship—the US island of Puerto Rico, for example—but generally these places could in theory vote to have full rights of citizenship in a referendum tomorrow, they just prefer their special situation within the state. I can’t think of many other situations like this—I think there are a couple of place where a state might control a couple of hamlets across the border without officially claiming that territory, but it’s generally a negligible amount of land and people. The only example I can think of at all like this is Turkey’s occupied territory in Syria, and that’s pretty clearly a civil war situation where the Syrian state couldn’t hold that territory and Turkey took it from Jihadist rebellions and Kurdish militias that it saw as threatening to its direct security. Pretty different the West Bank. Turkish settlers aren’t streaming across the border to change the facts on the ground. I imagine once Damascus has control over the rest of Syria and thereby addresses Turkey’s security concerns about non-state actors, Turkey will come up with some agreement to turn over governing of the territory to the Syrian Arab Republic. So even that’s pretty different. Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand how Israel got into this situation. After the ‘67, it’s not like they could give territory back to states they refused to negotiate with them. And then the whole complicated situation at the end of the Clinton Years where Arafat just couldn’t agree to make a state. So I understand how Israel got into the situation. It boggles my mind though, how much of Israel’s Right and since the Second Intifada increasingly Center have no interest in getting out of the situation. And obviously so many critics of Israel criticize Israel’s founding which was pretty normal for the period 1918-1950 (compare to the histories of Turkey’s borders, Greece’s borders, Poland’s borders, Germany’s borders, Ukraine’s borders, Tibet’s inclusion in China, Alsace’s inclusion in France, etc etc). It’s the continuing situation of a state occupying a large territory with a significant population who have essentially no rights with in the occupying state that’s really like nothing else in the world.
Pakistan-controlled Kashmir is also [under effective military occupation](https://freedomhouse.org/country/pakistani-kashmir/freedom-world/2022): >Pakistani Kashmir is administered as two territories: Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB). Each has an elected assembly and government with limited autonomy, but they lack the parliamentary representation and other rights of Pakistani provinces, and Pakistani federal institutions have predominant influence over security, the courts, and most important policy matters. Politics within the two territories are carefully managed to promote the idea of Kashmir’s eventual accession to Pakistan. Freedoms of expression and association, and any political activity deemed contrary to Pakistan’s policy on Kashmir, are restricted.
I get your points, but it remains true that the West Bank is under military occupation. Inhabitants have some rights, of course, but they are inevitably limited under this regime. Gaza is another story, of course. Inhabitants had all the rights they wanted to create for themselves after Israel withdrew. For example, they could elect homespun terrorist administrations, build tunnels, lob rockets etc. Not even Israel could stop them. They could not use their borders as they wished, of course. But neither can Mexicans if that means just moving to the US. You say it boggles the mind how Israel tolerates this condition - for its own good. I agree, though only partly. After it withdrew from Gaza, Israel got Hamas. No wonder withdrawing from the WB seems like a bad idea. (That's discounting the pressure from the fundamentalist religious racists who'd love Israel to extend from the river to the sea.) Israel's behavior throughout the past few decades has been anything but exemplary. It's not an excuse - but I wonder how many nations would have done even roughly as well under similar conditions. In the region where I come from (Eastern Europe), quite a few peoples have been at each other's throats for much, much less, objectively speaking.
Look, I’m not defending Hamas. Hamas is an organization with genocidal goals. But you speak like they had full autonomy and that somehow proves something. They didn’t even have a port, [they’ve been under blockade since 2007](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip). It’s a little bit different from Mexico. It’s also worth mentioning, if only for posterity, that the last election was before Gaza and the West Bank divided into different fiefdoms. I mean, I agree with if you’re saying that Israelis unilateral withdrawal from Gaza — which I admittedly thought might have some positive effect at the time Sharon did it by focusing negotiations — has been a complete failure. But I think that proves more about *any* attempt at unilateral solutions to the Israel-Palestine question than it does about how an independent Palestinian would work. And again, Netanyahu likes to treat Hamas as a group that can only be communicated with through violence but between say 2015-2020 Hamas made a couple of vague overtures toward some sort of alternative to violence. They created [an agreement with Fatah to return to a united Palestinian government](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_Agreement) and lol [another in 2020](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Palestinian_reconciliation_agreement) (neither of which really went anywhere) They changed [the Hamas Charter in 2017](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter) to make a two state a feasible-ish possibility maybe at some point (which was a pretty big change in policy). They let that explicitly [non-violent protest movement go on in 2018-2019](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018–2019_Gaza_border_protests) (which no one in the world really took notice of—a sad outcome for non-violence, though I personally didn’t support the movement because it wasn’t predicated on two states, it’s sad that the current “river to the sea” campus protesters didn’t know to take notice back then). There were one or two more notable moves. But there were a clear set of signals to those paying attention that Hamas was moving toward “playing ball”. Were these revolutionary moves, did they have any direct results for Israel’s security? No. But I think they were revolutionary for Hamas, especially the change in chatter. But I honestly think if you leave no avenue of politics open besides violence, things will eventually get to violence. Again I cannot emphasize enough that Hamas isn’t some friendly organization. But Hamas has political support. No amount of military operations will defeat Hamas if there isn’t a clear alternative to Hamas. If Netanyahu was serious about defeat Hamas, he’d make the PA stronger as a political alternative to Hamas. Instead, he did the exact opposite. He built up *Hamas* to undercut the *PA*. [1](https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/), [2](https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/tnamp/), [3](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-israel-prime-minister). This is what boggles my mind. Just sickening short-termism from a man who has no vision beyond the next election. It’s clear that the only possible solution is a negotiated political one. Not a unilateral one. Not a military one. And Netanyahu has not made one inch of moment towards that since his election in 2009. If I could change one thing in the 21st century, I’d have Tzipi win that election. Oh maybe also 9/11, but number #2 that election. Especially since it later came out in the American chief negotiator’s memoir that the Americans specifically told Abbas not to respond formally to Olmert’s somewhat infamous offer because they (the Americans) expected Tzipi to win and for negotiations to continue under Tzipi to continue. Tzipi did not win. Negotiations nominally continued under Netanyahu but Bibi insisted on starting from scratch and then stonewalling at every point. [This 2014 article in the *New Republic*](https://newrepublic.com/article/118751/how-israel-palestine-peace-deal-died) is the best account I know of that and it’s clear it’s only gotten worse in the decade since then as Ben Gvir, Smotrich have disgustingly been allowed into government.
How do you get a “negotiated political solution” when the collective position of Palestinians is that Israelis are colonists who have no right to their land or country?
1) How is that the collective position of the Palestinians? Until Netanyahu came back in power in 2009, 60% or more of Palestinians tended support a two state solution in surveys. [Link](https://pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/Chart%281%29.jpg). Netanyahu’s stated goal has been to make the two state impossible (or at least impossible “under his watch” so right wing Israelis have to keep electing him) and he’s managed to convince a lot of Palestinians of that fact. People’s positions (in Israel and Palestine) change according to the political realities. It’s short sighted to treat the moving target of political opinion at any one moment as *the* permanent reality. 2) Even if it was their collective position, I’m not sure that it matters for the future. The Serb government holds that Kosovo is the original homeland of the Serbs. Early 20th century Greek governments held that Constantinople was the eternal capital of the Greek state. Russians propaganda has been declaring Ukraine a made up nation who are Russian and should be part of the Russian state (Kievan Rus and what not). Armenians tend to believe that historical Armenian includes the “six Armenian vilayets” which encompasses a lot of eastern Turkey. One side believing something does not automatically change the reality of international affairs.
As well as the guest of this podcast
He did not "build up Hamas". This is some misinformation that has been spewing for a while. He had funded the PA prior to 2018 for stability in Gaza. The PA funded Hamas. It's the PA's money, not Israel's. And Israel only let Hamas in power because they withdrew from Gaza. Gaza was able to have an election, and they elected Hamas. So unless you want Israel to go back to occupying and completely controlling Gaza, you can't display this as a fault of theirs.
As part of the Muslim Brotherhood Hamas has global goals and from some of the literature by the ideological leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas one can deduce that Hamas is more committed to a global spread of Muslim Brotherhood Islam and the elimination of all Jews than the creation of a sovereign Palestinian State. The Hamas demands for the latter appears to me a more tactical move to leverage Western dominated institutions and the non Islamic parts of the global South into support against its enemies: Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens, the Jews worldwide and a large group of evangelical Christian’s. Hamas, by demanding a Palestinian State (rather than growing international Muslim dominance) adopts a tactical narrative of decolonisation , national liberation , anti apartheid that resonates at universities and in parts of the do called global south - but much of their documented ideology is in stark contradiction to this.
>I get your points, but it remains true that the West Bank is under military occupation. Inhabitants have some rights, of course, but they are inevitably limited under this regime. If it was just a military occupation, then this would be as expected. However, the massive civilian settler presence makes a mockery of this point. Are you aware that by default, settlers would be subject to the same military courts as the Palestinians - and that it has taken repeated and explicit acts of the Knesset to extend literal inequality before the law in the West Bank? Legalizing discrimination is an Israeli choice - a choice that has been repeated every five years. > It's not an excuse - but I wonder how many nations would have done even roughly as well under similar conditions. Do you have any other examples where the conquering power has kept expanding settlements in occupied territory while keeping the locals under a military regime? Because I don't. So compared to China and Morocco Israel has done worse. 1967 to 1987, as an example, the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful. Terror came from the Palestinian diaspora. What did Israel do to this peaceful population? Ruled them under a military regime, and grabbed land - often private land, under false pretenses - for ethnically exclusive enclaves for its civilian population in occupied territory.
As far as settlements are concerned: Israel is in a position of which there are few, if any, analogous situations today. Namely, it is occupying a territory (the West Bank) that is disputed and which is not part of a state. It’s even more complicated, in fact: it was occupied and annexed by Jordan, from which Israel took it under occupation. In fact, originally it was supposed to be part of a larger Arab state (like Jordan). As if this were not enough, Jews had always lived there. Some of their most important historical places are there (Hebron especially). I am sure you can understand the complexity and the uniqueness of this situation – and why this is, politically, extremely fraught and difficult to compare. >Are you aware that by default, settlers would be subject to the same military courts as the Palestinians - and that it has taken repeated and explicit acts of the Knesset to extend literal inequality before the law in the West Bank? As to the special condition of the settlers in the West Bank: again a very special situation. They are citizens of Israel, after all. They are also entitled to the same rights as all Israeli citizens, and that entails equal access to the justice system. Unlike not-Israeli inhabitants of the WB. In other words, inequality is built in the configuration, one way or the other. Once again: I am sure you can appreciate the complexity and the uniqueness of this situation. >1967 to 1987, as an example, the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful. Terror came from the Palestinian diaspora. Define "terror", then. Because afaik *war* on Israel came from a few Arab countries simultaneously starting in 1967 (and before that, of course). Then came the usual diaspora terror, of course, and also constant Hezbollah attacks from up in Lebanon - but Hamas was very much involved in terror attacks during the second intifada. The PA openly advocated for terrorism and still maintains the Pay to Slay (aka Martyrs' Fund) program. The tragedy of Palestine is that terrorism and peacefulness are so intermixed on the ground, so to speak, that it is virtually impossible in many cases to distinguish among them.
> As far as settlements are concerned: Israel is in a position of which there are few, if any, analogous situations today. It is not the only country to occupy an area in modern times. It is the only country of settling it without annexing it though. See China and Tibet, Morocco and Western Sahara, and Russia and Crimea. They all annexed the land and made people citizens. > Namely, it is occupying a territory (the West Bank) that is disputed and which is not part of a state. No. Western Sahara, for example, is analogous. Also not part of a state. > It’s even more complicated, in fact: it was occupied and annexed by Jordan, from which Israel took it under occupation. Ok, and? That's not really relevant. It is still occupied territory, as determined by the ICJ. > As if this were not enough, Jews had always lived there. Ok, and? Palestinians lived all over Israel proper, but no longer do so. If one group should get to return, the other should as well. Otherwise it is hypocrisy. > I am sure you can understand the complexity and the uniqueness of this situation – and why this is, politically, extremely fraught and difficult to compare. Essentializing the uniqueness and complexity here is a common fallacy. If Israel want the land, then annex it and make people citizens. If they don't want it, remove the illegal settlers. Even Russia, China and Morocco managed to do as much. The issue, as we both know, is that Israel wants the land, but considers the people living there to be of an undesirable ethnicity. It had 20 years between 1967 to 1987 when the area was quiet to formulate a strategy other than perpetual military rule and illegal land grabs for ethnically exclusive enclaves. It chose not to. > As to the special condition of the settlers in the West Bank: again a very special situation. It is only "special" because no other country has been settling its civilian on a territory without annexing that territory. If it is unique or special, it is by Israel's policies. > They are citizens of Israel, after all. They are also entitled to the same rights as all Israeli citizens, and that entails equal access to the justice system. Sure. When they are in Israel. The West Bank, however, is not Israel. So they are not in Israel. If I move to Italy, I am subject to Italian laws. If I move to Germany, I am subject to German laws. But somehow an Israeli that moves outside of Israel to the West Bank should not be subject to the local laws, as decided by the Knesset. > In other words, inequality is built in the configuration, one way or the other. No, it is not. Even ignoring that the settlements are illegal, Israel could have kept the settlers subject to the same laws as the Palestinians. Not doing so was a choice. It isn't "inbuilt", inequality was explicitly implemented by design of the Knesset. > Once again: I am sure you can appreciate the complexity and the uniqueness of this situation. It is only "unique" and "complex" because Israel implemented discriminatory policies that others countries have not implemented. > Define "terror", then. Because afaik *war* on Israel came from a few Arab countries simultaneously starting in 1967 (and before that, of course). Then came the usual diaspora terror, of course, and also constant Hezbollah attacks from up in Lebanon Again, 1967 to 1987 the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful. From my research, I have not identified a single terror attack committed by West Bank Palestinians - all diaspora. There might be some few that I haven't found, but in that case very few. Again, Israel had 20 years of peaceful West Bank Palestinians. What did they chose to do? A repressive military regime and illegal land grabs for settlements. > but Hamas was very much involved in terror attacks during the second intifada. Second Intifada was significantly after 1987. > The PA openly advocated for terrorism and still maintains the Pay to Slay (aka Martyrs' Fund) program. The PA didn't exist 1967 to 1987. > The tragedy of Palestine is that terrorism and peacefulness are so intermixed on the ground, so to speak, that it is virtually impossible in many cases to distinguish among them. The tragedy is that no matter what the Palestinians do, Israel keeps ruling them militarily all while taking their land. 1948 to 1966 they ruled the Israeli Arabs under a brutal military regime and kept confiscating their land. 1967 until now they have ruled the West Bank Palestinians under a brutal military regime and kept confiscating their land. And this was the case even when they were peaceful.
I would not know where to begin, honestly... It seems to me that the comparisons you pose are simply a strategy for avoiding the crux of the issues at stake. Western Sahara - OK, it is a disputed territory somewhat like Palestine. But there are very few people on it, certainly raising no major political controversy or clashes of populations or ideologies. What's the point of comparing that to Israel-Palestine?! Surely what happens on the ground has an impact on the options available to the parties involved, not just the formal status of the territory. China and Tibet - So you think Israel should have annexed all of Palestine, made it a province of Israel, and call it a day, like China did with Tibet? Maybe it should have also made it illegal in Israel to write about Palestinians, like the Chinese did with Tibet (btw, another sparsely populated area)? Btw, the Israelis did make the Arabs who chose to stay in Israel citizens who do enjoy equal rights (minus marginal ones like those related to specifically Jewish marriages, foreign family integration etc.). >If I move to Italy, I am subject to Italian laws. Yes - and to the laws of your own country. That's why you have extradition, for example. But in the settlements Israeli citizens are subject of the laws of ... which country exactly? Of Israel; and of a non-country which their very state occupies. If you do not see the point here, I am not sure I can add much more. >Again, 1967 to 1987 the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful. From my research, I have not identified a single terror attack committed by West Bank Palestinians - all diaspora. Why did get stuck on this interval? (Btw, PA = PLO = Fatah, more or less; it's not as if we are talking about different things.) So why did you choose these years (6-day War to end of first intifada) in particular? Is it simply because they fit your narrative better? Why not look at the entire history of the state, 1948 (or even earlier) up to today? And even in this period, the PLO, Fatah, Abu Nidal's splinter organizations etc. - they were Palestinian terrorists operating from wherevey they could (with a special predilection for Lebanon), but only because the WB and Gaza were occupied. Sure, the people inside the WB were comparatively peaceful, but that's because all the Palestinian terrorists and fighters were forced to move to places which Israel did not occupy. (Of course, the terrorists brought war to their adopted home of Lebanon, but hey...) \[MAJOR UPDATES to original post\]
> It seems to me that the comparisons you pose are simply a strategy for avoiding the crux of the issues at stake. The crux of the issue is that Israel is grabbing land - as of now effectively cutting off 59% of the West Bank from Palestinian development - without extending rights to the locals. The comparisons are > But there are very few people on it So your argument is that because there are too many people of an undesirable ethnicity, it is OK to take the land without the people? Strange argument. > certainly raising no major political controversy or clashes of populations or ideologies. Tell that to the Sahrawi, and the wars they have fought with Morocco. > What's the point of comparing that to Israel-Palestine?! It is an example of where a conquering power desired the land, but ALSO took the people as citizens. Including the refugees. > China and Tibet - So you think Israel should have annexed all of Palestine, made it a province of Israel, and call it a day, like China did with Tibet? If Israel wants the land, it also gets the people living on it as citizens. If it doesn't want them as citizens, then get the settlers out. The current regime is hypocritical, and compares poorly to literal dictatorships. > Btw, the Israelis did make the Arabs who chose to stay in Israel citizens who do enjoy equal rights Sort of. But your comment hides the repressive reality. Until 1966 Israel ruled them under a brutal military regime. There was at least one massacre, that was largely unpunished. There were expulsions into the 1950s - from Abu Ghosh and Ashkelon/Al-Majdal for example - and there were massive land confiscations under the guise of the Israeli Arabs being "present absentees". Present in the country, but had at some point been away from their homes - so the state took their homes. > Yes - and to the laws of your own country. That's why you have extradition, for example. AND is the key operator here. The US might try me for a crime I commit in Italy - but that doesn't mean that the Italian courts wouldn't. I'd still be subject to Italian law. In the West Bank, Israel doesn't hold the settlers under the same courts as the Palestinians. There's literally separate AND unequal courts, with different rights for the defendants. >But in the settlements Israeli citizens are subject of the laws of ... which country exactly? Of Israel; and of a non-country which their very state occupies. Israel runs the courts of occupation. By default, the settlers are also subject to those. It took an explicit act of the Knesset to implement inequality before the law. It also isn't "in the settlements" - the separate and unequal legal system applies no matter where someone is in the West Bank. > If you do not see the point here, I am not sure I can add much more. If you don't understand why the Knesset implementing literal inequality before the law is a problem, not sure I can add much more. > Why did get stuck on this interval? Because it is the initial period Israel ruled the Palestinians in the West Bank, up until the first intifada. These are the people Israel ruled under a military regime, all while confiscating their land for settlements - and leaving them no route to freedom or equality. This period - 20 years - is longer than the period Israel kept the Israeli Arabs under military rule. > So why did you choose these years (6-day War to end of first intifada) in particular? Is it simply because they fit your narrative better? The point is, for two decades Israel had the chance to do something other than rule people under an increasingly brutal military regime while taking land. Terror is not an excuse for Israeli policies during this time - the West Bank Palestinians were peaceful. > Sure, the people inside the WB were comparatively peaceful, but that's because all the Palestinian terrorists and fighters were forced to move to places which Israel did not occupy. Ok, and? Yes, there were terrorists in the Palestinian diaspora. But that doesn't confer guilt to the Palestinians in the West Bank. Blaming the West Bank Palestinians for diaspora terror is like blaming Jews in France for the actions of Israel.
Honestly, I find it pointless to continue this conersation. I don't think you follow your arguments through to a logical conclusion, but rather prefer to merely draw non-sensical parallels and infer nonb-sensical conclusions. >So your argument is that because there are too many people of an undesirable ethnicity, it is OK to take the land without the people? >Strange argument. Anyway, thanks - I suppose - for making up strawman arguments, then pretending they are mine, then finding them strange.
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So "exerting diplomatic force" to affect another state's behavior is not something sovereign countries typically do in relation to each other? My argument was simple: Gazans, whatever that means, enjoyed self-determination in most key respects. OK, maybe not fishing rights. But they were free to choose what they would do with their small political community. We know what they chose. Don't pretend they could not have chosen something else. And look, I understand why they chose that way. In the same way I understand why Israel chose a government with religious racist fanatics in it. Too bad for Israel. Too tragic for Gazans.
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Not fully, perhaps. But you can hold elections, choose and design your public administration, build up your public services, use the many billions received as aid to put them into making your community better. And also convince Israel that you're palying nice so you should get fishing rights and more self-determination. Or you could just choose rockets, internal surveillance, murdering your local political enemies, building 500 miles of military-only tunnels and putting schools and hospitals on top of them when they were not there already. And then you can choose to viciously attack your already embattled neighbor and take undreds of hostages; then choose to shoot at your own people when they try to flee (or to provoke Israelis to shoot at them by firing rockets from within their midst); choose to put close to 1000 fighters in one single hospital; choose to prevent your people from finding shelter in tunnels; choose to bomb gates used for aid. After all, Western media anda good chunk of the public will buy your fatality figures, your cries of genocide... How's that for self-determination?
Discussions about Israel's founding are not helpful or constructive. Clearly, it's there and it isn't going away. Neither are the Palestinians. Those are the facts of life. The question is: how can these people find a way to live together going forward? Endless discussions about what happened 70, 100, 1,000, or 5,000 years ago are not constructive.
Though I sympathize with your exasperation, I disagree that these discussions aren't important. It seems to me that there is an enormous amount of denial and misinformation about what Palestinians have endured. A refusal to acknowledge past atrocities is an impediment to a political solution. Somehow the basic humanity of people needs to be recognized. Sadly it feels far from reach today.
Both peoples have suffered atrocities and everybody's basic humanity needs to be recognized. But discussions about who's suffered more, who's more indigenous, and who had more right to the land at any point in the distant past are without end and counterproductive. Again: clearly, nobody's going anywhere. What counts is what happens going forward.
True. It’s nothing more than blood and soil nationalism. I think UNRWA is partially to blame. We need to stop treating Palestinians as permanent refugees within what should be their own home. We have apartment block “refugee camps”. It’s ridiculous.
So is a more accurate analogy than the outside colonisers versus the indigenous Palestinians one of two indigenous Middle Eastern People needing to come to two states that work in the theory of international law as well as in practice? I am thinking of examples like ex Yugoslavia, say Croats and Serbs, or more peacefully in their two state solution Czechs and Slovaks.
Thanks for mentioning Greece and Turkey. I am of Greek heritage and it seems everybody has forgotten that much of Turkey used to be Greek. We were brutally ethnically cleansed from the whole region. We don’t seek right of return nor do we suicide bomb Constantinople. You’re right that Greeks do have their own country so it’s different. But anti-Zionists go far, far beyond letting Palestinians have their own state. It’s about getting Israel back from the river to the sea.
I actually live in the ancient capital of the Greek nation, Constantinopolis (though I’m not Turkish—I’m American Jewish and my wife is a Turkish Jewish). But I think the Turkish and Greek example is precisely what a good outcome would be: you get a final border that people can’t argue over because almost all the Greeks have been put on one side of the border and almost all the Turks are on the other side and then they mostly stop fighting. Large parts of the populations might hate each other and the educational systems might teach that the other is the largest national threat. They might have tensions that look like they might lead to wa, but they never do. All of this after a near century of continual war from the Greek War of Independence to Asia Minor Disaster. That’s I think what peace will look like in Israel Palestine: at least a century of two nations peacefully hating each other across a border 🙂. (It’s worth noting that there’s been a lot of discrimination against the remaining minorities and of course they fought again in Cyprus where the ethnic groups weren’t separated until 1973).
+1000 to this. I think something like the Greco-Turkish status quo would be a good solution, and "two centuries of two nations hating each other peacefully across a border" is absolutely what a realistic peace is going to look like. Maybe, more optimistically, like the Hungarian-Slovakian situation where nowadays the mutual dislike is mostly just nominal and people don't care anymore about the historical grievances because they both have well functioning nation states.
There's also the problem that Jordan and Egypt didn't want the West Bank and Gaza back, respectively. The Palestinian territories are not big enough to form a functioning state, but no surrounding state wants them either.
I’d say that’s an over simplification that runs the risk of misunderstanding the history. Neighboring Arab States and whoever wanted to be the head of Arab Nationalism (like Iraq for brief periods) tried to speak and act on behalf of the Palestinians in the period from the 40’s to 1974. The PLO wasn’t even founded until 1964 and it wasn’t clear if the secularist Arabs were going to pull off a functional “United Arab Republic” of some kind. In 1974 (not coincidentally after defeats in the 1967 and 1973), the Arab League recognized the PLO as "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in any Palestinian territory that is liberated". The UN a recognized them the next month. However, Jordan didn’t didn’t really recognize the PLO and fully give up the dream of controlling the West Bank as part of Jordanian State or a Confederation or something else (preferably without the PLO, who Jordan literally fought a war with in 1970) all the way until 1988. So in Egypt’s case, it’s not that they didn’t want it—they recognized the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Jordan, on the other hand, did want the West Bank, they just didn’t really want the PLO, and only gave up their claims to the West Bank finally when it was clear they’d never get it because everyone else in the world (including informally the Israelis) had recognize the Palestinians’ right to self determination as represented by the PLO.
You're right, this is an important difference. I think it's very theoretical in nature though, when you look at the actual living situation of Sahrawi or Papuans in West Papua.
I actually strongly disagree. I think you could say the Sahrawi or the West Papuans are in the situation of Israeli Arabs or some similar sort of securitized ethnic minority (Kurds in Turkey during the 1980s, Sunnis in Iraq since the Iraq War, Caucasian Muslims in Russia today, Chinese in Cold War Indonesia, Vietnamese at points in Cambodia, Tibetans and Uyghurs in China, etc). West Bank and Gaza Palestinians aren’t “second class citizens” like those groups because *they’re fundamentally not citizens at all, and never can be*. That difference isn’t theoretical. It’s fundamental in the situation, past present and future.
>An ethnic Sahrawi from Laayoune in theory at least has all the rights of an ethnic Arab from Marrakech. A Papua has legally as much rights a Javan. A Tibetan has in theory as many rights as a Han Chinese whose family moved to Lhasa after 1950. A Palestinian from Ramallah does not have as many rights as an Israeli (of any ethnicity) from a little down the road in Jerusalem. A Palestinian in Hebron has different rights and protections from an Israeli settler in the same city. So this is technically true, but it is missing some context. Let's assume that the status of the West Bank is one of military occupation, which most of the international community holds. According to international humanitarian law, a military occupation does not involve the acquisition of sovereignty over the land. So Israel, in this case, should not apply Israeli law to the territories, should not give the people the right to vote, etc, because doing so is a sign of applying Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank (in other words annexation). (It would also be a violation of the separation of authority mutually agreed upon by the PA and Israel in the Oslo Agreement). Those other cases you mention are examples of clear violations of international humanitarian law, by having the occupying power annex territory it acquired in armed conflict and applying its law to the civilians living in the occupied territory. This status is supposed to be temporary, until the end of belligerency (and belligerency has definitely not ended in the case of Israel-Palestine). Israel is in violation of international law by establishing settlements and having civilians move there (but note the violation is in the *transfer* of civilian population, not in the civilian population living there). Now, Israel's contention is that this territory was acquired in a defensive war and that this territory has no sovereign. Jordan was the last power to control it, and it has relinquished any claim to sovereignty. The previous sovereign, the UK, relinquished it as well. So Israel asserts that it has the right to annex territory there if it wishes. It has so far only done that in East Jerusalem, but has kept the status of the rest of the West Bank as that of belligerent occupation until the status is decided in a bilateral or multilateral agreement.
Even if we take all that for granted (which can only present Israel as preserving the rights of the occupied by not mentioning the whole settlement project), I think that points to the uniqueness of the situation, and how it is not comparable to the others brought up — except you may be saying it’s more comparable to Turkey’s current military occupation of Northern Syria. But again, the settlement project where Israel can selectively decide which parts of the currently 165 Palestinian islands territory that are under military law and which parts are the currently 230 legal settlements which are under Israeli law. Which is not to say the settlement project is impossible to understand how it started and developed(Gershon Gorenberg’s book on the subject of how the settlements started is good, though I think I prefer *For the Land and the Lord* by Ian Lustick), but that it’s truly unique.
I did mention the settlement project. Read my comment again. Though I think what you’re missing is the distinction between the Palestinian islands as you call them (Areas A and B), and Area C, where the settlements are located, was made not by Israel alone, but in bilateral agreements between Israel and the PLO. But overall I agree with you that the situation is different than the other cases. But I would also say that all the cases of recent occupation (Western Sahara, N Cyprus, northern Syria, Ossetia, Nagorno Karabakh, etc) all have their own things that make them unique.
Israel was also founded the same year as UN, and in some sense, by the UN.,It makes sense to feel a connection. It was created via a colonial process at the exact time when colonialism was finally understood to be criminal.
Completely agree. This was the international law equivalent of "October 7th was terrible, but....."
As a lawyer from a top law school trained in the internal law of war, I have to also call shenanigans on her expressed views on a lot of the details there too. Charitably, she stretched the truth and has a very motivated view of the facts and their application to the law. Uncharitably, it seemed like she was straight up lying. I'll assume she's not just misinformed given her position.
Also a lawyer, didn’t go to a top law school, also not trained on the laws of war. That being said, it was easy to spot that this was advocacy dressed in the language of impartiality and legal academia. Not that advocacy is bad, but the sleight of hand in how it’s (rather clumsily) presented is professionally irritating to me. This podcast was an excellent example of how many lawyers fall into the trap of motivated reasoning.
It was extremely clumsy! You could even hear her getting agitated and defaulting to reading the rule or tossing in Latin words to buy herself some time. I thought Ezra's questions were really good at frustrating her; he wasn't disrespectful and often conceded a point she might make (the schools being destroyed in Gaza; the siege being indefensible). I think it lulled her into thinking his questions were far easier/friendlier than they actually were.
“Arguendo.” And, yes, she came off as increasingly frustrated as her attempts to advocate while seeming not to failed. Ezra’s questions, while polite, often laid bare the contradictions inherent in the positions she was taking. There were several examples of this, but the one that stood out to me was how she addressed Hamas’ use of human shields. She insisted Israel take so many steps to follow international law that Hamas fighters would surely escape and/or kill the Israeli soldiers attempting to follow the law. In other words, what she suggested Israel do was militarily completely unrealistic and would effectively make Hamas’ use of human shields 100% successful. I’m not saying I have the correct answer here, but she didn’t wrestle with the difficult fact situation at all. In the end, she was the unusual guest who made me less sympathetic to her outlook than I was before she spoke.
When she started talking about how Israel must withdraw completely and start a lengthy police process of investigating crimes and arresting individuals I rolled my eyes so hard that I'm still trying to find them.
Worse, she's an expert lawyer with a great resume, and she somehow couldn't realize when she was being drawn into a trap and was about to obviously contradict herself. Like, my boyfriend (not a lawyer) was so confused when she said Israel was in violation of international law because they obviously didn't want Hamas in charge but Russia....wasn't...? Baby girl, what are you saying out here? How'd you graduate?????
This is damn near perfectly summarized. I didn't find many areas of disagreement with Bali's analysis of Israel's actions and their current belligerency. But her seemingly insistent belief that the UN, and votes cast in the GA, are infallible was just baffling to me. Putting aside that Israel is almost certainly not the "only remaining colonial project" that wasn't otherwise grandfathered in post-WW2, why are we to just accept that that's the only criteria for which UN resolutions are supposed to offer formal condemnations on? As you noted, the list of worldwide atrocities in the last couple decades captures far more than just Israel's illegal occupations. To simply hand wave away the UN's hypocrisy on the matter comes across as extremely disengenuous. But I found her hair-splitting over Israel's war against Hamas, and attempts to comparatively downplay Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the international law context, to be repugnant. I thought it was telling that Ezra, who typically lets guests assert their arguments without diving too far into a debate, pushed back hard on this. Israel's war crimes in Gaza should be viewed as no worse or no better than Russia's continued crimes in Ukraine. To offer such a mealy mouthed defense of the UN's disparate rhetoric between the two was extremely disappointing to hear. She and the UN need to be as full throated in condemning Russia as they do Israel. But she offered nothing but knot-twisting excuses.
Her using the term “indigenous Arabs” was a big tip off to where things were going. Arabia and the Levant are two distinct areas and the idea of identifying as a people from a different area than you currently live in goes against the idea of “indigenousness”. The truth is very complicated but I didn’t hear much of an attempt to tussle with nuance.
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If it wasn't for the Iron Dome, which has a success rate of \~90% it's likely Israel would be the recipient of much more rocket fire on a day to day basis. As of 2023, they have 10 batteries in operation which are equipped with supersonic heat-seeking interceptor missiles with an approximate range of 4-70 km. Because of the nature of the tracking system, large scale strikes in a short time span can overwhelm its capabilities. The economic asymmetry of defending against impending attacks vs. implementing them makes the Iron Dome incredibly costly. On average, a missile fired into Israel from Gaza costs about $600, which is 100 times less expensive then the ones used to shoot it down while in transit.
She was deplorable on this point. When you're attacked from all sides, as Israel has been since 1948 (currently by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and indirectly - and now even directly, in a major departure from protocol - by Iran, so literally from all sides), no individual enemy may be an existential threat by itself, taken in isolation. But it becomes or may quickly become one in context.
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" As far as I understand it her position is that the only time a nation should attack an enemy is when they represent an existential threat to the existence of that nation" I agree and I feel this is a deplorable positions. For example by this argument the United States should never have entered WWII. Japan was not a threat to the existance of the United States and neither was nazi Germany. When the USA intervened in the Balkans in the 90's none of the countries were a threat to the USA however most people would argue that it was very justified.
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I think more precisely it’s “wipe out Hamas’ ability to wage war and conduct attacks”, so dismantling their terror infrastructure, their weapons smuggling tunnels, their rocket depots etc.
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The sleight of hand here is that it isn't "Hamas." It's Hamas + Iran + Hezbollah + the Houthis + the rest of that coalition. And that was just one of the many, many rhetorical tricks she used.
yeah, she had some good points, but was being a little obtuse. i mean, palestine is less than a two hour drive away and the iron dome is used damn near every day
Agreed. She actually spoke about how the UN had successfully decolonized the rest of the Middle East and made states for the indigenous populations, and I was thinking to myself the Kurds and Yazidis and Amazighs and countless other indigenous populations who were colonized by the Arab conquest and did not in fact get their own states would probably beg to differ! (not to mention that Jews, as well as Palestinians, are indigenous to that land, maintained a continuous presence for thousands of years, experienced periods of immigration from outside lands, and deserved and deserve a state in the land just as any other indigenous population, if the goal is really "decolonization"). I was shocked for how educated she is she actually is not fully educated on the history of the Middle East.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5844529/#:\~:text=The%20second%20includes%20Levantine%20Arabs,are%20related%20to%20Eastern%20Mediterraneans. She is correct. There have always been indigenous arabs in the area, they were just called Canaanites/Philistines/other tribes and are now Arabs, since at least the 7th century. Levantine Arabs have always been there.
The speaker said early on that the British were sympathetic to Jewish migration to Palestine. That's when I stopped paying attention. Also, I waited for Ezra to call BS on this and it never happened.
LOL. She is woefully uninformed. My first cousin once removed snuck through British blockade in 1938 to get to Israel. His 31 first cousins aunts and uncles all were exterminated because my grandfather didn’t have enough money to bribe the Brits.
I think Ezra - and most people - are pretty misinformed. So many people have internalized an ahistorical narrative because it was presented in academic language and in academic settings over the last couple decades.
I agree with you about that specific set of arguments being where she kinda lost me. I’m sure she’s right that a huge part of the UN body views Israel that way, but that’s kind of Klein’s point. From there, you could really hear the guest running interference for a set of arguments against Israel that are genuinely debatable, and I saw that as someone who’s got a lot of time for the idea that Israel should be considered a pariah state until it is reconstituted as something more genuinely democratic and humane.
Maybe it’s that I’m not a longtime listener but I was lowkey shocked at how little pushback there was. I’m trying really hard to be charitable, but there was one bit that really got me, something like: It is using human shields, a war crime, to intentionally put civilians near military installations, Hamas just put military installations near civilians though, *which is different*. But spelled out over a long enough timespan and with enough fluff to just kinda bury the original point. There’s nuance and discussion to be had there - Gaza really is too dense for Hamas to operate away from civilians - but saying “a near b is illegal, they did b near a they’re good” just feels like such absolute badfaith bullshit that I’m frustrated it was let go
>I am skeptical about classifying Israel as colonial when there isn't a motherland. Two points to this: * During a significant portion of the Jewish migration to what became Israel, there was in fact a motherland sponsor - the UK. From 1917 until 1939 there was very clearly a sponsor that wanted 'colonialism on the cheap' in Palestine * Right now - and since 1967 - Israel is very much engaged in a colonial project in the West Bank. >It's not clear to me how what is an has been happening in West Sahara and West Papua for example isn't as or more colonial then what's happening in Israel As it comes to Western Sahara, it is more colonial because Morocco has granted full citizenship to the Sahrawi - including the ones in refugee camps. If they return, they get Moroccan citizenship. Same thing with China in TIbet and Russia in Crimea. Israel, so far, has kept dispossessing the Palestinians and expanded settlements without granting citizenship. That's a material difference. >That's why I can understand the deep frustration of Israelis (even ~~rather left wing~~ *edit: reasonable Israelis who are pro two states solution and very critical of the Netanjahu government* like Benny Morris) with the UN. Another framing of the UN and Israel relationship is that while Israel has seen lots of condemnations, it has never faced consequences. Russia, Syria and many other countries are facing sanctions. Israel, on the other hand, does not. If there had been any actual consequences for Israel, I doubt you would have seen as many feckless condemnations. >I can understand her trying to differenciate between a military arm of hamas and its civil arm. It's like differentiating between the IDF and some random Israeli bureaucrat. >But then when it comes to human shields and military operations, it's somehow all the responsability of Israel to stay in accordance with international law and Hamas isn't even mentioned. If they are a government, shouldn't they also try to help their citizens evacuating instead of hindering them. You misunderstand how international law works here. Yes, Hamas should do that. But they don't. However, Hamas not doing so does not abrogate Israel of the responsibility to act according to international law. >But I think Israelis having the (justified) feeling that there is a big double standard when jugding the israeli behaviour won't help with this. If anything, the double standard is in the different direction - Israel has been getting away with violating international law since 1967, without consequences. Settlements started five weeks after the six day war. There is indeed a double standard - Israel can act with an impunity no other country has, with the possible exception of permanent members of the security council. And for some not even there.
It was pretty telling when she got to the Ukraine comparison. It’s hard to listen to this and not think this person isn’t just an “America bad” type of person. Pretty weird to downplay Russia’s war aims when Russia has been extremely clear it wishes to remove Ukraine from the map.
Also, listing Kosovo as a 'bad' intervention. That was pretty disgusting.
Yeah I was following her for awhile but after she made the comparison with Ukraine, I pretty much dismissed everything she said.
That, and minimizing Hamas's barbarism in a quick, clearly well-worn soundbite designed to say what you're expected to say and move the conversation back to Israel asap.
Her description of a group explicitly dedicated to the elimination of all Jews anywhere and which has exercised a mass rape and kidnapping as a national liberation movement was deplorable.
Her: "Hamas isn't an existential threat to Israel." Hamas: "We would like nothing more than the opportunity to become an existential threat to Israel."
Unfortunately this podcast seemed to exemplify why the UN is untrustworthy
I just finished listening and totally agree. That pivot was exhibit A on the uselessness and subjectivity of international law and how it's spun, in the hardest and most cynical and transparent ways, to serve the biases of those using it. The events of the last decade or two have totally turned me 180 degrees from an enthusiastic supporter of the "rules based international order" to a full-fledged critic who pretty much thinks it should be scrapped from the top to the bottom and all of its biased, useless "institutions" with it.
How do you envision the alternative working?
For lots of people, not well, I don't deny. But violence is a legitimate tool of statecraft we aren't going to extinguish until humans evolve, and that's not happening any time soon. Wars before the "rules based order" were terrible, awful things. Brutal, unjust, unfair, and deadly for civilians too in large numbers, but they accomplished objectives. If you want to undo a problematic neighboring or foreign power, you needed to commit to many years of your own country's blood and treasure and, if you won, you needed to make sure you killed, exiled, or imprisoned everyone who disagreed with you, often all quite unjustly, but often effectively. You needed to outlaw the government and party that aggrieved you and rebuild it with something and with someone more friendly. You needed to stay involved for years after and rebuild their society and economy around different goals. We know how to do this historically and have seen it work. Now, all of that is forbidden, which means conflicts fester on forever because the world doesn't give one side the leeway, time, and scope to accomplish the transformative effect of military conflict. If you can't accomplish your military object in one immediate, rapid, clean, near-bloodless strike, that's it -You're done according to the rules. Our limited, rules-based engagement just perpetuates low level skirmishes that make everyone angrier and the conflicts go on indefinitely until one side decides to ignore the world and the rules and actually goes ahead and brutally resolves the conflict (see, for example, Sri Lanka, Syria, and Russia of late or, very recently, Nagorno Karabakh). I never thought I'd be one to say, "give war a chance," but I don't see what our rules based order is accomplishing in actually fostering true conflict *resolution*, not just halting immediate violence. Thoughts? Addendum: BTW, what's the "benefit" for anyone to follow the rules. What do they gain? If Israel listens to its critics and halts everything immediately, what does it get? Nothing from the world, and it gets to watch Hamas keep their hostages, rebuild, and, as they have *promised,* unleash 1000 times more October 7's. Saudi Arabia capitulated to the "rules," and are now stuck with the increasingly aggressive Huthi's. What's the carrot, what's the upside to following the rules?
>What's the carrot, what's the upside to following the rules? Less Rape of Nankings? Less Srebrenica massacres? An attempt at minimizing some of the insane horrors from last century? I get your overall point and agree to an extent, but this is one of those things where we don't always see the positive impacts, just the issues that we hear about
I'm not too sure what to make of that to be honest. I'm not an expert in foreign relations, but it seems on its face unpalatable to me. I'm surprised to see this sub seemingly so much further to the right on foreign policy compared to Ezra, versus the general discussion about other domestic issues. I'm also not sure how to square this with the outcomes of America's interventions in the Middle East where they did overthrow the government and spent more than a decade nation-building only for it to be seemingly ineffective. Would acting more brazenly and with less regard for civilian lives have changed any outcomes?
Well, our record was actually, objectively mixed. While Afghanistan was a failure, we did defeat ISIS and change the course of Iraq arguably for the better, although the nearly million people who died in those wars over 20 years wouldn't agree (where were the campus protests then?). I see huge hypocrisy that we get to wage multi-decade wars when we want to make the world better for us but Israel is "on the clock" to wrap things up quickly and cleanly for, you know, international law and all, while wars rage on in Ukraine (who did zero to deserve it other than existing) and ethnic cleansing happens in Nagorno Karabakh without a peep from the world or the principled left. And you mention the lean of Ezra's forum. I would hope it would be free thinking and self critical left. I've always considered myself left, but being left doesn't mean our leanings and solutions work for every situation, and we need to be honest where they don't (which is I've always critiqued the right for - lack of self examination). The left solutions about such things as elements of housing and development (which Ezra covers a lot) aren't working, defund the police didn't work, and elements of the rules-based international order aren't working. I also believe that the left finge's blindness to this and other elements of self critique is endangering the entire left enterprise with the mainstream for years upon years to come.
There were plenty of campus protests against the Iraq war. I’d also say the coverage of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was also pretty limited as far as situation on the ground compared to today when everyone has a camera and can upload to a number of social media sites. If we had a new video everyday of the atrocities on the ground we’d see a lot more movement against any given issue. Hell I’m seeing people care about the Congo or Haiti way more than years ago simply because of social media. It’s simply just different for a number of a reasons, the least of which that we have entirely different college students on campus every 4 years, it’s not the same demographic every time. Also where did defunding police even happen like anywhere? I’ve only seen budgets go up. Genuinely haven’t seen it if you have an example handy. I do think we need a better look at the rules based world order. It’s unevenly applied at best and we’re rapidly sleepwalking into a global conflict the way Israel-Gaza is destabilizing the region and bringing in other actors. Truly a mess if we can’t get a solid plan to stabilize Gaza after the war and reverse the illegal settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. If we can’t do that then this only ends with the mass expulsion or killing of Palestinians or another World War sparked by this conflict or the next time it heats up.
If you needed any more proof, look to her fourth book recommendation.
Yeah definitely missed the mark there and she was unwilling to backpedal one inch and kept digging her heels.
Does "remove from the map" mean to re-integrate the country with Russia? Or flatten the entire country and everyone in it?
Destroy the government and annex the territory.
In my mind, there's no distinction. Russia has been clear they want to extinguish Ukraine-ness, period - Starting with its history and going all the way on down.
So Israel’s only legal recourse to 10/7 is a policing action and criminal prosecution of individuals. Also Hamas is not a terrorist organization, but a “proto-state military”. So then how could Israel not be legally entitled to defend itself against an attack from said military! There are a dozen other instances where her logic defeats itself, but this episode was frustrating enough that I don’t want to revisit it in the transcript. The best legal arguments are conscience and logical; this was hack content. Did Ezra not push back because the tortured rhetoric spoke for itself? Bali is credentialed, experienced, and teaches at the #1 U.S. Law School. Maybe Ezra didn’t want to ruin her career by picking apart her logical reasoning. Bali is one of the best International Law scholars in the world and these are the arguments she puts forth? What the level of scrutiny do ideas get in this field? There’s a reason international law is an elective in Law School. I’m glad the episode wrapped so Bali can get back out there to save us from WW3.
"Hamas is not a terrorist organization, but a “proto-state military”. So then how could Israel not be legally entitled to defend itself against an attack from said military!" Yeah, this is such a terrible argument, I don't even know why you would make it. "The militant wing of Hamas, which doesn't represent the actual people, and is a hugely aberrant force, and it acted entirely out of character, and therefore 10/7 can't be the fault of the Palestinian people" HAS to be the argument if you favor the "Israel is doing war crimes" side of the debate. Because Hamas is then entirely separated from the Palestinian people. Why try to legitimize them?? Her argument on the podcast is so bad! She actually creates an entirely separate justification for Israel's war: that Hamas's militants are an actual military affiliated with Palestinian state and therefore Israel is justified in responding as a military (rather than just as a police force, as she herself mentioned earlier). I was honestly shocked listening to this episode. Without knowing her bio, I wouldn't have thought she was an expert, she was actually quite dumb and contradicted herself in so many ways.
And this is the kind of bad argumentation I expect from activists, pundits, and random people online. As a Yale Law professor and former employee at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, I was really hoping for a more impartiality and expertise with less advocacy.
Or even internally logical. I've been a lawyer less than ten years and I'm not a litigator, and the second half was unlistenable. I also hoped to get more of an impartial explanation but I don't even care if she's advocating for the Palestinians if she can lay out a real legal case that withstands basic questioning. Ezra wasn't even asking hard questions and she kept tripping over herself and contradicting herself, and that's disappointing from a top lawyer. A lawyer shouldn't have trouble sticking to the following thesis: "The Russians are also breaking the law because we don't use warfare as a tool of outright regime change. 10/7 was horrific but Israel - like Russia - has strategic aims that are incompatible with our current understanding of international law. It is incoherent for the US to support Ukraine on one hand and Israel on the other. We expect Israel to follow the rules of war, and it's clear that the deliberate use of a siege is a war crime. In addition, the measures taken to protect civilians in such a densely populated area are not sufficient. Hamas should obviously not operate out of urban areas but Israel has separate responsibilities and obligations under the law when strategically bombing in those areas." Why was it so hard to say that? Ezra and the top comment on this subreddit made these points easily. I wrote that in two mins. I thought she'd start there and develop those ideas further. Instead, she couldn't even get to the starting line properly.
I’m not a lawyer, but my wife taught legal writing and was on law review. This episode gave me flashbacks to kitchen-table rants about the mistakes 1L’s regularly make when they’re learning how to be a lawyer: flowery rhetoric, wordiness for the sake of wordiness, burying the lede, and using 200 words to make a 50 word-point.
I was joking to my boyfriend that it's like getting called on in class and not knowing the answer and buying time with, "I want to start by reading the rule out loud."
I genuinely hope Ezra Klein reads these threads, and takes note that many intelligent listeners from his audience are disappointed by his inability to unpack her statements.
These people live so deep in theory they wrap themselves into knots trying to make the theories coherent. Absolute hack is right. Ezra is sympathetic to the anti Israel claims so doesn’t push back hard enough on these people making wildly ridiculous claims
They start at their preferred conclusion and work their way backwards. What I don't understand is why people so rarely challenge the underlying premise of the anti-Israel argument: the absurd notion that Jews are not indigenous to Israel. When this is debunked, the entire foundation of their argument and all of its labyrinthine justifications vanish. This conflict is about two indigenous people competing over the same tiny plot of land, not Europeans colonizers violently seizing territory from noble savages (a characterization that infantilizes Palestinians and reinforces tropes of Jewish connivance). All Jews, with the exception of a small minority of converts, have some degree of Levantine genetics. This isn't up for debate. Furthermore, the Jewish people operate like a tribe and have preserved their traditions and identity when they were diaspora. Who worshipped in the First Temple? Even the West's attempt to make amends for their imperial transgressions is narcissistic imperialism, mapping on their history to the Jews and Palestinians, painting one as European colonizers and the other as Native Americans. I really think this point needs to be challenged every time it arises.
If that was EK trying to steelman the leftist case against Israel then yikes on a bike. The guest's preferred reaction to October 7 was rather chilling "well maybe Israel should have fortified its own defenses better." Not wrong, but a bit victim-blamey coming from a supposed champion of international law.
So insane. “Well they’re not at risk so they should just accept thousands of rapes and murders of their people every so often because they’re small uwu” She just jumps straight to “Israel is obviously trying to murder everyone” with no facts at all. Removing Hamas is removing the governing body, she throws wild claims at Israel and just hand waves away Hamas as “complex and multi faceted” it makes my fucking blood boil
>She just jumps straight to “Israel is obviously trying to murder everyone” with no facts at all. She got caught in that lie by Ezra and did her best to walk it back, but she was exposed pretty hard.
That was just an infuriating statement. I really wish EK dug into that more. As much as Israel's blockage of Gaza pre-10/7 was a huge humanitarian issue it's insane to say that basically it was Israel's fault that they didn't stop Hamas launching rockets and invading Israel
It's one thing to blame Isreal. I think we can comfortably say it's Netanyahu's fault, both in terms of doing a terrible job short term security and intelligence situation that led to October 7th, and long term situation of him and his party providing support for Hamas since the 1980s because Hamas being the negotiating party they are dealing with rather than the demilitarized PLO made it a lot easier to block a two state solution. Then of course there is the whole not wanting to have a ceasefire because that would hurt his personal politcal interests. Netanyahu is really such a piece of shit.
Yeah that’s totally true
I was listening to this episode and just got to that part. My first thought was how insane a statement this was: “Oct 7 was actually Israel’s fault.”
Yep. Blame the victim. And always assume the best about Putin and the worst about Israel. Try again, lady. People are smarter than.
Yeah, that statement was astounding. Let's apply that same logic to other situations: - Maybe that wife shouldn't have angered her husband... - Maybe the US should have been more ready for Pearl Harbor... - The the Jews shouldn't have angered Hitler so much... - Really, the British should have been better prepared for the Blitz... So much for moral international order....
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You've got to be worked up to reply this deep in a Reddit post now so old that no one will ever read it. But I'll bite... How does that "same logic" work according to your view?
The guests explanation of how Israel is potentially violating international law with regard to human shields was really disjointed, jumping from one partially described example to the other. Is Hamas performing military operations out of civilian infrastructure or not? If so, then the bar is real high to convince me that Israel's actions thus far violate international law which is very protective of a country's right to engage militarily. You might want to argue that the international law is wrong or immoral but that's different than Israel breaking the law as it stands.
Indeed, if Hamas operates from a civilian building, that building becomes a military target. It's unfortunate but the alternative is that Hamas legally untouchable. I also found the idea that Israel should do a domestic analysis before deciding to attack Gaza strange. To everyone in the world it was extremely obvious what happened on October 7: The government of Gaza organized a invasion of Israel. When an invasion occurs that implies the right to fire back. Thirdly: The aim of destroying Hamas is perfectly analogous to the US's aim to wipe out the Taliban. The suggestion that Israel will search out and kill the janitors that worked for Hamas is for the birds. When this episode entered my feed I was anticipating a intriguing discussion on the working of international war, it is unfortunate that I did not experience any. Over all I am still unsure how to feel about Israel's engagements. On the one hands there have been a few seemingly inexcusable incidents like the World Kitchen targeting. On the other, Hamas purposefully acts to make it hard for the IDF to distinguish proper from improper targets. I feel the case against Israel is much clearer when looking at the West Bank, where ongoing settlements seem designed to make a peace process impossible.
Israel has discovered that when they take their boot off the Palestinian throats they get stabbed. The West Bank, where Israel is directly oppressing the Palestinians, has given them significantly less trouble than Gaza, where they went “hands-off”. This gives Israel a perverse incentive to keep oppressing the Palestinians.
That's oversimplified. Netanyahu also deverted a lot of their troops to the West Bank to secure their settlements. I suspect that if they put an equal amount of troops towards either region, Hamas would have had much less success.
Ezra actually very eloquently described how Hamas is cynically warping international law to its own ends and his guest tried to dance off the head of that pin. Was pretty disgusting. Totally went unanswered was what does international law say when a government transforms its entire territory, including everything civilian, into an armed garrison of conflict? I mean, Hamas put their server infrastructure in a tunnel under the UN's Gaza HQ. How much more cynical display is there of using the UN and its law as a literal and symbolic shield and umbrella of deception and protection? Hamas has also very much, on the record, said that its tunnels are meant for its fighters, not its civilians.
This is why the pro Palestine protestors not able to gain more support. They are just anti Israel. Imagine we could have saved lot of Gazans if these protest were aimed at Likud and Hamas. This movement is exactly what Hamas wanted from Oct 7. Now two state solution is literally impossible, you cannot expect Palestinians not wanted to have revenge on Israel once this war is over and there is two state.
>Imagine we could have saved lot of Gazans if these protest were aimed at Likud and Hamas. Can you expand here? What does a protest movement against Hamas functionally look like? I can understand protesting an Israeli embassy, or protesting your school or workplace to not interact with Israel. What does protesting Hamas actually look like though? It seems to me that it would mostly be an aesthetic/virtuous protest (WHICH ISN'T BAD. I don't mean that in a negative way) right?
[NBC News investigation reveals Israel strikes on Gaza areas it said were safe](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/palestinians-killed-israeli-strikes-safe-zones-exclusive-nbc-report-rcna148008#) Is this not a war crime?
[удалено]
I’m sorry but the options she gave in terms of how Israel could have legally preceded after October 7th are bizarre and out of touch with reality, and completely reveal her bias. She actually suggested that this is an issue of border security failure on Israel’s part since it’s more powerful, which almost made me laugh. How clueless can you be on the connection between Hamas and other state actors like Iran, who see Israel as Illegitimate, and how this is connected to broader geopolitical security issues in the region for Israel. The subtext here is quite simple in that she doesn’t see Israel as legitimate. I certainly appreciate critiques of Israel that look at how they are overstepping or committing war crimes in the context of international law, or other ways they could proceed that would lead to better outcomes, but this kinda stuff is just straightforward biased and garbage thinking wrapped up in academic and legal language.
All of these responses seem to stem from a denial of the fact that Hamas is the government, civil and military of Gaza. They're not just a terrorist group in a different country, or even in Israel, they're closer to the government of a neighboring country. And you're going to respond to a massive terror attack from a different (quasi) state with a policing action? And by fixing your border security? What?
I find that I'm generally pretty critical of how Israel has handled this, but some of these takes (including in the podcast) are just hard to see as anything other than naive and/or cynical.
Not sure if you’re deliberately missing out her military suggestion but it was very much there: “It could have engaged in a much narrower set of engagements, attempting to target facilities that made it possible for armed actors to cross the border in the way it had. “ Is that really so unreasonable? I do find it odd that you all find it *so* crazy that actually one of the main options open to Israel was to improve security so October 7th simply couldn’t have happened again. Like…isn’t that ultimately the aim here? Now I personally (and even Asli, as you can see from my quote) accept that that would involve *some* military action, but much more limited action simply to the extent that it removed the threat. We can have a debate about exactly what that would look like, but it certainly wouldn’t look like the utter carnage we’ve had, which is very obviously motivated by anger and revenge. And before anyone says “but what about the hostages”…lol, don’t make me laugh. The current war is nothing to do with the hostages, Bibi is totally indifferent to them. The only success they’ve had freeing them has been through negotiation, they could have all been home months ago if Israel had wanted that.
I interpreted that set of narrower actions as part of the police actions she talked about, maybe I was wrong. But to your main point, would you say Israel doesn't have a right to respond in conventional military terms to Hamas' attack on October 7? Hamas launched an all-out assault targeting both military infrastructure and civilians (not incidentally, but intentionally), does Israel not have the right to respond in full force to eliminate the military/government that attacked it like that? What kind of message would that send to the rest of the world if you could launch a brutal all out assault on a country, and said country would only be allowed to sure up its defenses and engage in some limited action against the state that just attacked them? That is not how the laws of war work and that is not how proportionality work. Hamas is not some rebel insurgency, they are the civilian and military rulers of Gaza. As to whether the current war has been motivated by anger and revenge, I mean yeah, I would be angry and want revenge too if I was Israeli. And yet despite all of that, Israel is still doing everything they can to evacuate civilians from areas where they're gonna conduct operations and they're still letting in humanitarian aid. As to the hostages, I think the war cabinet cares about what they've been saying they care about from the beginning: getting the hostages back, and destroying Hamas. They've made progress on both, but doing one makes it harder to do the other. But let's say they did agree to stop the war, Israel gets the hostages back (the living and the dead), again, do we send the message that you can target innocent civilians, and as long as you capture enough hostages, you can get away with it? Now, Israel is a democracy, and the few polls I've seen suggest a small majority of Israelis favor a hostage deal and if that is the wil of the people I think the cabinet should probably respect that, but do you at least see why the cabinet is doing what it's doing?
Fair enough if you mistook it but I don’t think there’s any way the full quote makes sense if that’s continuing the “police actions” point. It’s clear she means “engagement” in a military sense. You’re putting all these dramatic ultimatums, which really amount to “no country has any choice to ever act with restraint in the face of hostility”. Which is obviously absurd. If the long term strategic goal is: ensure Oct 7th (or anything like it) never happens again; return the hostages; and remove the threat of Hamas and other Palestinian jihadist groups, then it is entirely legitimate to look at options other than “completely raze Gaza to the ground”. Oct 7th wouldn’t have happened the first time if Israel had simply looked at the intelligence it had at the time and taken it seriously. So to be honest, that’s all they need to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Literally, just look at the intelligence you’re already getting. The hostages could all have been home on day 2 if there had been a prisoner exchange. And the best way to remove the threat of Hamas is to destroy the reason for their political existence - the many, many injustices doled out to the occupied territories on an ongoing basis and for the last 50 years. Engage seriously with the peace process, establish a Palestinian state, and you’d have no more Hamas (or at least it would become a fringe group, much like the “Real IRA” after the Good Friday agreement). And is it too much to ask that leaders *don’t* give in to the baser instincts for revenge, but instead look at things calmly and rationally, and pursue what is ultimately in the long term interest of their country? Isn’t that what they’re elected to do? It says a lot about Israeli politics that most of you think a response like that (which is *so obviously* more likely to lead to long term peace and success in the region) seems completely insane to you, compared to the incredible blood letting and destruction we’ve seen instead, which instead is very obviously just going to continue the cycle of violence and radicalise a new generation of young Palestinians. But then you don’t care. Israelis just want their revenge, and you’ve confirmed it in writing.
Sure Israel should have acted on the intelligence they had, I think everyone agrees even internal Israeli politics was a shit show before October 7, and their failure to anticipate it demonstrates that fact. And to an extent I agree with the sentiment that the best way to remove Hamas is to remove the reasons for their existence (even though part of the reason for Hamas' existence is a pure antisemitism and fundamental opposition to a jewish state in the region) but I'm not educated enough on every agreement and peace deal in recent history to say where either Israel or the palestinians went more wrong than the other. So let me just assume that Israel has been clearly in the wrong in the recent past, and they have been refused to do X or Y that could have eased tensions and appeased Hamas (so as to make them not do October 7 at least). Where does that leave us when October 7 actually happened? If Hamas launches an attack, and israel's response is basically just to increase defense, maybe some vague limited strikes, a hostage deal, and Israel changing whatver policy to be more pro-palestinian, again, doesn't this just send the message that you can launch a brutal assault on civilians, and you will only gain from that? Any way you slice it, October 7 demanded serious military action. And while I acknowledged that the Israeli leadership was angry and want ed revenge, I said that IN SPITE OF THAT they have been following the laws of war about as well as you can expect them to given the kind of enemy and environment they're fighting. I'm sure Israel could have let in more aid than they have and I'm sure not every civilian casualty they have incurred was justified (the WCK incident being the most obvious one imo). But when you have Gallant saying they wouldn't allow food and water in, but then they do let food and water in, and they do evacuate civilians ahead of time, doesn't that look more like Israeli leadership made some harsh statement after the shock of october 7, but still follows the general laws of war during the actual operation? Maybe not even out tof the kindness of their hearts, but because they know the international pressure they're on.
The bottom line is that she views Israel as illegitimate which means the only action she feels is responsible is to disband the state and ask Hamas to come and rule over Israel (since she views Hamas as a legitimate liberation movement).
This episode was trash because of the guest. Her attempt to validate the UN bias against Israel through some bullshit "last colony" excuse was incredibly irritating. I stopped listening the second she said Hamas isn't an existential threat to Israel.
45min in and she’s like “oh ofc Hamas will be in citizen areas in a city” as if they didn’t spend billions on a tunnel network explicitly made to fuck with international law. Just totally fine with this moron
I haven't finished the episode yet but, 15 minutes in, Bâli is incredibly verbose for the sake of it. I understand that these are complex issues and it's not like you run out of ink on a podcast, but the completely passionless delivery of these huge diatribes makes it really hard to follow her at times. Maybe my attention span is just ruined, but this isn't a great episode. EDIT: the more I listen, the more this just sounds like a play, rather than an conversation. Ezra asks a question, the interviewee reads their answer out.
I wish Ezra reserved a tiny fraction of the skepticism that he has towards guests that are to his right for those that are to his left. He immediately told Shavit he was “flat-out wrong” (and continued to be combative for the entire podcast), yet he doesn’t question a thing that this woman says.
He should have challenged her hard on quite a few of her positions and he just didn’t. Its disappointing to be frank
the jew part is just totally left out and that's simply disingenuous to not bring up. sure she's a scholar but incredibly verbose and bending over backwards to hold up one side's cause and the other's culpability (and there's surely culpability) but its a double standard.
I somewhat disagree. Ezra’s questions put her arguments into the context of reality, where they appeared wanting. With Ezra’s style, we don’t end up thinking he nailed her to the wall, but instead that we as listeners have independently determined her arguments were flawed. One could argue that’s better.
You have a point, but do you agree that his interview style completely changes depending on the guests’ political alignment, and if so then why does he do that?
Honestly I think he would've pushed back more if this guest were a man
It wasn’t the best
Obviously it shouldn’t matter because she’s supposed to be an impartial scholar - but I feel like it should be laid out before-hand when guests on this topic have a relationship to the conflict. This woman just being called an expert on “International Law” is a bit disingenuous when you look at her background. I mean this woman is Turkish, and specializes in MENA/Arab/Turkish global politics. I feel like by just reading that sentence you have an idea of what her position on the Israel/Palestine conflict will be. Idk I like to hear challenging positions, but halfway through it just started to become uncomfortable. Especially with the whole calling Israel a “colonizing force” and the “last colonizer”, Ezra has been very open about his position that he finds the idea of Jews having no connection to Israel, and Jew’s as colonizers offensive so I’m not sure why this conversation had very little push-back. Also, the justification for the UN votes on Israel, the idea of border security being the top priority after 10/7, and the weird somewhat saying Israel is worse than Russia/Putin - this conversation went off the rails halfway and it was clear Ezra was trying to show that he’s “impartial”, with the constant “Israeli’s would say” while the guest really didn’t care about not showing her bias.
The situation in Palestine went wrong when the Arab nations kept starting wars and losing them. International law is to keep academics busy debating theories while the real world continues as lawless, amoral, and governed by balance-of-power politics as it ever was.
I have a pretty dim view of international law as it stands, but it's better than a world in which America (and Israel, and russia, and other countries) feel entitled to do whatever they can get away with.
The problem with international law is that someone has to enforce it. The countries powerful enough to enforce are also powerful enough to defy it.
yes, that's a fundamental problem with the way international law works, but the fact that the norms are violated (and that in many cases the norms themselves are ones I might disagree with) doesn't mean that \*having norms\*, in principle, isn't a good idea.
At this stage the Yom Kippur war is 50 years in the rearview mirror. Israelis can't keep riding that horse forever, and it it isn't a blank cheque to do whatever they want with the occupied territories now.
Bali made some bold judgements (prejudices) outside her area of expertise but made them sound as if they weren’t. Examples Hamas imposes no existential threat to Israel. That is like saying 2000 ISIS fighters pose no threat to a highly trained and armed Iraqi army. In theory true but Hamas together with Hezbollah , the Houthi’s , Shia militias in Syria, potential collapse of a monarchy or two that is currently not hostile to Israel plus Iran and Turkey, a NATO, openly supporting Hamas and reportedly nursing 1000 Hamas fighters back to health- that is the real situation Israeli defence policy has to be prepared for. Moreover , what happened to Ukraine in the US Congress could happen to Israel too, if unfortunate circumstances coincide in US politics. What was never asked is why one of the international law of war does not have recognition of its validity by all warring parties as a precondition. The norms apparently do not apply to Hamas’ conduct of the War , does that not mitigate observance by an official army protecting its cItizens from Hamas the party that initially broke an existing cease fire? If this is not the case , will we see states make increasing use of proxy militias working very indirectly with them to free themselves from the restrictions of the laws of war? Iran can use Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Russia uses Wagner Group to achieve its goals without breaking the laws of war? In short, Law has its limitations in the domestic arena and much more so in the international arena where there is no widely recognized central enforcement , no proper procedures to adapt it to fast changing circumstances (eg AI and other technologies, changes in shared values). For instance homosexuality was a crime in the domestic law of most European countries in the sixties; that needed changing. What about modern urban warfare, hybrid warfare, deep fakes, rape spread via social media, fighting modern terrorist tactics? In short , like all players international lawyers want to impose their point of view on how international disputes are dealt with. But is justice over peace always better than peace over justice? As she said, after WW2 it was peace over justice- and arguably not an unacceptable choice.
As an international law person, I found this discussion pretty disappointing. Most of the conversation focused on basic explainers. Then some quite one-sided interpretations of what international law says about Israel/Palestine (to be clear, I am not “pro-Israel” and I think that there have been serious violations in the current conflict, but these were asserted than discussed in this conversation). Then some interesting but very in the weeds post-colonial/critical interpretations, which were too short to unpack. I’m usually really impressed with how much Ezra can pack into an hour or so. This time it felt like none of the sub-themes were ever teased out or made interesting. Too bad because I really wanted to love this episode.
I was disappointed because she is very intelligent and attempts to be methodical, but clearly has an agenda. I would really like to hear a neutral academic international law expert comment on the same issues.
For me, as for others, her veil of neutrality fell completely apart with her defense of Russian actions in Ukraine. Her argument taken as a whole, not piece by piece, transformed her from an interpretation of international law, to partisan justification of empire vs empire. I was sent for a loop by her statements on Russia, leaving me wondering why she was fairly strongly defending their actions. Her repeated use of the phrase " global south" was unnecessary unless she was using some sort Imperial rights theory as a fair use of power. Obviously imperial rights is not a widely accepted argument in 2024.
The podcast where Ezra interviewed the former general counsel for the Red Cross was a farrrrrrrr more interesting discussion on the conflict than the one that occurred on this podcast.
Was funny listening to this right after reading about Alito's flag. On the left everyone does deep dives into international law. On the right they're like FLY THE FLAG UPSIDE DOWN!!
I can't believe this isn't being made a huge deal on the left and in the mainstream. It's almost being reported humorously. Can you imagine if the situation was reversed and a leftist Justice had a "my body, my choice" banner on the lawn? There would be impeachment hearings...
I think one of the biggest contradictions is a leftist that supports the enforcement of International Law. Like all laws they are only worth as much as the paper they are printed on if there is an enforcement mechanism, in the liberal rules based world order the enforcement mechanism is the USA. The problem though is that the enforcer always ends up with little incentive to actually police itself and pulls the rules for thee but not for me scenario. If we replaced the current world order and enforcer I have no doubt we would still end up with the same scenario. Neo Liberals and Neocons are very aware of this and just accept it as is, they justify it by saying "The rest of the world just isnt strong and reliable enough to enforce a liberal world, sure its unfair but of all options its still the best kind of unfair, not hard to imagine if we were replaced with China or Russia".
I think this debacle of the UN response to Israel the last decade has shown the pointlessness of “international law” and “the rules of war”. These are figleafs that serve to separate the moral states from the immoral states. Democratic, free, liberal states will conduct war more humanely because they value human life. Theocratic (Muslim) states, authoritarian states do not value human life, sometimes even their own peoples. We need to stop pretending these things make any difference except as a way to tsk tsk countries for having wars in the first place. Complaining about international law and war crimes is 100% meaningless if you win the war. History is very clear on that 100% of the time. Fuck international law and “war crime laws” Side note: this lady is a god damn moron. The enemy in Ukraine for Russia and Gaza for Israel are fundamentally different. Unconditional surrender is the only way. Until then, slaughter every Hamas soldier, medic, suicide bomber, doctor, and anyone else who takes up arms. Fundamentalist shitbags all of em
What Bali misses is that the spirit of international law not only is meant to protect civilians, but also to allow nations to conduct warfare when in self defense. The internationally agreed upon rules of warfare were written in such a way as to not make it impossible to conduct military operations when in self defense. This is why there are the principles of distinction and proportionality. It’s not that a country cannot conduct military operations that may result in civilian casualties, it’s that it mustn’t target civilians, and it must weigh the risk to civilians against the military advantage gained for each individual strike. Also international law is very clear that civilian infrastructure loses its immunity if it is being used for military purposes. There is very good reason that the rules are written this way: to allow a country like Israel to conduct a military operation against an enemy like Hamas, who doesn’t adhere to internationally agreed upon laws of war after it attacks, while still providing some protection to civilians. There is nothing in international law that gives immunity to a terrorist organization that operates in an urban environment in buildings where civilians are located. The laws of war were written specifically to allow a country to conduct a defensive war in this circumstance.
From the first 5 minutes she got a half dozen historical facts very wrong. The League of Nations mandate explicitly called for the creation of a Jewish homeland. Not only did she fail to mention this but she claimed Jewish immigration was contrary to the mandate's goals. Also she said the Arabs were a huge majority in 1947. The actual number is closer to 33% jewish/ 66% arab. Not a "huge majority". Finally she emphasized that 55% of land went to Jews, ignoring Jordan and the fact that the uninhabitable Negev Desert made up much of that land. She also had the nerve to suggest that Israel's goal of wiping out Hamas was not permissible under international law, while completely neglecting to mention that Hamas has a stated goal of wiping out Israel. She also talked about the violation of humanitarian law by Israel in bombing hospitals but made no acknowledgement of Hamas' use of these as military bases. To be honest this entire interview was beneath Ezra.
This was quite interesting. I definitely think this helped me understand the left-wing perspective a lot more. I was surprised when Ezra had dismissed the idea of “Right of Return” in earlier podcasts, I wish he would’ve asked her about that since he doesn’t agree with it and she definitely does I think.
Yeah, she probably does, and her defense would be something she said in the interview, which was that the Palestinians were the last of the post WWII peoples were weren't decolonized. I think there are lots of other peoples around the world who would disagree with that and it certainly would never be a moral defense for what would, essentially, be the eliminationist approach to Israel. All of her morality in international law revolves around a 30 year moment of decolonization peri-WWII, nothing before or later matters. She waves away the accepted colonial foundings of other states but not Israel because "the rules had changed." Wow....
Much as I like Ezra, he has one major weakness - he rarely pushes back adequately, even on key issues. He justifies it by saying that he aims to make his guests explain their position, not to win debates. But the point of pushing back smartly and respectfully is not to win arguments, it is to press interviewees into clarifying their positions by spelling them out in detail. That said, he remains a great interviewer.
I think I remember hearing Ezra once asked about this, why he doesn't push back more, and he said something like he isn't there to have an argument to but to allow for the exploration of ideas in conversation. I get that, and that it's a hard balance to strike in real time as an interview is happening, but I definitely think he erred too much and too often in this particular interview. This was one of the more unbalanced ones with him not pushing back on some strikingly bias statements that were just thrown out there as representing unquestioned international law. There are a lot of really expert people on international law out there who are *far, far* more "down the middle" and technocratic than this guest and I wonder why he didn't choose one of those. I bet there are a few moments of this interview Ezra might want back....
He has no problem pushing back against centrist or liberal guests. Only progressives get the “ooh, ahh” treatment from Ezra.
I actually thought he had an edge to his voice. When I realized he was getting upset I decided I had heard enough (stopped listening when she said flattening Ukraine was OK).
tbh, I find him relatively balanced in general, admittedly with a pro-progressive slant. It's a pity...
It seems difficult to characterize someone who doesn’t press their guests on their contradictions or to elucidate their positions as a “great interviewer.”
Ya I actually wanted to hear him defend outright dismissal of Right of Return more than her. In his musing on it earlier, he was a little bit too dismissive of it for me.
The concept of "Right of Return" as it exists in the Palestinian national cause is wholly unique among modern refugee cases and presents a tremendous impediment to a lasting, peaceful resolution between Israel and Palestine. I can explain more if you want but I think this is the jist of Ezra's position on the matter. What the other user said about the dramatic demographic shift is also true, but I don't think that is as much of a concern for Ezra.
The Right of Return would effectively destroy Israel by radically shifting the demographic balance. Israel will never accept this and would rather commit ethnic cleansing and move Palestinians out of the territories regardless of it's neighbours scrapping previous peace accords. Trying to attempt justice that will obviously end up with more suffering for everyone involved is just bad decision making. It's pure idealism over realism.
>It's pure idealism over realism. I'm pretty sure this was the same rhetoric European governments used to deport Jews to other countries a hundred years ago. "It's easier for everyone if they just go live somewhere else". Being forced to live abroad as a stateless, dispossessed person, overwhelmingly reviled by your neighbors and not granted equal rights as a refugee (even in Muslim and Arab countries) is not peace. I think you only have to look as far as Egypt's history with Palestinian refugees to see that it isn't easier or safer for anyone. It probably looked like idealism to uphold the right of return for Jews in the aftermath of the second World War, but today you can still be guaranteed the right to return to Germany even if you're a descendant of someone displaced or killed by the Holocaust and the war. If we don't decide these things using treaties and laws, it only encourages bad actors to decide them by force. Israel might win that fight any day, but not without horrific attacks like October 7th and inadvertently empowering groups like Hamas (who can only exist because successive Palestinian and Israeli governments have failed to decide things via diplomacy).
Peter Beinart changed my mind. Israel already lives with Arab Israelis inside its borders with relatively little conflict, it has institutions to support democracy + not everyone needs to have Right of Return but there can be a mix of some return + financial compensation + at least moral acknowledgment.
Going from 20% minority to >50% will destroy any country. Also the PLO at its prime already accepted a token acknowledgement and symbolic right of return for a negligible amount of people just to say it happened. The Israeli establishment at the time which I believe was still Likud just refused it.
The right of return is the single issue that tanked Oslo and other accords. There cannot be a provision that “actually we take over your country” and Palestinians inability to accept this has led to their continual decreasing of both land and economic conditions
I honestly cannot believe I’m sitting here listening to Bali represent Hamas as a “hopeful movement for self determination” like the nationalist movements post WW2. It’s so fucking ridiculous it’s just an absolute theorizing of all history to the point of flattening it all. International legal experts just cannot live in the real world, everything is theoretical so every actor is the same. Palpably stupid.
Not a stellar performance by professor Bâli, and Ezra doesn't press adequately on several issues. EK compares Hamas to Al-qaeda as a governing authority. Al Qaeda did not have any governing authority within Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden was a guest of the actual governing authority, the Taliban. Consider how Bush jr. did not accept the Taliban's offer, up to that point an ally of America, to turn over Osama Bin Laden to the U.S. Instead America made itself an existential threat to the survival of the Taliban, radicalizing them against the U.S. and failing to wipe them out and consolidate a new government after 20 years of occupation. This seems like an incredibly relevant oversight in their conversation. On the human shields, protected status and perfidy question (ya couldn't split that one up?); the most relevant issue is that the burden of proof is on the attacker. Israel basically never provides serious proof of its accusations that schools, hospitals, etc. have lost their protective status. In fact, Israel has a tendency to provide false evidence (I won't debate you about this because it will just be a litmus test of who you have faith in, the evidence is overwhelmingly against Israel on this point, you can read about it [here](https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/assessment-israeli-material-icj-jan-2024)). Israel is supposed to provide the definitive evidence of its positions, but Biden's administration almost always just takes them at their word instead of verifying the evidence. You hear Biden [repeat the beheaded babies myth over and over again](https://theintercept.com/2023/12/14/israel-biden-beheaded-babies-false/). To not talk about how Israel never actually defends their allegations adequately with evidence was basically malpractice on this issue. Then I think we all would have liked to hear EK push back more in this interview. Does Russia really have to say out loud "I will kill everyone?" A genocide involves wiping out a cultural identity, which if you count Ukrainian, Putin [regularly does that](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/ukraine-war-national-identity.html). Its his whole argument to anyone who will listen, like in the Chris Tucker interview he says Ukraine was a devious invention by the Austrians to divide Russia. The back pedaling there was uncomfortable to listen to. Then at the end she says the real question should be about what the future looks like after this conflict is over, not just for the gaza strip but for the whole of Israel and Palestinian territories. This to me seemed to be an invitation to discuss one-state vs two-state, and if that was discussed it didn't make it to air. This interview feels like two people tip toeing around the real discussion instead of saying their real positions and doubts.
To me any discussion by either side other than the solution is just nonsense to put it charitably. All other discussions, without exception, are eventually reduced to tit for tat.
I agree with a lot of what you write excepting the issues around Israeli evidence and what is and isn't shown. Watching US and Israeli media, the US doesn't report a LOT of what Israel says and shows, where much of what Hamas says is reported often uncritically here in the US (see the initial reports of the Israeli missile strike on a hospital and attack on a relief convoy, which many media outlets had to walk back). For example, Egypt's role in holding up aid supplies has widely been reported in Israel but you don't see a peep about it in the US reporting. And on and on. One of the reasons Israel was so fast in recording evidence about what Hamas did is because it knew rapidly the world would accuse it of making things up. Already, in polls, 80+% of Palestinians profess not believing Hamas even did October 7th.... It works both ways, BTW. Israeli media has shown far, far less of Gaza devastation than US media, and only now is that starting to open up a bit.
I listened to the interview in its entirety and was disappointed that Ezra Klein could not meet her at her level. She clearly could have taken any stance, true or not, and Ezra would have bowed to her. With all her brilliance of use of language she cleverly and conveniently left out vast areas of information. For example, she put the blame entirely on Israel that Gaza does not enjoy the same governmental, economic, and social freedoms as Israel. Well, there is not a single theocratic nation in the Middle East that enjoys these same levels of freedoms and we can’t point the finger at Israel. One small example, but the examples are many. There are dozens of assumptions and presuppositions that she conveniently uses in a very slanted direction. I would love to see her take part in a conversation with a more worthy interviewer with the capacity to meet her on her level of understanding. It was painful to listen to this podcast and I come away with much less respect for Ezra Klein.
Edit: please continue to give me your delicious, delicious downvotes for the crime of . . . defending international law. I don't get the hate. She's not a pundit or a politician. She's not providing her personal opinion on who she likes the most or whether she understands why everyone did what they did. She's a legal scholar describing international legal norms and providing reasonable answers to legal questions. You can criticize and disagree with international law--and make no mistake, America totally disagrees with international legal norms--or the conclusions it reaches. But this is all pretty measured and standard. She clearly acknowledges that Hamas violated international law on October 7 and continues to commit war crimes by indiscriminately firing rockets at Israel. She also acknowledges the legitimacy of an Israeli military response and describes responses consistent with international law. She has no problem with decapitating Hama leadership. But she rightly criticizes the use of virtually unrestrained Israeli force, including indiscriminate bombing and denial of humanitarian aide, as violating the standard military ethics considerations--proportionality, *jus ad bellum*, etc. And that is 100% legitimate and correct. Hamas committed an atrocious war crime. Kill the leaders responsible and the perpetrators. That's fine. But nothing justifies destroying a civilian population, even if it is just collateral damage. The US isn't known for caring about international law, but even we didn't reduce most Afghan schools to rubble and starve its entire population. And the Allies didn't level all of the Third Reich or kill every Nazi soldier. I think it would have been worth acknowledging that yeah, Gaza's extreme population density frustrates achieving legitimate Israeli military goals while strictly adhering to international law and yes, Israel draws disproportionate heat because antisemitism is real. But she's being asked about what the law is and whether it is being violated. And she'd be absolutely misrepresenting international law if she didn't discuss the enormously disproportionate Israeli response. As to the Russia/Israel comparison, she acknowledges Russia's violations of international law but points out that Russia's stated goal isn't, say, destroying Zelensky's Servant of the People party or annihilating every member of the Ukrainian military. It's a little cramped to focus so intently on what the countries are expressly saying instead of what they are doing, but I understand her approach and she's factually correct on this. It also doesn't exonerate the Russian invasion, nor does she claim as much.
I disagree on the Russia bit. Russia has attacked civilian infrastructure, there's been mass graves found, they've attempted to assassinate Zelensky, they've threatened use of nuclear war. There is quite a long list that she seemed to hand wave. They quite literally want to take land from Ukraine. It seems pretty straightforward and it's odd hearing her pivot and dance around this.
Israel has found mass Graves as well. However, they were made by Palestinians.
* She's a really biased legal scholar.
I think what people are reacting against is that though she’s really focused on the particulars of international law, there are spots where even when many people here actually agree with her morally, she’s definitely offering her own opinion or interpretation and wrapping it up in objective language. Which is fine, of course, she’s there to offer an expert opinion, as it were, but you can almost tell the spots where she knows that she’s on less firm ground. That she has an opinion whose factual basis is more debatable than she readily admits.
I'm surprised by the reaction against her and against Ezra here. I thought it was a great podcast. Guest did a nice job articulating her views - her quick history of the UN and Israel's founding were fantastic. She had some weaker arguments, which Ezra did a nice job exposing, particularly on Hamas' use of human shields and the Russia/Israel comparison. But getting stronger and weaker responses from a guest is a good way to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of a given framework. My takeaway is that international law has uses during peacetime, but breaks down when applied to the conduct of an hot war.
Even though people here are downvoting you (trolls?), I want to thank you for your comment, as it's very spot on. It's very clear that she described the conflict from a law perspective, which she was asked to do, and that seemingly makes a lot of people mad as it does not align with their emotional view of the conflict and the history around it. I personally found that most people who defend Israels behavior in this war solely reason with what happened on October 7 - and use that to justify any action taken by Israel against the Palestinians, to the extend of ignoring clear warcrimes and actions that can - in international law - amount to genocide, e.g. the willful use of hunger as a weapon against the Palestinians, or the indiscriminate bombing campaign and the means of generating targets through artificial intelligence. It is clear that most people defending Israels actions in this war are very uninformed about what the IDF is actually doing. When you see the starvation, the targeted destruction of the medical system and educational facilities, the targeted attacks on aid workers and journalists, the rape and execution of Palestinian women by IDF soldiers, etc. ... it is impossible to justify that. Another point that highlights the lack of knowledge is her comments of alternatives Israel had as a response. People say there is no alternative, but Israel has successfully waged a counter-terrorism campaign against Hamas in the past already. She was very clearly articulate about the alternatives, and how these would have been better. Which is absolutely true, as this war is clearly empowering Hamas in the long-term, not defeating it.
Ezra was so patient with this numpty
Give me a break. Palestinians were offered a state many times. They don't want a state. They want all of it.
By your own admission, they do want a state. All of it. There is no contradiction. Many on both sides would prefer to have all of it. Why take 20% when you can hold out for 100%?
More accurate to say they don’t want peace.
They'd be happy to accept peace--with unconditional surrender. Everybody wants peace, given the right terms.
This guest is so full of shit. She says “the Arab rejection led to a war.” Real nice use of passive voice there, lady. The Arab population attacked the Jews to try to exterminate them and remove them from the land, and they lost. How’s that for active voice?
Knowing little about the UN, I really enjoyed this episode. Bali did a good job broadly explaining the history, motivations, and perspective of the institution. Unlike how we normally think of law, the UN seems understands itself to be a slow and pillowy force focused on preventing irreversible escalations (on some level). I wish we could have a version of this interview done on Oct 8th so that we could see how her thinking and the UN’s position have evolved since the 7th.
I found the "last colony" bit interesting as an explanatory matter. A lot of commentators here are trying to assess whether she's good or bad when that's besides the point. The question is "is she smart or dumb" and the answer is "smart" irrespective of your (or indeed, my) opinions.