The limits of international law with Dr. Ardi Imseis

This week on the Palestine Pod, Lara and Michael cover the ongoing genocide in Palestine with updates from on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank including Israel’s bombing of the Al-Ahly Baptist Hospital (again) on August 31, 2024 and the invasion of multiple cities and refugee camps in the West Bank including Jenin where Israeli occupation forces besieged the city, destroyed 70% of the city’s roads in a manner of days and, at the time of recording of this episode, killed 22 Palestinians. Lara reminds us this is all part of the plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine which has been ongoing since Day 1 over 76 years ago noting that Israeli officials are even calling for the “temporary” displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank, a tactic which has historically never proven to be temporary and has only ever been used as a means by Israel to steal more Palestinian land. Lara and Michael also critique a recent move by NYU to propose that “Zionist” be considered a protected class under the school’s code of conduct, a move which comes on the heels of social media giant Meta announcing that content targeting Zionism or Zionists could be removed under the company’s hate speech policy. Finally, the Palestine Pod recalls the brutal killing of the brilliant Palestinian content creator Medo Halimy and the legal case for the mainstream media’s role in perpetuating the genocide of the Palestinian people.

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Jewish anti-zionist activist and writer Amanda Gelender. We discuss how the Jewish community has a major fascism problem in Zionism; and how to best bring it to an end. Amanda speaks frankly that Jewish ally-ship is not more important than any other, and implores fellow Jews to do more in support of Palestine and Palestinian liberation. 

This week Lara and Michael discuss the grotesque hysteria around Washington's reception to a heinous war criminal. We cover the spread of preventable skin diseases in Gaza where Israel forbids the entry of even the most basic medical supplies. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Associate Professor of Law at Queens University, Dr. Ardi Imseis. Dr. Imseis is the author of the UN and the Question of Palestine, a study into what historically went wrong in the UN’s treatment of the question of Palestine since its inception. Dr. Imseis exposes how at various critical moments in the last century, the prevailing international law of the time was flouted by the UN in favor of policy that violated Palestinian rights and democratic principles. The work reminds us how the law can be used as one of many tools, but certainly has its limits. Laws can be oppressive (like the Nuremberg laws, South African Apartheid laws) and the choice to respect them or not is inherently political. We discuss how a lack of accountability for Israel’s violations has only caused the Zionist occupation to become worse and worse over time, what public international law principles require of Israel in terms of reparation for its international wrongs against the Palestinian people, and the handful of current legal efforts brought by Palestinians and their allies to use the law for emancipatory aims including the ICJ case in relation to the illegality of Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinians territories, a case where Dr. Imseis acted as part of the legal team.

This week Lara and Michael discuss two recent reports challenging the stagnant death toll in Gaza: a recent article by Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa in the Electronic Intifada, concluding the Israel has most likely killed, in 9 months, 194,768-511,824 people in Gaza. Such findings were corroborated weeks later by an article published in The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, finding that the real death toll is likely at least 186,000 Palestinians. These earth-shattering findings are contrasted with the phenomenon of genocide denial in the US political landscape and the urgent need to stop the annihilation of the Palestinian people. 

This week Lara and Michael sit down with the former President of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Jwan Haddadd. We talk about the successful organizing effort to pass a resolution divesting from companies who support genocide, and the coalition of organizations, students, and faculty who made it happen. UCSB becomes the sixth University to institutionalize a boycott within the UC system. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the Israeli massacres in Jabalia and Jenin. We discuss the premature infants forced out of their incubators by zionist bombs. The last two functioning hospitals in Gaza are besieged by the IOF and have been without clean drinking water for days. We also cover the ICC Prosecutor's application to the pre-trial judges for the arrest warrants of Netanyahu and Gallant. 

This week, Lara and Michael play a recorded interview with UCLA students in the encampment and sit down with Presidential candidate for the Green Party, Dr. Jill Stein. We discuss the role of electoral politics, how it has failed us, and how now more than ever we need a third party to threaten the two-party duopoly. Dr. Jill Stein has centered her campaign around being the only option on the ballot across the country to call for an end to the genocide in Palestine, and she promises to dismantle the US empire. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the Pro-Publica report that internal state department recommendations advise sanctioning and cutting the supply of weapons to the the occupation. A recommendation Anthony Blinken has been suppressing and lying about since December of 2023. We also discuss the phenomena of college campus student solidarity encampments starting with Columbia and then leading to others at Harvard and Yale. 

This week Lara and Michael cover the details emerging around the massacre at Al Shifa. This massacre will be remembered in the same way as Deir Yassin and Tantura. Doctors who refused to leave their patients were executed. IOF terrorists separated people by color-coded bracelets. We cover the wildly racist coverage of the assassinated aid workers, and how the lives of foreign nationals are not more important than Palestinian lives.