9 Summer 2025 liberation movement of the Jewish People, anchored in the identity of Jews who for thousands of years prayed and yearned and longed to return to Zion, you actually redefine the concept so as to alter it in a manner that minimizes any suffering from racism. It is the same with apartheid. Apartheid has a definition. The State of Israel has its challenges, but it is not an apartheid state. When you utilize that term in an inappropriate manner, you turn the State of Israel into the pariah among nations. In that way, the state of the Jews, which is intended to be an equal state in the family of nations, is turned into the “Jew” of the states − demonized, delegitimized, and suffering from the application of a double standard. Regarding genocide, the altered definition is most important. Genocides are taking place in the world where we live, in Sudan, for example. South Africa hosted their leader, who is actually guilty of committing genocide in Sudan, weeks before filing that “alleged” accusation against Israel in the ICJ. When you have collapsed those principles, when you have rendered them meaningless, and the institutions created as courts of last resort − I only touched on this point briefly − but the ICC and the ICJ were courts of last resort that were actually, with legal terminology, created with limited resources in order to be able to deal with the worst atrocities committed in places in which there are no legal mechanisms to try those atrocities. Well, if you utilize them in a way that not only quashes their principles of justiciability and complementarity, and all the other principles that they completely overlooked and ignored, then they also fail to address the real issues in the real places in which these ongoing crimes are happening. Think of Amnesty International itself redefining genocide or Human Rights Watch, when Bob Bernstein, its founding president, wrote, I believe, in the late 80s, an article that was published in The New York Times about human rights lost in the Middle East. He predicted this just like Patrick Moynihan predicted it in the UN, because they were both witness to the appropriation of their life's work of human rights. So, when you take legal terms and change their meaning, you not only weaken their meaning or invert their meaning, in our case or in antisemitism, because that's how antisemitism works. It is actually the inversion, the Orwellian inversion. But it does not only do this great injustice or is unable to render justice to those for whom those mechanisms were created to protect, it actually collapses the entire coal mine, if you will. As I said in the UN a month after October 7, we may be the bloody canary in the coal mine, but the coal mine will collapse. So, if October 7 is that Kristallnacht moment, 85 years after Kristallnacht, and 75 years after the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it too is appropriated in that way, that is not just a problem for the Jew among the nations and the State of Israel. That is not just a problem for Jews or supporters of the State of Israel around the world. That is a problem for all of us who cherish these foundational principles created with the pledge of “Never Again,” utilizing these legal principles and mechanisms that have meaning and appropriating and changing them actually collapses the entire infrastructure. Q: What are your thoughts on the Irish claim that as Israel is committing genocide, the term should be redefined? A: Yes, that is really a continuation of that Amnesty International redefinition of genocide. This reminds me of something that I didn't say. What the responses to October 7 revealed in pulling off so many masks, is the intersection between − I will call it the international institutions and human rights Industry − between university spaces that have relinquished the responsibility of teaching how to think for the very dangerous prospect of teaching what to think. That is what we see at Harvard and at Yale. And I have said this to university presidents: if that is the moment in time that universities must reflect on, that is a moment of reckoning. But it intersects with those international institutions and human rights with what is happening on university campuses and with the social media spaces. We should now understand that those three, I call them echo chambers, are not singularly separate. I underscore the importance for lawyers to be able to understand that, because we understand how to see the breadth of things across all those ecosystems instead of going down rabbit holes. An example of this is fighting only antisemitism online, fighting only antisemitism in international institutions, or fighting antisemitism only in this university or in all universities. The understanding is that if we are going to be able to get ahead of this, we must stop with what I call whacka-mole, right? Especially with what happens online. It is very visible. Regarding what happens online, including “we want content moderation” − I don't want content moderation. I don't believe that what happens in digital spaces is free speech. It is very expensive speech. It is a very lucrative business model. Somebody is making a lot of money
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=