Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show The Disastrous Relationship Between Israel, Palestinians and the U.N. About this episode The international legal system was created to prevent the atrocities of World War II from happening again. The United Nations partitioned historic Palestine to create the states of Israel and Palestine, but also left Palestinians with decades of false promises. The war in Gaza — and countless other conflicts, including those in Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia — shows how little power the U. N. and international law have to protect civilians in wartime. So what is international law actually for?
Aslı Ü. Bâli is a professor at Yale Law School who specializes in international and comparative law. “The fact that people break the law and sometimes get away with it doesn’t mean the law doesn’t exist and doesn’t have force,” she argues.
In this conversation, Bâli traces the gap between how international law is written on paper and the realpolitik of how countries decide to follow it, the U. N.’s unique role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from its very beginning, how the laws of war have failed Gazans but may be starting to change the conflict’s course, and more.
Mentioned:
“With Schools in Ruins, Education in Gaza Will Be Hobbled for Years” by Liam Stack and Bilal Shbair
Book Recommendations:
Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law by Antony Anghie
Justice for Some by Noura Erakat
Worldmaking After Empire by Adom Getachew
The Constitutional Bind by Aziz Rana
The United Nations and the Question of Palestine by Ardi Imseis
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Carole Sabouraud.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Ezra Klein? From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:24 Ezra Klein? On Friday, May 10, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution saying Palestinians qualify for full member status at the UN.
0:30 Speaker 01 In the end, the vote was overwhelming. In favor, 143; against, 9; abstentions, 25.
0:46 Ezra Klein? This was new. The General Assembly had never voted for that before, but they did so now in overwhelming numbers. The final vote was 143 to 9. Israel voted against it. So did the United States. Now, to make Palestinians, to make Palestine, a full member of the UN, would take a Security Council approval, the US would veto that. Our position is that a Palestinian state should only emerge through negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. But the vote itself was a sign of the chasm that is opening between not only Israel and the UN, but America, too. Israelis have long felt the UN is biased against them. In 1975, the UN voted to declare Zionism a form of racism, though repealed
1:27 Ezra Klein? that in 1991. From 2015 to 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted 140 resolutions on Israel. Over that same period, it passed six to eight resolutions on all other countries combined. At the same time, the UN was instrumental in the creation of Israel, voting to partition the land of historic Palestine between Jews and Palestinians, and giving a majority of it to Jews. Palestinians feel the UN, in particular, and international law in general, has been a procession of false promises. Where is their state, their self-determination? Where is the right of return for their displaced? What have all these resolutions and condemnations amounted to? Azabali is a professor at Yale Law School who specializes in international
2:09 Ezra Klein? law. And I wanted to have Iran to trace a deeper question here, too, one that stretches beyond Israel, Gaza, to Russia, Ukraine, and really the whole world. What is international law actually for? As always, my email, [email protected] .
2:31 Ezra Klein? Azabali, welcome to the show.
2:33 Speaker 02 Thank you for having me.
2:34 Ezra Klein? So I think the way we normally think about laws is that they are rules where, if you break them, some kind of external actor comes in to enforce a punishment, right? Maybe a sanction, maybe imprisonment. With that definition, is international law actually made up of laws?
2:52 Speaker 02 It is made up of laws, and it sort of depends on where you sit. So if we take an average-sized country with an average military capacity and an average economy, it might be very much deterred, just by the presence of the rules themselves, from doing things that it could reasonably anticipate would be subject to punishment under the rules, like sanctions, or punishment like international adjudication. And it would depend a little bit what kind of violation it was and whose interests were at stake. But there are many, many contexts in international law where it operates just the same way that you expect it to operate in a domestic legal system. We are thinking about international law from the perspective of sitting in the United
3:34 Speaker 02 States, a country that is the author of most of the rules, a rule maker, and not very often a rule taker, in part because it's by far the most powerful state in the international system. And we tend to project, from that experience of understanding international law in, let's say, an à la carte manner, to how all states in the international system might regard international law. But that's wrong.
3:55 Ezra Klein? I think that makes sense to me. But one of the things I was looking at before we talked was what, since roughly 2000, have been the conflicts with the most terrible casualty counts. And when you look at that, you actually do see a lot of countries that are not hugely powerful international actors. I mean, you see Syria on there, you see Yemen, you know, in the Yemen civil war, you see Ethiopia and Eritrea. And all of these, and some of them in particular, have had terrible atrocities associated with them. But the fact that the perpetrators weren't particularly powerful did not seem to create some opening by which the international community could stop the bloodletting.
4:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, in the two specific examples you just gave that you began with in Syria and Yemen, the reason for this is because smaller or less powerful actors can seek great power patrons in the international system, and those very powerful states can disable mechanisms of enforcement and accountability. So in the case of Syria, it has cultivated a relationship with Russia, and Russia has effectively used its veto power at the Security Council to shield Syria from various forms of accountability that were very much on the table. With respect to Yemen, the source of impunity has been the United States, and Saudi Arabia has been able to wield its own influence, backed by the United States at the UN, through a variety
5:21 Speaker 02 of back-room negotiations and open threats. So the cases you began with are cases where great powers stopped accountability from occurring through their veto in the Security Council and other means. That still leaves the other example you gave, which is Eritrea and Ethiopia. And I would add to that one more, which is the conflict that has consumed the Great Lakes region in Africa since the late 1990s, where you've had millions of people displaced, millions of people killed and injured, and essentially very little by way of international intervention. These are cases where no great power is interested and is willing to generate the political will to engage the institutional accountability
6:05 Speaker 02 mechanisms that exist, because there isn't, for example, a domestic audience cost. There isn't an outcry domestically over that particular conflict. In the Great Lakes region, DRC, example that I gave you, there's no comparison between the level of attention and scrutiny given by the American public to conflicts that are occurring in Europe or in the Middle East and those that are occurring in parts of Africa where the United States is not historically deeply implicated or engaged.
6:36 Ezra Klein? So what I hear you saying here in different directions, is it for international law, like for other kinds of law, power really matters?
6:44 Speaker 02 Yeah. And if you would let me indulge in just one more example. In the context of the 1990s, when the United States was by far the most powerful state in the international system, an uncontested sort of unipolar moment. There were two major crises that involved clear evidence of crimes against humanity, possibly genocidal crimes and violence. One was in Yugoslavia and the other one was in Rwanda. And there was enormous international attention to these contexts. And yet, there was still a reluctance to do the first thing that international law might have required, which is to trigger measures through the UN Security Council that would wield international power to get the violence to stop. And there were constant calls for this.
7:29 Speaker 02 But from the United States' perspective, a painful punishing experience in Somalia earlier in the 1990s had yielded the lesson that we will not be implicated in judgments by the Security Council suggesting that such an obligation might exist, for example, by characterizing the conflict in Rwanda as a genocide. We will not allow this because this will drag us into engagements that we do not wish to be part of. Eventually, of course, because the Yugoslav conflict was unfolding on European soil, eventually, you did have a direct intervention. But it took a very long time. And so that's another example of a place, it's sort of in between, where international
8:09 Speaker 02 law is definitely being used, it's shaping the responses of actors, but it's being deployed in a way that defers the urgency of the moment and allows bloodletting to continue.
8:21 Ezra Klein? Before we get into the conflict we're actually really here to talk about, I guess I want to ask a more personal question of you, which is, this seems, from everything you are describing here, to be an incredibly frustrating world to work in. I know a number of international lawyers, I know people who care deeply about international law, and they are unerringly some of the most idealistic, most justice-oriented people I have ever met. And yet, what we're describing here, what you're describing here, is a world where powerful states decide whether enforcement actions will be taken, where power decides whether the law will apply at all, where the relevant body of the UN that decides on security actions
9:03 Ezra Klein? is dominated by a small number of very powerful players wielding vetoes. How do you balance the sort of belief in the laws as written and your sort of recognition of the way that practical politics and power end up shaping and warping their application?
9:23 Speaker 02 So the international peace and security order that we have emerged out of the Second World War, which resulted in the deaths of at least 30 million civilians, which caused untold damage the world over, although we tend in the United States to focus exclusively on the European theater. So the architecture that was established for the international legal order in the aftermath of the Second World War prioritized peace over justice, without any doubt, in my view.
9:51 Speaker 03 The nations were united. The big five, China, Russia, Britain, France, and the United States, led the peoples of the world as they launched a rule of international law and a bill of human rights, a rule of law they believed no nation, large or small, would dare defy.
10:07 Speaker 02 The architecture of the United Nations security order gives asymmetric power to the victors of the Second World War that were also assessed at that time to be the most powerful states in the international system, states that now have nuclear weapons. Any war between those five states threatens planetary extinction and, as a result, must at all costs be avoided. The architecture of the UN endows them with this asymmetric power as a mechanism to keep them inside of the institution, negotiating the differences amongst them rather than resorting to extra diplomatic, extra political means to resolve their conflicts. Now, imagine a universe in which the great majority of countries agree that the circumstances in Israel-Palestine
10:51 Speaker 02 represent a threat to international peace and security and require, imperatively, international intervention. The United States would interpret such an intervention as a direct threat to one of its most core interests of enormous consequence. And so immediately, you would be in a situation in which one nuclear power would be on one side of the equation and arguably, one or more nuclear powers would be on the other side of a conflict. There is a real risk that any number of geopolitical zones of conflict, including Israel-Palestine, including the Middle East, could become the site of a metastasizing, a globalizing conflict in which-- One or more of these nuclear states is ranged against the other. But the institutional design of the United Nations system is intended to prevent that
11:36 Speaker 02 by enabling each of these powers to paralyze any action when one of these great powers understands its interests to be threatened. That's the design of the system. International law, though, has other characteristics, too. For one thing, it is a recognition of the sovereign equality of all states, regardless of their ability to defend their borders militarily. So it's a system that, as a de jure matter, recognizes equality amongst fundamentally unequal units in the international system and affords some possibility for smaller states to protect their own independence, using a normative language in which all actors, recognized as states in the international system, have a shared vocabulary.
12:19 Speaker 02 That's an incredibly valuable possibility. It's a language that makes it possible to make normative claims on the powerful and to limit the degree to which they exercise their power in ways that are deeply compromising of the interests of states that are far weaker. So the basic decision made to build an international institutional architecture that recognizes those asymmetries of power and keeps those countries in, even at the price of paralyzing the security order in circumstances where they believe their interests are at stake, is a decision to prioritize the avoidance of a Third World War over justice as part of the actual internal institutional structure of international law itself.
13:04 Ezra Klein? You've said that the creation of the State of Israel and the creation of international law as we know it today are interwoven. How so?
13:13 Speaker 02 So one of the things that the League of Nations did after World War I was oversee the territories of collapsed empires that were defeated in the course of the First World War and whose territories were now no longer under imperial dominion. On the land empire of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, the territories were not deemed capable of self-government and were placed instead under mandates, a kind of trusteeship, in the hands of colonial powers. One of those was the Palestine mandate. And it was bequeathed to Britain to oversee as a mandate that was supposed to enable the self-determination of the people on that territory. There were a range of events for two decades
13:58 Speaker 02 as the British maintained this mandate authority, in which you had increasing immigration of Jews from Europe and elsewhere to Palestine as part of their goal to establish a state on the Palestinian territory that would realize the ambitions of the Zionist movement, which was born in Europe in the 19th century. And the British authorities were extremely supportive of the goal of Jewish communities to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It was something that was conceived of as a solution to an ongoing problem of Europe, which was the raging antisemitism and the violence that came with it that culminated horrifically in the Shoah in the Second World War, but of course, had punctuated European history for centuries before that
14:42 Speaker 02 with pogroms and persecution across the continent. And then, of course, you had the indigenous Arab population of Palestine that were seeking self-determination and independence, as were the Arab populations of the other mandates, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, et cetera. And so, of course, this was producing intercommunal clashes because you now had two communities that were seeking to engage in self-determination on one land. And so, this conflict raged for two decades. And at the end of the Second World War, the British, basically having difficulty maintaining imperial control as a general matter, turned its mandate in Palestine over to the newly-formed United Nations and was asked to make a judgment about what should be done
15:27 Speaker 02 about these competing ambitions for a homeland.
15:30 Speaker 03 At a special session, the General Assembly of the United Nations established a special committee on Palestine and sent it to this troubled area to study the problems and make recommendations.
15:41 Speaker 02 The judgment that the United Nations made was that the land would be partitioned between the Jewish community, which would get roughly 55% of the land, and the Arab community, which would get roughly 45% of the land. The Palestinians of the territory were accorded less than half of the territory that had been part of the mandate. They objected to this. They also constituted a very, very large majority on that territory at the time. But the Arab rejection led to a war. And in that war, the Jewish forces gained a larger proportion of the territory even than had been assigned to them in the partition, leaving 22% of the territory under Arab control and the remainder under Jewish control.
16:26 Speaker 03 Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations, and her flag was raised at late success. Again, the United Nations had, through peaceful mediation, resolved an international dispute which had been a threat to world peace.
16:39 Speaker 02 So that's as of 1949. But in the following two decades, the UN presided over a much, much wider-scale decolonization of territories that had been colonial possessions of Britain and France and other European powers across the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia. And this enormous wave of decolonization brought dozens of new countries into the United Nations, newly independent countries, all of whom were highly committed to a model of decolonization that enabled populations under colonial rule to achieve self-determination.
17:37 Ezra Klein? So one thing I think this gets at is the way in which there are these two narratives that sit alongside each other about the foundation of the State of Israel and the sort of world we now inhabit around that, which is, one is that it was an act of the United Nations, right? It was a, there was a piece of paper. There was a partition plan. And another is that the UN was a bit of a sideshow, and there was a war. And that sort of understanding Israel, and for that matter Palestine and Palestinians, as constructs of international law, has both always been tempting, because international law has always been right there, but has actually been wrong, because in the end, the UN did not send in peacekeepers or soldiers to enforce its own partition.
18:22 Ezra Klein? It did not send in people to create its own preferred outcome. And so there's been this tendency to look outside of the conflict for this arbitrating authority of the UN that has always been right there alongside the conflict, and still is, but has never actually been able to manage or effectively structure it. How do you think about the way these sort of two tracks of interpretation have evolved alongside each other?
18:50 Speaker 02 So I think that the second track that you describe, which just views the creation of the state of Israel as a fact of war, is problematic for a couple of reasons. The first is that it doesn't ask a set of questions that are the predicate to that war being possible. How was it that there was an idea that an Israeli state would emerge on a mandate from the Ottoman Empire that was called the Palestine mandate for the population that was on that territory at the time of the end of the First World War? That, too, was an instrument of international law. The mandates were created as a consequence of the Versailles Peace Treaty, and the British exercised its power as a matter of international law over Palestine. And of course, many would argue,
19:34 Speaker 02 violated the terms of a mandate by enabling a kind of pattern of immigration and demographic change, along with commitments, political and legal, to another community to achieve self-determination on that same territory. And this connects to the ways in which international law itself has long been, prior to World War II and since, a system of rules that essentially have facilitated European, let's say now Western or global north, control over swaths of territory that were defined lawfully as colonies.
20:07 Ezra Klein? So the thing you'll hear from Israelis on this is they feel the UN is biased against them. You'll hear that from 2015 to 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted 140 resolutions on Israel. It adopted 68 resolutions on all other countries combined, even though this is a period when there was a lot of war, a lot of atrocity, a lot of human rights abuses in places like Syria and Yemen. So there is a specific level of interest in Israel and the Palestinians that I think if you're just looking at, I'd say casualty counts of different wars and conflicts, you wouldn't be able to predict.
20:39 Speaker 02 So it's the only territory that had been slated to be decolonized at the creation of the United Nations that it inherited from that previous system that has not been decolonized. It is not disproportionate to the attention that was paid to apartheid South Africa, where the territory continued to be under white minority rule. For decades in the United Nations, these two challenges were understood as ongoing examples of incomplete decolonization that continued long after the rest of the world had been fully decolonized. At the beginning of the 1990s, there was an expectation globally that both of these remaining dossiers of incomplete decolonization were on the cusp of being resolved. One of
21:24 Speaker 02 them because of the transition within South Africa to a post-apartheid constitutional regime, and the other because of the Oslo peace process and the imminent possibility of the emergence of a Palestinian state. In the context of Israel-Palestine, the two-state solution did not come to fruition. And as a consequence, now Palestine remains the one instance that goes right back to the founding of the United Nations of an example that a majority of states at the UN continue to interpret through the lens of incomplete decolonization. So from the US perspective, decolonization's over, it was a good thing, and now we're in this post-Cold War order. But from the perspective of the world that was subject to colonial dominion.
22:06 Speaker 02 The question of decolonization remains very live and the continuities between the experience, quite recent, I would add, historical experience of their nations and the current scenes that are emanating out of Israel-Palestine makes this an ongoing issue of concern for them, if only for symbolic reasons and if only to a limited extent. So, voting on UN General Assembly resolutions is not exactly the same as having serious skin in the game. But those 143 states in the international system understand the Palestinians as entitled to self-determination and a state. Fifty countries in the world don't recognize Palestinian statehood, and there's an enormous overlap between those 50 countries and the former colonial powers in the international
22:51 Speaker 02 system. And so, in that circumstance, I think you can see why it is that what you're describing as disproportionate attention is actually attention to the one case that continues to reflect this longstanding grievance of the global South over the role that international law has played in enabling subordination.
23:11 Ezra Klein? The view I often hear from Israelis about this is that they feel there is something unusual about the belief that Israel itself is unusual. And it's an attack they often lob specifically at the United States, which is itself a nation that was settled, settled with enormous violence to it. There is a lot of blood in the founding and blood in the early years of the country, and that at some point, that is no longer a question, right? There isn't an effort anywhere to sort of say, should the US continue to exist? And to Israelis, there are many countries that look like that, that their foundations have a war in them, their foundations have an expulsion in them, but that country is
23:53 Ezra Klein? now kind of accepted as just a country, not sort of an open case file. Whereas Israel, they feel like there is somehow softer clay around them than other countries that don't look all that different in their origins. Do you think there's validity to that feeling? And if so, does it reflect that Israel emerges after the formation of the UN in this world of international law, or is it something else?
24:17 Speaker 02 I do think it has to do with the fact that Israel emerges after the rules have changed. So it's quite true that the United States was founded in a very similar fashion with European settlement and, in fact, much more violent, the genocide of the indigenous population, expropriation of its lands, enslavement of peoples, transatlantic slave trade, et cetera. There's nothing to celebrate about the origin story of the United States from that perspective as a matter of international law, except that at the time that all of that happened, there weren't clear laws that excluded that. In fact, quite the opposite. As I mentioned, international law facilitated colonial conquest of non-European lands and territories and offered a set of justificatory frameworks for enabling that. So first of all, there was already international law
25:01 Speaker 02 applicable that treated Palestinians differently than indigenous populations of earlier centuries. As a consequence of the end of the First World War and the creation of the League of Nations, Palestinians had already been recognized as a people with a legitimate right of self-determination subject to a mandate that was understood as a trust in order for them to have their welfare preserved by, I mean, however cynically, by a colonial power until such time as they could exercise their right of self-government. And secondly, following the end of the Second World War, there were new rules about the conduct of war and the protection of refugees. So it was against that backdrop that Israel came into existence. And it's less that it's considered a state unlike all other states,
25:46 Speaker 02 and it's not an incomplete file as such just on the Israeli side. It's rather the idea that today you have 14 million people on this territory. Half of them were recognized as having their own right of self-determination, and that has been frustrated. The other half has achieved its right of self-determination. So Israel has created a state that is an expression of the recognized right of self-determination of the Jewish people, but is continually behaving in ways that essentially deny Palestinians the ability to achieve the same. All of those efforts that you described of external actors to impose solutions of one kind or another, whether they be unilaterally the British
26:29 Speaker 02 or the Americans, or the United Nations as an international organization, one thing they run up against is that there are actually two communities on the ground whose preferences need to be taken into account. One of them is asymmetrically more powerful than the other. Each of the rounds that you described, or that we've discussed so far, have greatly favored the Israeli side in one way or another. The least example of that is the UN Partition Plan. All subsequent plans have enabled Israel to retain far larger swaths of territory, territory acquired by use of force in a time when international law prohibits the acquisition of territory through the use of force. So these agreements, these externally backed agreements, have systematically favored the more powerful side.
27:14 Speaker 02 And the inconvenient reality on the ground is that there are two populations of equal size on the territory, 7 million Palestinians, 7 million Jewish citizens of Israel. And it has proven impossible to force, through external pressure or by dint of arms, Palestinians to simply accept their subordination as a legal matter. And so you have an ongoing conflict.
27:37 Ezra Klein? Let me pull us into the present here and look at another body of international law, which is the international laws around war and conflict. And let me begin on the part that I think people are talking less about right now, which is that on 10/7, you have Hamas fighters cross into Israel. They kill around 1,200 people, most of them civilians. They take hundreds of hostages, many of them civilians. What is international law to say about that?
28:02 Speaker 02 So they clearly violated the laws of war by, first, deliberately targeting civilians, secondly, taking civilians hostage, which is also impermissible, and then ongoing indiscriminate rocket fire is another source of violation. So there's undoubtedly war crimes committed by armed Palestinian factions, including Hamas, on October 7.
28:25 Ezra Klein? If Israel wanted to rely on international law here as both a matter of defense and a matter of justice, what would it have said or done?
28:36 Speaker 02 So it had a number of potential options. It could have engaged in a police action in Gaza, seeking to apprehend individuals that they held responsible for the October 7th attacks. It would probably have begun with investigation on Israeli territory of who actually was responsible for taking the individuals that had been captured alive on Israeli territory, interrogating them, and then seeking to gain access to or jurisdiction over those that were held responsible. 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
29:21 Speaker 02 had. And primarily, it could have shored up its own defenses, because the conditions that enabled the October 7th attack to occur was not some new, unexpected capacity on the part of armed actors that represent an ongoing existential threat to Israel, but rather a failure to maintain basic defenses at the border with Gaza.
29:43 Ezra Klein? Israel has responded with the view that Hamas is a kind of organized fighting force that cannot be allowed to continue to exist as any kind of fighting force, that as long as Hamas exists as a structure, it will continue planning and using creative means to try to figure out how to strike at Israel's weaknesses. And so that they need to destroy Hamas. They can't just treat it as something where a couple people committed a crime. The thing that was Hamas cannot be allowed to exist. How does that fall within the way international law understands the kinds of responses that are reasonable here?
30:22 Speaker 02 I think the view that the absolute destruction and extermination of your adversary is the war objective is simply grossly disproportionate and impermissible as a matter of Usad Bellam, which is to say the law governing resort to the use of force. Hamas does not represent an existential threat to Israel. Israel is saying that our objective in this war is to destroy all Hamas military presence, period. So then it's basically a no-holds-barred situation because the argument is there are tunnels underneath everywhere. So the way that Israel is interpreting internationally humanitarian law here, it's deliberate
31:05 Speaker 02 choice to prioritize military necessity over the principles of proportionality and distinction, and also to describe military necessity with respect to its overall strategic objectives rather than answering the question whether this object in this concrete and direct way is contributing to a specific military advantage in that moment, is reinterpreting the rules in a way that undermine both the spirit and the law of internationally humanitarian law because it eviscerates the law's ability to protect civilians. What's made much more complicated is that Israel is not always clear in claiming that it's Hamas as an armed actor that must be destroyed.
31:50 Speaker 02 Oftentimes, it seems as if it's just Hamas as a whole, and Hamas has many different characteristics. It is an armed faction in Gaza, but it is also the governing authority that represents all of the civil service, all of the bureaucracy, all of the municipal services, everything that enables any territory to run, from crossing guards to sanitation workers, to people who are operating the hospital systems. And so the idea of destroying the governing authority is totally impermissible and would be actually targeting of the civilian infrastructure, which is indeed something I think we're seeing. And so there's a troubling question of what does Israel, how does Israel define the object
32:35 Speaker 02 that's seeking to eliminate or exterminate? And in the context of Gaza, which is a very, very small territory with a very dense civilian population, is going to have the kinds of consequences we've seen of just grotesque, disproportionate harm to civilians.
32:54 Ezra Klein? Is this a place where international law and what you might call international practice diverge? Because it is difficult for me to imagine. All that many countries suffering the kind of attack from a neighboring territory that Israel suffered and not believing their objective is to wipe out the governing authority that planned, financed, and launched that attack. I mean, the obvious, I think, analogy for Americans is Al Qaeda after 9/11 was certainly the way the American political establishment initially absorbed, you know, this moment, right? You know, Joe Biden kind of making the point of how many 9/11s this would feel like to
33:37 Ezra Klein? Israel, even as many of us kind of really push the idea that our response to 9/11 was misguided. But it wasn't an effort to invoke that same sense of how a country might reasonably be expected to respond to this kind of security risk. So there's a question of international law here, but there's also the question of what do countries typically do under this kind of pressure? And I wonder if those two diverge for you.
34:03 Speaker 02 So it's an interesting question. To begin with, the idea of a country facing an armed attack from another country and what does it do is, of course, the premise of all of the laws of war. And like, let's think of the context of Ukraine and Russia, for example. We don't imagine a scenario in which it's permissible for either of those actors to have as its war objective the complete elimination and extermination of all fighting forces and the governing structure of the other. We would understand that to be a kind of total war that's ruled out. And if either party seemed like if it was pursuing that kind of a maximalist goal, that would be rejected out of hand. So it really depends on where you sit. If you're the United States and you choose to see Hamas as the equivalent of Al Qaeda
34:48 Speaker 02 on 9/11, you might choose one set of repertoires. And as you say, international law required constraints that the United States did not observe post 9/11 and came to regret it for the reasons you were suggesting. Many of us believe that the US response post 9/11 was disastrous, not only for those that were the targets of US force, but also for the United States itself, which in fact suggests that there is a purpose to the rules and that enabling their constraining function may actually be in the interest of all parties. But if you're sitting elsewhere in the world, for example, in the global south, then you might not think of Hamas as similar to Al Qaeda, but rather to the national liberation movement that achieved independence in your own country. And the rest of the world, the global south at least,
35:33 Speaker 02 fought very hard for a law that entrenched that right of armed resistance in the international legal order through the additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions and through a range of subsequent customer international law that has grown up around the Geneva Conventions and the additional protocols that recognize national liberation movements as a very different kind of actor, a sort of proto-state military, rather than an actor that can be compared to Al Qaeda or a terrorist group that isn't connected to a claim of national self-determination.
36:32 Ezra Klein? I want to go back to something you said a minute ago about Russia and Ukraine, because I actually did understand something like the governing authority of this country is illegitimate and a danger to us and needs to be wiped out completely as Russia's, at least stated, objective of what they were trying to do in Ukraine. And I think this gets to this question somewhat of enforcement, where I think Russia's general invasion was rejected within international law. And yet, there is this kind of shimmering, crazy-making sense around it, where Russia did the thing that is most abhorred under international law, just launched an invasion of a neighboring country for functionally no reason whatsoever.
37:15 Ezra Klein? And yet, Russia maintains its standing in the international system as it has always been. It's sitting there on the UN Security Council. The fact that its efforts have been rejected has not mattered all that much. If we are looking at the Russia-Ukraine analogy alongside this, I do think that is one where people look at the system and they say, this is no system at all. This is just power dressed up as laws, not laws that actually act to constrain power.
37:44 Speaker 02 In Russia and Ukraine, it's one thing to say that the goals of Russia are to defeat the Ukrainian government and to perhaps remove the leadership of the Ukrainian government. And it's another thing to say that the goal of Russia is to wipe them out and exterminate them. So I don't think we have any evidence to suggest at this point that they have 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.
38:22 Ezra Klein? Is that Israel's goal, though? Because that's also to my... I mean, I have a deep critique of the way Israel's 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.
38:36 Speaker 02 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 non-state actor, et cetera. And that was the sense in which I was invoking Russia and Ukraine earlier in our conversation,
39:20 Speaker 02 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.
40:05 Speaker 02 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.
40:27 Ezra Klein? What are, in your view, the clearest violations of the laws of war that have happened during Israel's invasion of Gaza?
40:34 Speaker 02 I think the one that is probably the easiest to document and substantiate is the blocking of access to humanitarian aid and what is now amounting to the crime of starvation. Because Israel, the officials declared in the immediate aftermath of October 7th that they were going to cut off all food, all fuel, all water, and have proceeded to oversee a scheme in which they control today all points of entry and egress from Gaza and have precluded humanitarian aid necessary for subsistence of the Gazan population to enter the territory. And have also denied humanitarian actors the ability to supply that aid.
41:17 Speaker 02 So blocking humanitarian assistance, including food, medicine, fuel, water treatment, hospitals, that, I think, is the clearest and most easily established war crime. I think the deliberate targeting in some instances, or at least indiscriminate bombardment of areas that have dense concentrations of civilians. It's difficult, in the context of war crimes, as you know, and the violations of international humanitarian law, to establish the requisite intent. But examples of indiscriminate killing that are well-known include the killing of Israeli hostages when they were, had escaped and were walking clearly unarmed with their hands up,
42:00 Speaker 02 carrying white flags, and were nonetheless executed. And then the strike on the World Central Kitchen four-car convoy. These are cases where, because of the identity of those that were struck, Israel has felt the need to explain its conduct and others have scrutinized the conduct. But I think these are very small examples of a much- Much wider pattern. Unfortunately, the deaths of 34,000 plus Gazans has simply not attracted the same level of international focus. But there are statements that have been made on the record by Israeli military authorities and IDF spokespeople, together with the empirical record
42:42 Speaker 02 of enormous destruction of all civilian infrastructure in Gaza that make it relatively more straightforward than in other contexts to establish that the war crime of indiscriminate bombardment of civilian areas has occurred.
43:00 Ezra Klein? There are, I think, two major categories here that I want to think about, not separately, but for different reasons. So one is the actions that I think it is fair to say are targeted at civilians, or at least indiscriminately, truly indiscriminately targeted at civilians, like the siege. And I mean, that has always seemed to me to be a war crime. And the sort of American defense of it has, I think, been disappointing. The other piece of it, which you brought up around these tunnels, what Israel says is that Hamas is using international law against it, that Hamas uses civilian shields. And I cannot judge whether this is true, but take it as plausible for the moment
43:44 Ezra Klein? that Hamas works out of schools and hospitals. And the Israelis have said, well, because of that, it means that unfortunately, we have had to destroy. I mean, there's just a Times report on the huge proportion of Gazan schools that have just been wrecked. And so Israel's argument is that this is not Israel's fault. It is Hamas's fault, that it is Hamas that has decided to hide among civilians and to use both civilians and civilian infrastructure as shields, as disguises, as operating bases. And so the consequence of this falls on them.
44:22 Ezra Klein? How does international law treat a question like that when you do have a force that at least to some degree is using civilians and civilian infrastructure as kind of shields, collateral damage, and operating basis?
44:33 Speaker 02 Obviously, in places and in territories where you have a dense civilian population, there is infrastructure that is helping an adversary's armed force to sustain itself on which the civilian population is also deeply dependent. Targeting that on the grounds that it's dual-use is not only in violation of the spirit of international humanitarian law and the goal of protecting civilians and minimizing harm to civilians in conflict, but in many cases, it's also a violation of the rules. Which brings us to human shields and that argument. So, the definition of using human shields for a matter of international law
45:14 Speaker 02 is the deliberate placement of civilians in proximity to military objectives during a conflict. It's not the presence of civilians in densely populated areas from which armed groups also operate. Gaza is a tiny territory, and inevitably, on a territory that's small, that has 2.3 million people residing, you're going to have civilians close to places where Hamas operates, no matter what. Under those circumstances, the rules require that Israel take precautions that are available to take. So, let's take an example of the hospitals. Let's say, arguendo, that Hamas was using a hospital or was present underneath a hospital.
45:56 Speaker 02 Then what would be the measures that Israel is permitted to take in order to address the tactical military advantage of an actual Hamas presence, an armed presence in that moment, near or under that hospital? First of all, Israel would have to evacuate the civilians or create an opportunity for the civilians that are in the hospital to be evacuated. It would have to facilitate access to medical supplies and necessary humanitarian assistance for patients to be transferred, for patients in need of care. It would also have to ascertain where it believes Hamas is present and narrowly target whatever strike or attack to that particular location.
46:38 Speaker 02 And it's not simply that you warn a population of... And attack, it's that you provide them a meaningful opportunity to be evacuated from an area, you offer them safe passage and you enable them to travel to somewhere where they will be safe. Instead, we've seen warnings without opportunities to evacuate, or where evacuation passageways have themselves been the subject of targeting for attack, and where people have been directed to places that themselves have continued to be bombarded. Let's just look at the laws of war for a moment and see what they're designed to do. They're not designed primarily for ex post accountability and to be used in an international criminal setting.
47:19 Speaker 02 They're designed for ex ante incorporation in the military manuals and books and rules that govern armed forces, how they're trained and what they're told they can or can't do. Now, I think there's good reason to think that there has been a dramatic shift in Israel in the internal rules of engagement. We're probably not going to be able to establish whether that's true or not in the immediate period because Israel will remain the most powerful actor on the ground and will not subject itself to that kind of third-party inquiry. But the rules are failing to constrain Israel first and foremost because Israel has ceased to internalize those rules. The use of such heavy weaponry as 2,000-pound bombs, or the shelling with very heavy artillery
48:03 Speaker 02 of civilian areas where civilian populations remain present, is quite distinctive in this context because it's happened so frequently and with such a high level of ordinance that sets it apart from essentially any other conflict to date, at least that the United States has been involved with or implicated in.
48:24 Ezra Klein? One thing that has been interesting to me is the Biden administration has been shifting its position somewhat over the past, I would call it, two or three months, is that as much as international law has not been able to constrain Israel on its own, it is the tool the Biden administration increasingly seems to be using as it looks for a way to reconcile its own positions. It wasn't there when they didn't want it to be there. But when they don't seem to want their position to simply be, Joe Biden has had enough, he thinks they've gone too far. It does sort of operate as this other language, this sort of agreed upon language. I'm curious how you think about that sort of role of this, even where international law cannot work as an in the moment enforcement mechanism.
49:09 Ezra Klein? It is something that can be used at times to create sort of mounting moral pressure or justify decisions that would not otherwise work politically.
49:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I think that's clear. And again, I just want to go back to where we started at the very beginning of our conversation in thinking about how does law work as a general matter? We don't say in a domestic system that has periodic surges in murder rates that the law of homicide doesn't exist or doesn't work or is unenforceable. Even if it's the case that there are people that escape the capacity of the law to actually hold them individually accountable for one reason or another, the fact that people break the law and sometimes get away with it doesn't mean the law doesn't exist and doesn't have force. The Biden administration came into office, in part signaling at home and abroad that it was breaking from the Trump administration,
50:03 Speaker 02 breaking from a period of what it viewed as lawless rule and returning to a rule based order, rehabilitating the US reputation. What we have now entered into is a period of a return of serious multipolarity. That is to say, the United States faces a range of actors, some larger, some smaller, that for a variety of reasons, either in their particular spheres of influence or globally, have emerged as either adversaries or challengers. And in this context, of course, each of them is able to make recourse to the precedent set by the United States of failing to constrain when they want to act. And so they'll point to Kosovo, they'll point to Iraq, they'll point to Libya. And we're seeing the consequences of those precedents now
50:47 Speaker 02 when they're wielded to legitimize. Uses of force we disagree with. So there is that phenomenon for starters, and that indicates a universe in which all actors, not just the United States, have to either be far more careful about the ways in which they continue to erode the existing international legal infrastructure, or in which we are moving in the direction of regional fragmented interpretations of what the international rules are, powerful actors commanding authority within their own year abroad, becoming stronger, and over time, the production of precisely the kinds of dynamics that resulted in the world wars of the 20th century.
51:27 Ezra Klein? So for much of the war, the US has used its veto at the Security Council to stop any resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Then in March, when another one came along, this one written somewhat differently, the US abstained and allowed it to pass. The Israelis ignored it, and then the US called it non-binding. And there was a State Department briefing where a reporter asked about this.
51:49 Speaker 04 So you don't believe anything is going to happen as a result of the passage of this resolution?
51:53 Speaker 05 So I think that separate and apart from this resolution, we have active, ongoing negotiations to try to achieve what this resolution calls for, which is the, an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages. I don't know, I can't say that this resolution is going to have any impact on those negotiations.
52:10 Speaker 04 So I don't expect you to answer this now, but do you need to just stick this in your pocket? If that's the case, what the hell is the point of the UN, of the UN Security Council?
52:20 Ezra Klein? That was really a moment, I think, that made the contradictions in our relationship to international law pretty stark.
52:26 Speaker 02 There is actually a precedent for the United States treating a UN Security Council resolution and turning around and presenting it as non-binding, and strikingly, it was in the South African context. You had a very similar situation during apartheid that we find ourselves in now, in which The UN General Assembly, the overwhelming majority of states in the international system, passed resolution after resolution after resolution with enormous majorities in support of denunciations of the South African regime of apartheid, calls for sanctions, arms embargoes, all kinds of things. In the General Assembly, while it doesn't have the power to issue resolutions that have binding law, that are at the force of binding law, it has enormous power to shape agendas.
53:09 Speaker 02 And it did do that even as the US and the UK, and to some extent, France, continued to use their role in the Security Council to shield the South African government. The General Assembly ended up setting the global agenda for how one should understand South Africa. And over time, the Security Council had no choice, under enormous pressure, to finally agree to some very, very mild measures against South Africa. But the very first such resolution passed by the Security Council involved exactly the same pattern. And then the US delegate turning around and saying, well, this is non-binding, and having an enormous debate about how to interpret Security Council resolutions, et cetera. In the end, in the grand scheme of things, it just didn't matter because the overall momentum in the system was against the South African government.
53:54 Speaker 02 And in the coming years after that, South Africa had come to become such an illegitimate actor globally that the Security Council finally did pass binding resolutions involving arms embargoes. And as we know, there was an eventual transition in South Africa to a post-apartheid system. So this non-binding resolution around the ceasefire could also be seen as the first in a series of steps that might occur in this relationship between international public opinion, international law, the General Assembly, international courts, the UN Security Council, that shift our attention away from the longstanding international humanitarian law framework that has dominated and that has forced us to look specifically
54:39 Speaker 02 at the rules for belligerent occupation and the rules of the conduct of hostilities when Israel engages in a variety of... Kinds of operations against Gaza or against the West Bank, to shift our gaze from all of that and instead return our attention to the question of the entirety of the mandate and ask a question about what the future would look like politically and legally, under international law, for an authority that governs 14 million people, where 7 million people, Jewish citizens, are fully enfranchised citizens of a democracy, and the other population of the territory, the other 7 million people, still have unresolved rights, and they're still sitting on the territory as well.
55:20 Ezra Klein? And then, always, our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
55:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, thank you so much for giving me a chance to recommend some great books. The first I would recommend is Anthony Angi's Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, which retells the history of international law, as well as the intellectual history of canonical European jurists, by centering the colonial encounter as the structuring event that triggered the emergence of international law as we know it. I would also recommend Noorah Edekhat's Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, which provides a detailed and highly readable account of how international law first facilitated British colonial rule, and then how it's been used by Israelis and Palestinians to organize, on the one hand, and resist, on the other. I would also recommend Adem Get to Choose: World Making After Empire: The Rise and Fall
56:09 Speaker 02 of Self-Determination, which returns to the era of decolonization to offer an account of how the principle of self-determination was differently understood by anti-colonial leaders, and how that understanding, had it prevailed, might have yielded alternatives to logics of partition, logics like the logic that underlies the UN's involvement in Israel-Palestine and ideas of the two-state solution. And then, with your indulgence, I'm going to recommend a fourth book, Aziz Rana's The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Bails Them, which is a wonderful book, just published, that provides an eye-opening and beautifully rendered account of how we, as Americans, came to be bound to a constitution that makes it
56:53 Speaker 02 so difficult to hold our own government accountable, or to translate public preferences into changes in our policies, a question that I believe has renewed urgency at a time when polls show that consistent majorities in the United States support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
57:10 Ezra Klein? Azam Ali, thank you very much.
57:13 Speaker 02 Thank you.
57:24 Ezra Klein? This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris, our senior engineer is Jeff Gald with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Kristina Ciemilouski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Carol Severo.
Previous This Is a Very Weird Moment in the History of Drug Laws Next A Conservative Futurist and a Supply-Side Liberal Walk Into a Podcast … Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
