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Hello and welcome to the LawFair podcast, I'm Benjamin Wittes. Our subject today is Israel

and the International Laws of War. We're talking about a new book by Peter Berkowitz entitled

Appropriately Enough, Israel and the struggle over the international laws of war, just published

by the Hoover Institution Press. Peter is the chair of the Hoover Institution's correct

Toby task force on national security and the law of which I and several other members

of the LawFair blog are members. The book, which is fewer than 100 pages long and very

readable in a sitting, is an impassioned critique of the abuse of the laws of war by critics

of Israel in the UN and in the academy, and an argument in Peter's words quote that in

our age the struggle over the international laws of war has become critical to the defense

of liberal democracies in a dangerous world. Peter stopped by Brookings yesterday to talk

about the book. So Peter what's the book about? So my book is on struggle over the international

laws of war. It's really about two cases of law fair, which I imagine the listeners

of this podcast now is the use of law as a political weapon. And I focus on two cases.

One is the Goldstone Report, which was published by the United Nations General Assembly in

September 2009 and the Gaza Flotilla controversy which erupted in May 2010.

And what's the what's the unifying feature of those two episodes?

Well, it's quite the unifying feature. Let me just go back a little bit and tell you

that the book grew out of really an event and an observation. And the event was September

...