Episode 14: Should Israel give up on international law ? A conversation with a former IDF lawyer

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If the requirements of international law mean that Israel is effectively prohibited from defeating its enemies or protecting its borders, should Israelis turn their backs on international law? Why do we need "law?" Isn't it enough to just do our best to be as moral as possible?

After all, the institutions of international law seem so unfair to Israel. Just this past year, Israel was made to stand in judgment, accused of genocide, before a judicial panel whose president hails from an enemy country (Lebanon) and then left half-way through the proceedings to serve as the prime minister of that country. That is, the top judge who sat in judgment of Israel was campaigning in the political system of an enemy state.Then there are the many reports that accuse the ICC's prosecutor of rushing to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders without bothering with normal procedures because he was trying to cover for credible sexual assault accusations against him?

If the institutions cannot be trusted and the rules themselves are abused by every one of Israel's enemies, is this really a "law?" Can it ever be applied fairly?

I ask former IDF legal advisor Ben Wahlhaus, who spent 12 years as an international law officer whose duties included counseling senior officers on the legality of military operations, including during the Gaza war.

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A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Ask Haviv Anything.
0:09.0	A great many of our Patreon subscribers, a great many people I have spoken to over the last
0:14.0	19 months.
0:15.0	I, myself personally, have been asking a lot of questions about international law.
0:20.0	It makes sense.
0:21.0	There's a war in Gaza.
0:22.2	There's a tremendous amount of human suffering.
0:24.9	There is an enemy, an enemy that talks constantly about annihilating us.
0:30.2	And in pursuing that enemy, there is best case scenario, tremendous civilian suffering involved.
0:38.7	And that is, if you like the Israelis and trust the Israelis if you don't like the Israelis don't trust the Israelis and think
0:43.1	they're evil human beings then everything gets worse and the language of international law
0:49.0	has been developed over the decades um partly since world war two, mostly since World War II, but we're
0:55.6	going to talk to an expert to learn more about it, in order to try and make war, which is
1:01.3	necessarily evil, necessarily suffering, necessarily with terrible consequences.
1:07.1	It's almost impossible to have one of those postmodern wars where a couple of robots exchanged missiles and everything's fine.
1:14.6	War often involves it is a test of wills between combatants willing to suffer a lot of blows and there are usually civilians in the way.
1:24.6	How do you fight a war in the most moral way possible,
1:30.6	with the least damage possible? That is, as I understand it, not a lawyer, just a civilian,
1:36.7	once a soldier, as I understand it, the purpose of international law. And yet, international law, in my view, and I'm going to be asking
1:48.0	whether this is a serious view or not, has been deeply misused. International law allows to fight a war.
1:55.5	International law says that if an enemy combatant uses a hospital, that hospital is a legitimate target for warfare.
2:03.2	And we've had international organizations claiming to speak for international law, argue otherwise,
	...

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