Finkelstein: Palestine's ICC victory thwarted by Israel's apartheid reality

Pushback with Aaron Mate

Pushback with Aaron Maté

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4.7 • 594 Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2021

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

Support Pushback at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate In a landmark ruling, the International Criminal Court has ruled that it has jurisdiction to investigate Israel for war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. However, scholar and author Norman Finkelstein warns that the ICC decision, while historic, is unlikely to deliver justice. According to Finkelstein, the Palestinian Authority's capitulation in the Oslo accords gives Israel room to flout the court's jurisdiction. Meanwhile, the reality of Israel today -- what the Israeli group B'Tselem recently called a "regime of Jewish supremacy" -- undermines any notion of a separate Palestinian state. Guest: Norman Finkelstein. Author, scholar, and leading expert on Israel-Palestine. His latest book is "I Accuse!". http://normanfinkelstein.com/ B'Tselem statement: "A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid" https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid

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0:00.0	Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aramette. The International Criminal Court has ruled that it has
0:09.4	jurisdiction to investigate potential war crimes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza.
0:17.1	The decision is indeed a historic one, but is there a meaningful prospect that it will deliver
0:22.7	justice for Palestinian victims of Israeli aggression? Well, joining me now is Norman Ficklestin,
0:29.3	author, and scholar. Norman, welcome back to pushback. Thank you for having me. What is your
0:35.4	reaction to this ruling? Initially, I was, when I first received the news,
0:43.6	I was happy. I was actually happy, if you know the expression, I was happy to be proven wrong.
0:50.7	I was not optimistic about the outcome of the current round in the case.
0:58.0	And it seemed initially that I was mistaken.
1:03.4	However, as I read through the actual decision, read it through to the end,
1:10.4	particularly the last three paragraphs.
1:14.6	I was less optimistic, actually, I'm still at this point.
1:18.6	I'm quite pessimistic about the prospects.
1:21.6	I think there's been a certain amount of misunderstanding about what the court actually ruled.
1:30.3	How so? What is the misunderstanding?
1:33.3	I'm going to try to summarize in a few succinct sentences, I wouldn't call it a complex case,
1:41.3	I would just call the protracted case. At this point, there's probably
1:45.9	several thousand pages, at least several thousand pages of public record on the case. The essence
1:55.8	of the matter is as follows. The state of Palestine joins the ICC. The technical term is it accesses the ICC in
2:07.6	2015, in early January 2015. Now that it's officially a member of the ICC, it has a right to send a referral, a complaint
2:24.0	to the ICC.
2:26.5	And unsurprisingly, it files a complaint regarding Israeli crimes, criminal actions by the Israelis, which the ICC has jurisdiction over.
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