The Laws of War — with Matt Waxman

Call Me Back - with Dan Senor

Ark Media

Society, October 7, Hamas, War, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Israel, News Commentary, News, Politics, Elections, Palestine, Dan Senor, Government

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In President Biden’s address from the Oval Office, we continue to hear calls for Israel to respect the laws of war. In recent days, we have also heard others call for “proportionality” in Israel’s response. What does that actually mean? According to what definition of proportionality? And according to whose rules? Is Israel subjected to different rules of war than other countries? Is Hamas a different kind of enemy? These are some of the issues we get into with Matt Waxman, who is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he chairs the National Security Law Program. He is also Adjunct Senior Fellow for Law & Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he is affiliated with the Lieber Institute for Law & Warfare at West Point. Among his many areas of expertise, Matt is a scholar of the laws of war, including their history and their application to new technologies of warfare. During the Bush administration, Matt served in senior positions at the U.S. State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council. Earlier in his career, he was a defense analyst at RAND, where among other things he worked on the law and strategy of urban warfare.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, certainly in my view, Israel has every right to defend itself militarily.
0:05.9	This is a war of self-defense, but it's also a war against a terrorist adversary that does not itself follow any rules.
0:15.2	How do we take a body of rules that was developed primarily for state versus state, Army versus Army.
0:24.2	And how do we translate and apply that body of law
0:28.0	to a war against a terrorist organization.
0:37.0	It is
0:44.1	it is Thursday October 19th
0:46.2	1030 p.m. in New York City and 5.30 a.m. in Israel on Friday, October 20th.
0:54.0	President Biden just gave his address from the Oval Office.
0:57.2	My immediate reaction, both to the speech
1:00.0	and to President Biden's historic visit to Israel earlier this week was generally quite positive.
1:06.3	First off, it was extremely important that he was in Israel.
1:10.1	I can assure you that when the Hamas leadership was planning this invasion of Israel,
1:15.2	they did not expect in a matter of days that the commander-in-chief of the most important and
1:19.6	powerful military in the world would come into Israel into a war zone in no time to stand
1:26.3	shoulder to shoulder with the Israeli people and to even attend a war cabinet
1:30.3	meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel's political leadership.
1:35.0	It continues to be important that the President compares Hamas to ISIS and the Nazis,
1:40.3	as I've said on this podcast and elsewhere, and using that comparison, President Biden is putting
1:46.0	markers down as you look at the history of how the U.S. and our allies dealt with eradicating the threats of ISIS and the Nazis.
1:55.2	It was also notable that President Biden mentioned Hamas's use of human shields and
2:00.6	that he blamed Hamas for civilian deaths.
	...

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