The BBC grotesquely misused the Geneva convention in the way leftists always do. The Geneva Convention is a rational document. While it does indeed place limits on armed conflict, it does not expect only one side in that conflict to observe it. As I recall the document, if one side is not properly uniformed as a fighting force for example, the Geneva Convention protections do not apply to them. But more to the point, if they act as Hamas acted, they do not get the protection of the convention’s limits and responses. Hizb’allah might for the moment as they are rocketing Israeli military targets for the moment. But once they start going for villages and so on, those limits come off. The Geneva Convention is meant to be a system to allow a policy dispute being solved by force not to become a genocidal all out war. But the media uses it as a set of handcuffs on whoever they want to lose. It simply is not written that way.
WHO IS NATASHA HAUSDORFF?You’ll be hard pressed to find more knowledgeable experts on international law and how it effects Israel in its response to the Hamas massacre, than barrister Natasha Hausdorff! Brilliant explanation here on BBC. pic.twitter.com/q2qMzeF7UH
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) October 21, 2023
This Sunday, the 33-year-old barrister and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel will be making the country’s case again at Jewish Book Week.
Hausdorff, who clerked for the late President of the Israeli Supreme Court, Chief Justice Miriam Naor, is taking part in a roundtable discussion entitled, “Israel: A Fragile Democracy?” with JC columnist Jonathan Freedland, fellow lawyer Anthony Julius and historian Sir Simon Schama.
Putting the “badly misinformed” right, correcting the swathes of untruths that surround the Jewish state, is a moral compulsion for Hausdorff. And she felt the urge from an early age.
“It was already plain to me in the first year of my secondary school that when it came to Israel, my teachers were desperately ignorant, yet highly opinionated. From the get-go I felt it was my duty to explain the context and provide the content they didn’t have.”
Context and content handed to her, you could say, from her family’s unusual biography.
“My dad was born in Tel Aviv and the Hausdorffs go back eight generations in Israel. Azriel Zelig Hausdorff was born in a village near Leipizig, in Germany, and arrived in Jerusalem, via London, in 1847.
“My mum met my dad in Israel and, like many postwar non-Jewish Germans, had always been fiercely Zionist.
"We went to Israel every year during my childhood, and when we weren’t there, I missed it terribly. In fact, growing up in the non-Jewish London borough of Kensington, I honestly felt there were three other Zionists in the whole of Britain: my mother, my father and my sister.”
But they were informed Zionists — “I was essentially growing up in an Israeli household in London, so closely did my family follow Israel’s news and developments” — and that gave her the confidence to fight back at school.
“In every other way, I was a very good girl at school, its rules were holy to me. But when it came to this one issue, I argued with my teachers robustly.”
Two decades on, she says she feels privileged to have a job that gives her the flexibility to fight for Israel on a pro bono basis.
“I love being a barrister, but I feel especially blessed to be able to engage in Israel advocacy. It gives me a sense of purpose, it’s energising. When I defend Israel I am not just defending Zionism, the most important part of my Jewishness, I am defending liberal democracy and the truth.
“People are so used to hearing the expression ‘illegal occupation’ in relation to Israel they don’t realise that in this context it’s a political term, masquerading as a legal one.
"They don’t know what international law says about the formation of a state’s borders at the moment of independence and how when it comes to the world’s sole Jewish state, that law is somehow disapplied.
“But I do and I can’t let untruths go unchallenged.”
No comments:
Post a Comment