Is Israel Breaking International Law? The Truth About Genocide, the UN, and Gaza

David (00:00:00):
Great. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Covenant and Conflict Podcast. I’m your host, David Blease, and I’m wearing a sports coat today because we have a lawyer with us, Andrew Tucker from Think. Thank you for being here.

Andrew (00:00:15):
David, it’s good to be here.

David (00:00:16):
We’ve been planning this for months and months, maybe even more than a year.

Andrew (00:00:20):
Could be.

David (00:00:21):
And for such a time as this, he has come to Texas, to Dallas to share with us. Think, let me see if I can get this acronym right. It is the Hague-

Andrew (00:00:33):
Initiative.

David (00:00:34):
Initiative for International-

Andrew (00:00:36):
Cooperation.

David (00:00:37):
Cooperation, man. Long

Andrew (00:00:38):
Name.

David (00:00:39):
But I love the Think.

Andrew (00:00:40):
Yeah. It’s kind of cool, right?

David (00:00:42):
Love the acronym. And Think is a legal firm. You also help just kind of the average person understand it. You have-

Andrew (00:00:51):
We’re like a think tank. A legal think tank. Comprising mainly Christians and Jews. But not only, we’re not actually a Christian organization, but we come from a Christian perspective. Let’s say a perspective where we really support and value and defend Judeo-Christian values. That’s really the bottom line from a legal perspective. And then we’re focused on the topic of Israel.

David (00:01:16):
Well, and we were talking briefly before we hit record. What we spend a lot of time doing is helping people understand Israel in the Bible. How do we make sense of the covenant that God has with Israel? How do we make sense of the Jewish people and many of them rejecting Jesus? What about the Jewish people that receive Jesus? When we go back to the Bible, I think you’re doing a very similar work with the legal side, because just as inflammatory as Israel is in the Bible, it is maybe even more inflammatory politically. It is nuclear right now. Mentioning Israel is not something you ever want to do at the Thanksgiving table. I mean, it’s going to create arguments wherever you go. Everyone has an opinion. But I would love for you to just help us understand the legal side, help us understand the foundation, what’s really going on.

(00:02:10):
We hear terms like genocide. We hear terms like occupation. So I’d love for you to just help us understand what’s actually going on and help us have intellectual conversations that are grounded in true legal definitions and not just feelings.

Andrew (00:02:27):
Yeah. So that’s what we’re here for. And it’s good to have the conversation. I think it’s a very important one because we live in this world.

David (00:02:35):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:02:37):
That’s the challenge we have, isn’t it? We’re called to be in the world, but not of the world. And Israel, the Jewish people are always at the center of God’s attention. I think they’re at the center of his great plan of redemption,

David (00:02:52):
Of

Andrew (00:02:52):
The whole creation. And they don’t fit in well into the worldly scheme of things.

David (00:02:59):
They

Andrew (00:02:59):
Never have in history.

David (00:03:00):
They’ve always been- They’re called to be separate.

Andrew (00:03:02):
They are called to be separate. And we don’t like that as human beings. The nation’s uncomfortable with this idea of a unique nation that believes itself to be different, having a different calling, kind of exclusive, and yet particular. So it’s hard from a Christian perspective, but also hard from a worldly perspective to understand the phenomenon of this nation of Israel in our midst. So for me, the starting point in a sense is God’s relationship with the nations. So God called the nations to him after the fall, after the flood.

David (00:03:48):
Yeah. After Babel, after the

Andrew (00:03:52):
Tower foul laws. So the children of Noah, the three sons of Noah became the 70 nations of the world. And then I think that’s Genesis nine and 10. And then Genesis 10, God calls Abraham out of Babylon.

David (00:04:08):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:04:08):
Really? Yeah.

David (00:04:09):
I think it’s Genesis 12 because Babel’s 11. And then Genesis 12. Yep.

Andrew (00:04:12):
Thank you. And then so we have the Tower of Babel, which is … We’ve always have the Tower of Babel, don’t we? The nations who want to come together to build their own kingdom, to reach to the heavens. And God says, no, I have another path. I’m going to call a man out of the nations, out of Babylon, and through him, I will create nations and he will be the blessing of all. And all the nations through him will be blessed. So when in our generation, God is restoring the Jewish people, having been in the diaspora for, of course, the Babylonian diaspora, the Assyrian diaspora, and now the Roman diaspora, he’s bringing them home as he said he would, the 12 tribes of Jacob.

David (00:05:02):
Yeah. One of the most consistent prophecies in the Old Testament is the regathering.

Andrew (00:05:06):
Throughout the regathering. And from the north, the south, the east, and the west. And it’s hard to look at Israel today and not see this miracle. You go to Israel, you see Chinese Jews, you see African Jews. You see every color under the sun of these amazing people who come together and are creating this nation in the land that God has promised them. So the conflict, I think around Israel today is a conflict between God and the nations as much as it is between the nations and Israel. He says, “I’m restoring Israel not because they’re great or big or even important, but as a sign to the nations. You are my sign to the nations that I am God.” So Israel presents the nations with a choice. Either you accept me, accept God as the God, or you create the Tower of Babel again. And I think that’s what the world is doing.

(00:06:05):
We have the United Nations. We have all these international institutions when they’re not bad in themselves. There’s nothing wrong with the United Nations in principle, European Union, African Union, name them all. But when they become an idol and a goal in themselves to create a kingdom, then we have a problem.

(00:06:32):
And so I’ve always seen Israel and the restoration of modern state of Israel as being God’s witness to the world, that he alone is the creator and the redeemer of creation. Now, so where does law come in?

David (00:06:51):
Yeah. And where do you come in? I’d love to hear when did this become a passion for you Because that’s not the passion of most lawyers, I’m assuming. No.

Andrew (00:07:02):
No. Well, that’s been a journey in itself.

David (00:07:05):
So

Andrew (00:07:05):
I grew up in Australia in Melbourne, which has actually … I’m a Christian. I grew up in an Anglican family and was taught a little bit about Israel. It was kind of there in my family’s history that Israel has always been seen to be important theologically, biblically. The Anglican church doesn’t teach much about this, but I was surrounded by a lot of Jewish people. Melbourne had, at that time, I think still does the largest community of Holocaust survivors outside Israel.

David (00:07:44):
Wow.

Andrew (00:07:45):
So a lot of elderly people, I learned the stories of how they came before or after the Second World War. And I think that had an impact looking back on my life. Went to Europe in my mid-twenties, took on a career as an international lawyer in different areas and settled in Europe, but married into a strongly Christian Zionist family. My father-in-law was a successful businessman, sold his business at the age of 50 and decided he wanted to go into the churches and to speak about Israel. He said, “Christians have lost their sense of the importance of Israel and we need to stand.” And he always spoke about Ruth accompanying Naomi back to Bethlehem. He said, “Your people will be my people. Your land will be my land. Where you die, I will die.”

David (00:08:46):
Your God will be my God.

Andrew (00:08:47):
Your God will be my God, the most important. And that’s had enormous impact on my life, his testimony, and I think really a call. He always said, “We Christians are good at loving dead Jews from the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament. And we’re good at loving the future Jews. We know they’ll be restored and to God’s grace.” But he says, “Who will love the Jewish people

David (00:09:16):
Today?” Wow. And

Andrew (00:09:18):
That really is- It’s powerful. It’s very powerful. They said like, “Well, if we’re serious about our faith and belief, there’s a consequence. And it means that you’ve got to …

(00:09:29):
” It’s maybe not for everybody, but there is a place in our Christian identity, an important place where we understand this crafting into the olive tree, which is Israel, and that needs to be a part of our identity. So I learned that later in life, really. And then I was confronted with a choice in my early 40s. I was working as an attorney and I had the opportunity to take an international role with the ministry that my family had established, Christians for Israel. And I spent the next 10 years traveling around the world, meeting Christians, setting up Christian organizations to connect Christians in their countries with Israel and the Jewish people.

David (00:10:18):
That’s

Andrew (00:10:19):
Great. And parallel with that as a lawyer, I was very interested in the whole legal thing because we could all see lawfare growing. So we’re talking in the early part of this century, and it wasn’t such an issue at the time, but I knew that people were talking about occupation and all the rest of it. So I made a determined effort to really study all of this and get my head around what was happening, and it resulted in the creation of this organization think almost 10 years ago. So I left my role with Christians of Israel, became full-time because I think it’s important that we, from a Christian perspective, understand the battle that is going on, and to some extent it’s a legal battle. Of course, deep, it’s a spiritual battle. It manifests itself in the legal and the political. And I think we need to understand that as Christians, and it concerns me that Christians too often are misled, allow themselves to be misled by this whole narrative of the illegitimacy of Israel that’s a colonial enterprise oppressing the Palestinians, which it’s a complex issue.

(00:11:50):
I’m not saying it’s totally untrue, but if you look at the world through biblical or spiritual lens, as we must, then you also have to see the spiritual battle that is going on

(00:12:05):
In the political.

David (00:12:06):
Yes. It’s taking multiple different forms. There’s lots of things happening at once.

Andrew (00:12:10):
Yeah. And also when Christians say, “Oh, well, international law says such and such, we must hold Israel to international law because that’s the most important thing.” And I say, “Well, it’s not the most important thing.” Law is very important, and we’ll talk in a moment about what international law is, isn’t, but the most important thing is to stand on God’s word and support what he is doing. And when we do that, I think we realize we can see that there is a whole campaign to use the language and the rhetoric of international law to attack the Jewish people and to prevent God from doing what he’s doing, and that is restoring them to the land. And he wants to do this, not just to bless Israel, but also to bless the Palestinians, to bless the Arab people, to bless all nations. And I’m firmly convinced that a strong and a flourishing Israel and an Israel that returns to God will be the greatest blessing to the Palestinians that they can impossibly imagine.

David (00:13:30):
Well, that’s Romans 11. If you were blessed because they walked out of something, how much more blessed would you be if they came back? Yeah. Life from the dead revivals, the process. Yeah.

Andrew (00:13:38):
How awesome is that?

David (00:13:39):
So I feel like I’m hearing buzzwords that I hear a lot on social media, but never get context for. One of them is international law. Yeah. I mean, Israel’s broken thousands of international laws and it’s like, which ones?

Andrew (00:13:52):
Yeah, exactly.

David (00:13:53):
All of them. Yeah. I couldn’t tell you what they are. I don’t think they could tell us what they are. No, that’s the thing. So will you help us maybe first talk about either international law or if you need to take a step back and help us understand the UN, which you advise at the UN, you spend lots of time there, you have an understanding of Israel on trial. So help us kind of wrap our minds around it first.

Andrew (00:14:13):
Okay. So in my simplistic thinking, international law is the language that nations use to interact with each other. So in our countries, United States, Australia, the Netherlands where I live, we have a legal system and as citizens of the countries, we’re bound by that legal system, right? Criminal legal system, civil law. You can infringe the law. You can do criminal acts and then you’re brought to justice and you’re bound by decisions of judges. That’s our system. The industrial law is very different because nations are sovereign and that means that the foundation principle of international law is that every nation is equally sovereign. So the United States is just as sovereign as Vanuatu in the Pacific Islands. One is tiny, the other is big, but they’re equally sovereign.

David (00:15:16):
And they can’t enforce their own

Andrew (00:15:18):
Criminal- And you can’t interfere in the sovereignty of another nation. Yeah. That was really the basic principle in the 17th century when international law started to develop. We had nation states in Europe. Previously, we had kingdoms and empires and they continued, but Europe started to develop nation states. And so our system was developed to say, “Well, all right, how are we going to manage-”

David (00:15:45):
Interact with one another.

Andrew (00:15:47):
Yeah. And they basically said, “Well, all right, we accept each other’s existence. We’re not going to fight wars of aggression and we will not interfere in the internal circumstances of our neighbor

David (00:16:02):
States.”

Andrew (00:16:03):
That’s the basic idea. So today, of course, international law has be advanced enormously. It’s much more complex, but it still rests on that principle that sovereign states agree on certain things. They agree that slavery is illegal. We don’t do slavery anymore.That’s a fundamental principle we all agree on. We also agree that treaties are binding. So if the United States enters into a treaty with Vanuatu or any other state, they’re required to fulfill the terms of that treaty. That’s a treaty entered into a sovereign state, treaty law. We also have what’s known as customary law, and that is the rules that are developed over time through custom of states. And by doing things over and over again and accepting them as legal, rules and norms develop, basic principles. There are not too many of them, but they’re foundational principles and they’re the two main sources of international law.

(00:17:16):
And then we have some courts which can interpret and apply international law. So actually international law has some application within countries. So even United States courts will sometimes have to look to international law to resolve conflict here because international law works into our domestic situation. But at the international level, we don’t have that same court structure. A state can’t just go to a court and say, “Well, I don’t like what Israel is doing, so I’m going to go to the court and get an injunction against Israel for infringing the law.” It’s not as simple as that. We have two courts where that kind of happens. One is the international criminal court based in the Hague in the Netherlands where I live, established 20 years ago to create an international criminal legal system.

David (00:18:14):
Okay. Is that to hold sovereign nations accountable for crime? To hold

Andrew (00:18:18):
Individuals accountable. Not nation states, but individuals. So you remember the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War, that was a revolutionary and international law terms that you could bring individuals to justice for crimes against humanity. Got it. Totally new concept. Law of genocide evolved at that time as well. Court was created to do that. And we’ve seen a number of courts over the years doing similar things with the Rwanda genocide and Yugoslavia and that sort of thing. And at a certain moment, people said, “All right, well, let’s create a permanent court to deal with the worst crimes against humanity and international law crimes, including genocide.” And that’s the ICC, which is not universal. Not every state is a member of it. The United States is not a member of the ICC.

David (00:19:17):
Interesting.

Andrew (00:19:17):
So that’s why the United States doesn’t like it when the ICC tries to interrogate or investigate US citizens for war crimes. And the US says quite rightly, “Well, you don’t have jurisdiction over US citizens.”

David (00:19:33):
Has America been invited and declined or-

Andrew (00:19:35):
Well, the court was going after Americans for the intervention in Afghanistan. They wanted to prosecute Americans. Now, that was controversial because the United States is not a party. And now the ICC is going after Israeli leaders for war crimes in Palestine.

David (00:19:58):
In Gaza.

Andrew (00:19:59):
Come back to that. Yeah. Palestine is not a state.

David (00:20:01):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:20:02):
Israel is not a party to the ICC.

David (00:20:05):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:20:05):
So in the eyes of many, including myself, the court has no business in this. So that’s the criminal court. Then you also have the International Court of Justice, which is a UN body,

David (00:20:17):
Which we are members of the UN.

Andrew (00:20:18):
We are members of the UN. Okay. So the UN is really our modern tower of Babel. It was created after the Second World War. It was a revolutionary instrument. It’s a body. It’s an organization. It’s a treaty organization. So there was a treaty signed in San Francisco in 1945 to create the UN where states said, “Well, you know what? ”

David (00:20:46):
And by states, you mean nation states?

Andrew (00:20:47):
Nation states. We’re going to give up a little bit of our sovereignty to create a legal system that’s going to ensure we have peace and security.

David (00:20:56):
And how many nations are part of the UN?

Andrew (00:20:58):
193.

David (00:20:59):
Out of …

Andrew (00:21:01):
Well, there are a few states or nations that are not members of the UN, either because they’re not recognized as states or they’ve decided not to, but pretty much every state in the world is a member of the UN. So it is really a universal system. But it’s a system, and it’s created by a treaty, so it has a limited mandate.

David (00:21:28):
And are people of each of these nations sending delegates to the UN?

Andrew (00:21:33):
So in New York, you have the General Assembly and the Security Council. So every day, every week, the states are there. They’re national. They’re ambassadors or permanent representatives to the UN. They live and work in New York. They’re going to the UN every day. It’s a massive organization. And the general assembly is adopting resolution after resolution about anything you can imagine.

David (00:22:00):
And are all nations coming to New York for the UN?

Andrew (00:22:03):
Yep.

David (00:22:03):
Pretty

Andrew (00:22:03):
Much every nation has an embassy in the UN.

David (00:22:06):
Okay. And that’s in New York, but that’s not in Switzerland?

Andrew (00:22:09):
No. So the UN is basically New York, but also has a presence in Geneva. That’s really where the Human Rights Council is. Okay. That’s a UN body. And then in the Hague, you have the international court.

David (00:22:27):
So the international court is in the Hague, the UN meets in New York.

Andrew (00:22:31):
Correct.

David (00:22:31):
Got it.

Andrew (00:22:32):
So the UN adopts resolutions. That’s the general assembly. They’re non-binding. They’re political statements on a range of things, including Israel and Palestine, but on every other conflict you can imagine.

David (00:22:47):
And when you say adopt a resolution, is that to form a statement that people will then get behind? Is that kind of the purpose of it? Yeah. This is what we believe as the UN, so it’s a banner statement, but it’s not binding or legal. It’s not

Andrew (00:23:02):
Binding a legal sense.

David (00:23:04):
But it’s probably the court of public opinion?

Andrew (00:23:06):
Exactly.

David (00:23:07):
Okay.

Andrew (00:23:07):
Right. So Israel is always on the agenda of

David (00:23:12):
The UN,

Andrew (00:23:13):
Both in New York and in Geneva.

David (00:23:14):
Geneva

Andrew (00:23:15):
Even more. So they’re always talking about, they’re always creating these resolutions. Now, the way the UN works is through blocks of states, groups. It’s very much an entity that has these political and geographical groups. You have the Western states, Europe, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They have a group. You have the Islamic states. Organization of Israemic Cooperation that’s also a treaty organization, but it’s also an observer in the UN. And all those 56 Islamic states are a group in the UN.

David (00:23:55):
Wow.

Andrew (00:23:56):
They get together with the Arab states, the Arab league states, and they pretty much always have a majority in the UN. Which is probably not

David (00:24:06):
Good for the public opinion of Israel.

Andrew (00:24:08):
So they can push through any resolution they want. And that’s why you get so many of these anti-Israel resolutions. It doesn’t mean every state agrees with those resolutions. It simply means you’ve got a majority, you’ve got 193 states, but the decisions are made by … I don’t want to get too technical, but it’s important. They’re made by the votes of states that vote on a particular resolution.

David (00:24:43):
Okay. So not every nation votes on every resolution. They’re

Andrew (00:24:45):
Not even nation votes.

David (00:24:47):
Got it.

Andrew (00:24:47):
So what you get a lot is the resolutions … Let’s take an example saying that Israeli settlements are a flagrant violation of international law. We hear that a lot.

David (00:24:59):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:25:01):
We might talk about what that means in a moment.

David (00:25:04):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:25:04):
But that’s the rhetoric.

David (00:25:05):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:25:06):
Resolution after resolution. That resolution is drafted by a group of states. Most of them Islamic states. They’ll bring it to the UN on the table and states can vote. And

David (00:25:20):
Some states can just opt not to vote. Well,

Andrew (00:25:21):
They do. This is the thing. They abstain. If you abstain, your vote doesn’t count. So you’re often left with like, say, 140 states that are voting. So if you’ve got 70 of them,

David (00:25:34):
You

Andrew (00:25:35):
Can push a resolution through, even though 70 is not even half of the number of UN member states.

David (00:25:40):
It still says the UN adopted resolution. Exactly. So it makes it feel like all the nations are deciding. Yeah.

Andrew (00:25:46):
So we have this idea that the UN in some kind of monolithic universal ways is everybody is of the view that settlements are illegal, is a good example. Yeah. But nobody knows what a settlement is and nobody knows why they’re illegal. It’s just said.

David (00:26:03):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:26:03):
Right?

David (00:26:04):
Yeah. It’s good buzzwords.

Andrew (00:26:06):
It’s great. It’s

David (00:26:07):
Good to repeat. Yeah. Repeatable phrases.

Andrew (00:26:09):
And the point is that all of these resolutions are driven by some kind of ideology

David (00:26:15):
Or

Andrew (00:26:15):
Religion. And the Islamic states have an interest and an ideological mission to ensure that the Jewish people will never have sovereignty on Islamic territory. That is the whole point of Islamic theology. We cannot tolerate any people, but especially the Jewish people having sovereignty over land that has been under the Islam, and that is Jerusalem. It is everything.

David (00:26:49):
Yeah. Because it was overseen by the Islamic regime for-

Andrew (00:26:54):
Islam has held it, particularly under the Ottoman empire of

David (00:26:59):
The last 400

Andrew (00:26:59):
Years, but before that-

David (00:27:01):
Even with the crusades, that was the whole-

Andrew (00:27:02):
That was the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. It was the fighting about Jerusalem.

David (00:27:05):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:27:06):
So that’s why from an Islamic perspective, Jerusalem can never be a capital of Israel. So they’re always pushing this narrative that Israel is an illegitimate colonial enterprise, and they use quite deliberately and very, very successfully the language of modern international law, which is a very Western thing to advance their non-West, anti-Western agenda. And unfortunately, they find allies in the liberal West.

David (00:27:45):
Yeah, it’s so odd.

Andrew (00:27:46):
Especially Europe, which is bought into this narrative that the land has to be divided.

David (00:27:53):
So

Andrew (00:27:56):
We’ll allow the Jews to have their little state, but we’re going to demand that it’s divided along a line that we determine that, by the way, goes through the middle of Jerusalem and cuts off the old city to take it out of Jewish hands

David (00:28:11):
And

Andrew (00:28:11):
Give it to the Muslim world. That’s a European position. Then you get the former Soviet states, which also have an ideological interest and have always been very … And not always by the way, but for a long time, anti-Israel. So you have this sort of coalition of nations which former majority in the UN can push through these resolutions. And even in the Security Council, it’s always been only the United States, which is held back in the Security Council.

David (00:28:49):
Is that a different court?

Andrew (00:28:51):
Yeah. The Security Council, the top organization, it’s a bit like the administration in American terms. You have the White House. It’s where the really big decisions are made. That’s the Security Council.

David (00:29:04):
Okay. Is that all 190 nations? No,

Andrew (00:29:06):
There are five permanent members.

David (00:29:08):
Okay.

Andrew (00:29:08):
United States, France, UK, Russia, and China. This was created after the Second World War.

David (00:29:15):
Yeah, I was about to say- The winners. The winners of the Second War War.

Andrew (00:29:17):
Where does the Second World War say, okay, we are going to be the ones who will decide on the big issues. Those five are the permanent ones, and then they’re always joined by 10 other non-permanent states. So there are 15.

David (00:29:31):
That rotate in and out?

Andrew (00:29:32):
They rotate.

David (00:29:32):
Okay.

Andrew (00:29:33):
So they’re making decisions.

David (00:29:34):
Fascinating.

Andrew (00:29:35):
And when it’s been anti-Israel-

David (00:29:38):
America’s the only

Andrew (00:29:39):
One in this. As always said, “We’re not going down that line.” They might criticize Israel, which is fine, but they’re not going to condemn Israel or demand, for example, the division of the land. They’ve always said it’s up to Israel to negotiate with its neighbors. … and with the Palestinians until December 2016, you might remember President Trump has just been elected, Obama’s on his way out and he and John Kerry allowed a resolution to go through in the security council condemning Israeli settlements as a flagrant violation of international

David (00:30:26):
Law. Was this before or after he moved the embassy to Jerusalem?

Andrew (00:30:29):
So this is before,

David (00:30:30):
Before

Andrew (00:30:30):
Trump even

David (00:30:32):
Started

Andrew (00:30:32):
His first administration. So this was like Obama’s last parting shots.

David (00:30:38):
Got it. So this was Obama’s decision. Okay.

Andrew (00:30:40):
Yeah. And that for us was also kind of like the thing that caused us to establish our organization. We said, “Well, this is lawfare.” Because Obama had this kind of political commitment to saying, “The only way of solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to divide the land, give the Palestinians a state.” That’s a view. It’s fine to have that view.

David (00:31:13):
Yeah. You can see how people would get there logically. It

Andrew (00:31:18):
Kind of

David (00:31:18):
Makes sense. Two sides fighting. Give them both a side. Exactly. I do it with my kids all the time.

Andrew (00:31:22):
Right. Yeah, you do. You’d be like Solomon. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s right. Two peoples claiming sovereignty over land, split it down the middle and everybody will be happy. Well, we’ve tried that for a hundred years.

David (00:31:38):
Wasn’t Jordan kind of the-

Andrew (00:31:39):
Jordan was supposed to be the original

David (00:31:42):
Palestinian state. We didn’t like that line. No. Yeah. So

Andrew (00:31:44):
There’ve been a lot of two state solutions on the table over many, many years,

David (00:31:48):
And

Andrew (00:31:48):
It’s never worked. But for Obama, this was like a mantra. And that’s why settlements are so problematic for people who have that view.

David (00:31:59):
Because they’re going into what would be the- Because they’re

Andrew (00:32:01):
Jews living in land that they want to give to the Palestinians. And the Palestinians say, “We don’t want Jews in our land.” We

David (00:32:08):
Want

Andrew (00:32:08):
A Palestinian

David (00:32:09):
Stuff. It’s been a suspended kind of territory. Yeah. So real quick, just because we mentioned it, and I want to get your thoughts on it from the legal understanding, because I don’t know if it’s as factual or if it’s more retrospective to say Jordan was the two state solution. Is that how they saw it? Yeah, it was. At the time? Yeah. So they decided, we’re going to give Jordan is going to be … They wouldn’t have used the term Palestinian at the time. So what was the idea that was the area? Well, they

Andrew (00:32:43):
Did and they didn’t. So 1918, end of the First World War, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the allied powers got together. This was sort of the last year or two of the First World War. When people could see where it was going, the Ottoman Empire was falling,

David (00:33:05):
It

Andrew (00:33:05):
Was going to collapse.

David (00:33:06):
And the Ottoman Empire just was the entire Middle East. It

Andrew (00:33:09):
Was like that. Exactly.

David (00:33:10):
Yeah. So what do you do with all that? Yeah.

Andrew (00:33:12):
Yeah. From Turkey right down to Northern Africa, all of Northern Africa.

David (00:33:15):
Actually,

Andrew (00:33:16):
What we now call the Arab world

David (00:33:18):
Was

Andrew (00:33:18):
The

David (00:33:18):
Ottoman Power.

Andrew (00:33:19):
The Middle East was the Ottoman Empire. Yeah. So of course, this was the moment the Jewish nationalism was being revived, the Jewish Zionist movement

David (00:33:31):
Early 1990s.

Andrew (00:33:31):
From the mid 1800s onwards when Jews were being massacred and persecuted in Russia, in Ukraine and Poland, and they were starting little by little to move to Palestine. And as it was known, Palestine was a Roman word invented by the Romans, 135 AD.

David (00:33:52):
Yeah. And there was chance Jew go to Palestine. It was like- Yeah.

Andrew (00:33:55):
So that’s

David (00:33:55):
How we go to your land. Yeah.

Andrew (00:33:57):
Yeah. And Palestine was under the Ottoman empire at the time and the Ottomans allowed Jews to come in. And then it was Hertzel who created the idea of a Jewish state. That was embraced by the British 1917, the Balfour Declaration, which said, “We will support this reconstitution of the Jewish homeland in Palestine.”

David (00:34:24):
And the Balfour decoration drew these borders that was pretty much the biblical Israel life.

Andrew (00:34:28):
Exactly.

David (00:34:29):
Interesting. Much bigger than it is today.

Andrew (00:34:32):
Yes. From Dan to Beshiva, that was the idea. Absolutely right. The biblical … And that was unique. It was amazing. Lord Balfour, the foreign secretary at the time was an evangelical Christian and he understood. And the prime minister was an evangelical Christian. So it was a little moment in history that Britain could play this role. And that declaration was supported by the Americans, supported by other states. And a few years later, after the First World War, the allied powers institutionalized it in the mandate for Palestine. Because the Ottoman Empire fell, the land had to be somehow divided.

David (00:35:20):
Yeah, diddied up.

Andrew (00:35:22):
And people didn’t want colonies anymore. The British realized that the time of colonialism was passed. Woodrow Wilson was insistent and the Americans came and says, “We’re not having colonies anymore. We’re going to help people have self-determination.” So the man of Palestine was intended like the other mandates for Iraq, Espotamia, and for Syria, and many other parts of the world were intended to give the local people self-determination.

David (00:35:53):
Yeah. We had a historian on once and he was saying, it’s so funny that we’re against nationalism, but he was like, “Nationalism was the answer to break up empires.”

Andrew (00:36:04):
Yes, exactly.

David (00:36:04):
Exactly. It was. It was self-determination. It was the greatest thing was nationalism. Yeah. And so they were doing that to all of these countries that we now know in the Middle East, they were drawing these boundaries and saying, “We want you to have self-determination, run your own country.”

Andrew (00:36:21):
Yeah. So that’s when the Middle East was divided into what we now know as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq.

David (00:36:29):
And when they took the Balfour Declaration, did they essentially cut it in half and

Andrew (00:36:32):
Say- Yeah, so that’s right. So the Belfor Declaration took a period of time to create boundaries of Palestine and included everything that is now Jordan and Israel and the so- called Palestinian territories. So really from the river to the sea almost, certainly from the Jordan river to the sea, but including Jordan, which of course extends way into Saudi Arabia and Iraq and so forth. Then Churchill said, 1921, when the Arabs were a little bit difficult and the British had a big interest, the oil and they wanted to kind of divide it up. And the French were in there as well. And it was a kind of a fight between the French and the British.

David (00:37:18):
Like always.

Andrew (00:37:19):
Likewise. And the British wanted the Suez canal. So they were very concerned to have control over Palestine and they put the Hashemites in from what is now Saudi Arabia. They brought them up from Mecca and put them on the throne in Damascus and in Aman and also wanted to do the same in Palestine. But for Palestine was for the Jewish people and churches said, “Well, you know what? We’ll divide it this Palestine into two. Everything west of the Jordan river will keep for the Jewish national home and everything east will become an Arab state.” It did become a state. The Hashemite kingdom of Jordan.

David (00:38:06):
So it truly was the two state solution.

Andrew (00:38:08):
It really was.

David (00:38:09):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:38:10):
No Jews were allowed to live in Jordan. It was ethnically cleansed of Jews and it was intended for the Arab Palestinians. And that’s what Jordan is today. It’s an Arab Palestinian state run by Hashimite, which is problematic because he’s not a Palestinian. So he’s always trying to keep control. And that’s why Jordan has control over the Temple Mount. They invaded Israel in 1948 and took control of the old city of Jerusalem and the West Bank as it became known Judea and Samaria. And so Jordan’s always had this kind of Islamic kind of calling because they’re from Mecca, they consider themselves to be the custodians of the temple mount.

David (00:38:59):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:39:00):
So they will never give up the temple mount.

David (00:39:03):
Even though in 1967, right, the Jews got the temple back and they gave it … Yeah.

Andrew (00:39:11):
They

David (00:39:12):
Gave the keys back to the- They have the keys for actually. … the Jordanians to just run the temple mount. So Jerusalem is back in Jewish hands after 67, but the temple mount was still in Jordan because they thought that that was going to remain peace, that was

Andrew (00:39:26):
Going to keep the peace. Exactly. We’ll keep the Muslims happy by allowing them to keep their mosques on the Temple Mount. We won’t let Jews go and pray there. So that was known as the status quo.

David (00:39:38):
Because they cared about Jerusalem, but the temple mount they were willing to submit. So sorry for that rabbit trail, I’m sure we’ll have many, but that was very much a two state solution. So that kind of brings some clarity to when people are crying out now for a two state solution, it’s not incorrect to say we already tried that. Yes.

Andrew (00:40:02):
We

David (00:40:02):
Tried the two state solution and maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t work.

Andrew (00:40:08):
Well, it’s worked to some extent. There is a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, and they live in relative peace. They even collaborate on many, many issues. It’s a cold peace in many ways, but so then we come to dividing the rest of the land. And the problem there is that it was Jordan that attacked Israel aggressively in 1948 and took an occupied Jude and Samaria and half of Jerusalem and Egypt took the Gaza strip, which were then liberated 19 years later by Israel in 1967. And

David (00:40:45):
They got back what’s known as the West Bank and Gaza.

Andrew (00:40:48):
Right.

David (00:40:49):
But then they gave Gaza back to Egypt later.

Andrew (00:40:52):
Well, no. So Egypt never wanted the Gaza Strips, still doesn’t want the Gaza Strip, but 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza.

David (00:40:59):
And tried to let them have self-determination? And let the

Andrew (00:41:02):
Palestinians, because by that stage we had the Oslo agreements, 1993, between terrible agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasa Arafat. The

David (00:41:15):
PLO.

Andrew (00:41:15):
The Pielo, which is deeply, deeply anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, and is built on the idea of destroying the state of Israel, liberating Palestine. Palestine, yeah. So when people talk about Palestine, the Palestinians mean everything. It’s Palestine as a whole. They want to liberate it from the river to the sea, but the West in our naivety think that the, well, they really only want the Western-

David (00:41:44):
The two state. Yeah. So

Andrew (00:41:46):
We’ll give that to them because we think that’s a good idea.

David (00:41:49):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:41:50):
And that’s why it’s never worked because Arafat has walked away as Mahmoud Abbas has time and again from offers from Israel to give it to them.

David (00:42:01):
Yeah. Like the Oslo accords, you look at it now and you’re like, “That was the sweetest deal.”

Andrew (00:42:07):
Yeah.

David (00:42:07):
They would kill for that deal today, but because they didn’t want a half a state, they wanted policy.

Andrew (00:42:14):
I think at the deepest, that’s the problem is that on the one hand, the Islamic world wants and must have the whole. They will never be satisfied with only half. And from the other side, I think at its deepest, Israel realizes that Judea and Samaria belong to Israel, but there’s a battle going on within the Jewish world about this issue.

David (00:42:39):
Totally.

Andrew (00:42:40):
You see it, don’t you, in Israel,

David (00:42:42):
Between

Andrew (00:42:42):
The left and the right-

David (00:42:43):
Secular news. I often say the settlers remind me of the zealots back in Jesus’ name. They’re politically activated, they are aggressive, and some horrible things are happening at the hands of these Jewish people, and the victims are the Arabs in the West Bank, and many Israelis will condemn the settlers for what they’re doing. Very much so. But then the political people aren’t doing enough to stop them because maybe they feel like maybe that’s the bull in the China shop that kind of paves away for a later settling of that land. So it’s really complex. It’s very

Andrew (00:43:28):
Complex.

David (00:43:29):
And hard because you’re dealing with people.

Andrew (00:43:30):
Yes.

David (00:43:31):
So-

Andrew (00:43:32):
And from a security perspective, Israel has always said they cannot and they will not simply hand over East Jerusalem and Judean Samaria to the Arabs. Even Rabin, who was very left, and he was the one who signed the Oslo agreements. He said, “We’re never going to create … We cannot, from a security perspective, allow the creation of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state on the totality of this territory because it will be the end of Israel.” You’ve been there, you’ve seen how close, if they take control of the mountains of

David (00:44:14):
Surrounding Jerusalem.

Andrew (00:44:15):
Judea, Samaria, it’s gone.

David (00:44:18):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:44:19):
So Israel has always looked for kind of compromise, some kind of deal with the Palestinians where their security is protected.

David (00:44:26):
Yeah, giving Gaza back or the Golan Heights, thinking these land for … I mean, what was the- Land for

Andrew (00:44:33):
Peace.

David (00:44:34):
They gave Egypt the Suez canal, what was

Andrew (00:44:36):
It? Yeah, that’s right. They gave all the Sinai deserts.

David (00:44:38):
Sinai peninsula-

Andrew (00:44:39):
Back to Egypt.

David (00:44:41):
Thinking that it would create peace, Gaza, letting them self-govern would create peace, and then we have October 7th. So I think there’s more of a reality now in Israel that no, a two state solution won’t work because we’ve tried little breadcrumbs of that and they fired rockets from closer or dug tunnels or whatever. So I get that tension of, from an Israeli perspective, a two state solution is never going to work. We’ve flirted with that and it’s only cost us.

Andrew (00:45:10):
Exactly.

David (00:45:10):
So let’s transition now because I know we don’t have a ton of time, but I’d love to talk about genocide because that’s the current buzzword of all buzzwords. It

Andrew (00:45:19):
Really is.

David (00:45:20):
Help us understand the definition, help us understand what’s happening right now in the UN and then kind of your perspective on what’s going on.

Andrew (00:45:31):
So genocide is defined in the genocide convention of 1948, which was created after the Shawar, after the Holocaust, really as a response to it, as the genocide of genocides. It was a term invented by and is a Jewish lawyer called Lemkin. And the concept basically is it’s the deliberate and intentional destruction of a group of people in whole or in part. So it’s really about the destruction of a people. It doesn’t mean you have to … You can be guilty of genocide even though you only kill a small number of people, but if

David (00:46:15):
Your intention- Like

Andrew (00:46:17):
Holocaust, yeah. Yeah. If your intention is to … And this is the key thing, the intention to destroy the people as such. So killing Palestinians is not evidence of genocide, nor is killing of Jews. You have to show there’s an intention. The genocide convention is binding on states, pretty much every state.

David (00:46:42):
Nation state.

Andrew (00:46:43):
Nation state is a party to the genocide convention. Not all of them, but most. And this has been bubbling around for quite a number of years, the idea that actually Israel’s deepest intention is to wipe out the Palestinians. Really, that’s what Israel is doing. The Jews have come back to the land to destroy the Palestinians just like

David (00:47:11):
They- The ethnically cleanse.

Andrew (00:47:12):
Ethnically cleanse

David (00:47:13):
Them,

Andrew (00:47:13):
The land of Palestinians.

David (00:47:15):
The victims have become the aggressors. They’re now doing a Holocaust.

Andrew (00:47:20):
Right. Now-

David (00:47:21):
That’s the narrative.

Andrew (00:47:21):
No doubt in history, and even today, you have Jews, even Jewish leaders who hate the Palestinians and maybe even want to kill them. I don’t exclude that possibility. And there were in the Zionist movement of the early 20th century, Zionist leaders who were more aggressive. That having been said, the state of Israel is built on the whole idea that it is a democracy for all the people of Palestine, Jew and non-Jew. That’s the essence of the modern state of Israel. And in 1948, the Jewish people invited the Arab Palestinian people to join with them in creating this new state of Israel-

David (00:48:07):
And have equal share in the-

Andrew (00:48:08):
And be part of it. It will be a Jewish state, but it will be a state for all people. And you’ll read that in the basic Declaration of Independence

David (00:48:17):
In Israel. Yeah, May 14th, 1948. Yeah.

Andrew (00:48:21):
Then came the problem of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and these Jihadist movements in the Palestinian territories. So when Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas took control and so forth, as it’s doing in the West Bank. Then we had October the 7th, and Israel’s response has been a very strong one, and Israel has always said, “We have a right to self-defense to protect ourselves from these people who want to kill us.” And the only way to defend ourselves is to eliminate Hamas.

David (00:49:01):
Yeah. Eliminate the threat.

Andrew (00:49:02):
Yep. Now, big argument on international law, what is the right of self-defense? Clearly Israel has a right to self-defense. That includes eliminating the threat.

David (00:49:11):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:49:12):
Self-defense

David (00:49:13):
Meaning we’re just going to shore up the border or something. Self-defense mean going. It can

Andrew (00:49:16):
Be. To defend yourself, if you have to go into foreign territory, you can do that. If it’s necessary and proportionate, and if you don’t target civilians, these are the key things under international law. And Israel has made every effort since October the 7th to comply with international law, to limit the number of Palestinian civilian casualties, and it’s remarkable what Israel has done, absolutely incredible in an urban warfare, fighting against underground terrorists, holding hostages, and yet relatively speaking, few people have been killed in Gaza. I know we have … The numbers seem big,

David (00:49:59):
But

Andrew (00:49:59):
Compared with all other wars, they’re actually very small.

David (00:50:02):
Yeah. The percentage of civilian casualty-

Andrew (00:50:05):
Compared

David (00:50:05):
With- In urban warfare.

Andrew (00:50:07):
The problem is we don’t know who is a civilian and who is a terrorist.

David (00:50:11):
This is the big problem. They’re not wearing uniforms. Yeah.

Andrew (00:50:13):
Yeah. So it’s very hard. It’s a complex thing. And then people come with the claim of genocide. This has been pushed through the UN, especially the Human Rights Council. You have a Human Rights Council, commission of inquiry, you have a special rapporteur whose only job is to investigate Israel for war crimes or other breaches of international law. And they, with amnesty international and human rights watch and all these others have built this kind of theory that actually what Israel is doing in Gaza is not self-defense, but trying to eliminate the Palestinians.

David (00:50:54):
They

Andrew (00:50:56):
Need to prove that case. There’s a case going before the International Court of Justice, South Africa against Israel case that was brought only less than three months after October the 7th, sponsored by Iran, by the way. South Agricult was paid by Iran to bring these legal proceedings in the court to accuse Israel of committing genocide. It’s an ongoing case. The court has not made a decision yet. It won’t for probably another year or so.

David (00:51:27):
And if the court makes a decision, it’s still not binding, is it? It’s just-

Andrew (00:51:30):
It’s binding on Israel. It’s binding on any party that’s a member of the genocide

David (00:51:35):
Conviction. What does that mean that it’s binding?

Andrew (00:51:37):
It means that it’s legally determinative. The court has no power to enforce it. It’s only the UN then, which would come in and say, “Well, if the court says that simply by fighting in Gaza, Israel, or in a particular way Israel is committing genocide, then it becomes a very political issue and a UN issue.”

David (00:52:03):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:52:05):
So the court case, a ruling is going to be very important, even though it’s not enforceable.

David (00:52:13):
They won’t enforce the war to stop or anything, but it would just be really

Andrew (00:52:17):
… They were using this thing to stop the war and the court said, “No, we won’t order that because Israel does have a right to self-defense.” The only thing Israel can’t do is commit genocide.

David (00:52:30):
And genocide, like you said, is an intention. It’s intention. They have to prove intention.

Andrew (00:52:37):
Prove that Israel has that intention. How do you prove intention?

David (00:52:41):
Wouldn’t the argument be, well, Palestinians or Arabs, if they had the intention to wipe them out, then they wouldn’t have two million Arab Arabs within Israel that sit on the courts, that are part of, have Israel passports, right? Or is that a different thing? That’s a

Andrew (00:53:01):
Strong argument.

David (00:53:02):
Okay.

Andrew (00:53:02):
Okay. That Israel is not actually trying to destroy the Palestinians as a people.

David (00:53:06):
Yeah. But they wouldn’t see them as Palestinians though, I guess. They would see them as Arab-Israelis. So

Andrew (00:53:12):
What they’re trying to say, okay, we won’t take the Palestinians in their totality. We’ll look at the Palestinians in Gaza. And if your intention is to destroy them, because they’re Palestinians, then you satisfy the definition, even if you’re not trying to destroy all Palestinians. So that’s one of their lines of argument, which in itself is problematic. But secondly, they will say, “We look at intent in a holistic way. We’re going to look at everything, and the numbers are one aspect.” So the fact that a large number of people are being killed, they say is a strong argument of evidence of intent. They look at the statements that were made by Bibianet and Yahoo and the President Hertzog after we all heard them and they were strong words, “We’re going to destroy these people. ” But of course they were talking about Hamas and the brutal propagators of the massacre, those who were behind it.

(00:54:19):
Yeah.

David (00:54:20):
It was the response of October 7th.

Andrew (00:54:23):
So they take all of these things together and then they go back in history and say, “Well, let’s look at the last 50 years and we’ll see actually what Israel is trying to do. ” And this is why it’s very dangerous what they’re trying to do in the courts at the moment to broaden the way that the court should interpret the convention and the issue of intention.

David (00:54:47):
Yeah. Well-

Andrew (00:54:49):
And I could tell you, it’s a hostile court,

David (00:54:52):
15

Andrew (00:54:53):
Judges on the International Court of Justice from many different countries, most of them have no idea about the history of this conflict. So they’re fed with UN information, UN reports, which they accept as being proof of facts, which they’re not, because they in turn are always based on hearsay, NGO reports, pro- Palestine. It’s a kind of a circular reasoning.

David (00:55:24):
Yeah, which is hard. I mean, we even had to sift through that as far as this is how many numbers of people that were killed in Gaza, and you’re like, “Who provided those numbers? Hamas.” And you’re like, “Well, that’s hard to verify

Andrew (00:55:36):
The

David (00:55:36):
Terrorist organization.”

Andrew (00:55:38):
They’ll say, “Well, there’s a UN stamp on that.

David (00:55:40):
”

Andrew (00:55:40):
So that’s good enough for us as a court, which is really, really appalling. But you have judges who are living in a different kind of world. They have very different worldviews. Some of them Islamic, some of them very left wing judges from Western countries, like the American judge from Columbia University. We have a South African judge on the court, and he’s definitely supporting the South African narrative. It’s a very, very biased court. And you have one very wonderful judge, Judge from Uganda. She’s a Christian. She’s very supportive of Israel and a very good judge, but she’s isolated. She’s being persecuted within the courts. So it’s not looking good for Israel. And what we’re trying to do is get some other states to step up and support Israel in the courts.

David (00:56:35):
Because right now, many can just abstain.

Andrew (00:56:37):
Yeah. Well, nobody’s required to be part of this. It’s a case between South Africa and Israel.

David (00:56:42):
But other nations can jump in and two sides?

Andrew (00:56:44):
Yeah, they can. So you’ve got like 20 states have jumped into sports South Africa, Bolivia.

David (00:56:51):
Which is really Iran, like you said, against Israel, but it’s done through South Africa. I’m assuming because they had their own war with, what’s the word I’m blanking out on?

Andrew (00:57:04):
Apartheid.

David (00:57:04):
Apartheid. Yeah. And so because they handled their apartheid, they’re kind of the judges of

Andrew (00:57:10):
Apartheid.

David (00:57:10):
Yeah.

Andrew (00:57:11):
The ANC in South Africa has always been a strong relationship with the PLO, very left, very, very Marxist kind of ideology.

David (00:57:19):
So what is the definition of apartheid and is Israel an apartheid state?

Andrew (00:57:25):
So first of all, Israel is definitely not an apartheid state.

David (00:57:29):
Okay.

Andrew (00:57:30):
Apartheid, funnily enough, there is no fixed legal definition of apartheid.

David (00:57:35):
Interesting.

Andrew (00:57:35):
It’s not a crime in itself. There’s no crime of apartheid, but we look to South Africa as being the example of apartheid. And the essence of apartheid is some kind of systemic exclusion of one part of society from every level of participation. So the blacks were literally excluded from every area of public life. They were separated and put into … In Israel, that’s not the case. Israel is a democratic state. Every citizen of the state has equal rights. It is a Jewish state. So to that extent, it has an identity that is specific for the Jews, but every citizen, Jew or non-Jew has a right to vote, has a right to participate fully in society. And as you know, there are many, many, many examples of Arabs in high positions in society. Of course, there is discrimination as in every country. Israel is a complex society with many different groups.

(00:58:46):
There’s discrimination within the Jewish groups against the Ethiopian Jews, for example. So of course-

David (00:58:52):
Or ultra orthodox versus secular.

Andrew (00:58:54):
Yes. And so the Arabs, and I know they do feel in certain areas they’re underprivileged in areas of education or access to public funds in some areas. That’s probably true. It doesn’t make it an apartheid state.

David (00:59:08):
Yeah. Well, and there’s the added confusion of Israel and what’s happening in the West Bank. Correct. Because Israel, like you said, there’s, I believe the number’s two million Arabs that are Israeli citizens that have full access to transportation, that can vote, can hold high, like you said, high levels in politics, officials, voting members. So in the boundaries of Israel, not including the West Bank, very clearly not apartheid. But I think what most people think is, what about these big checkpoints? What about these men with machine guns who are not allowing Palestinians to come freely into Jerusalem? So is that apartheid?

Andrew (00:59:57):
No, it’s not apartheid. It is a problem. And the problem stems from the fact that Jordan occupied the West Bank illegally for 19 years before Israel liberated it. And Israel has elected to treat the West Bank, as we call it, as occupied territory. That means there’s a military administration over the West Bank that’s perfectly legal. And Israel’s entitled to have checkpoints, boundaries at its border with the West Bank and to make sure that terrorists don’t come in and blow people up. For example, that’s problematic. It’s very hard for the Arab population in the West Bank, including cities like Bethlehem to come in. If they’re working in Israel, it’s very hard. There are checkpoints. It’s not nice.

David (01:00:48):
Yeah.

Andrew (01:00:48):
But this is all because of the status of that territory, which for neither side is satisfactory. It’s always been intended as a temporary situation.

David (01:01:01):
And has anyone declared sovereignty or is the West Bank considered part of Israel or is it truly disputed no one’s kind of claimed that Jersey- So

Andrew (01:01:13):
Israel does not claim it’s part of Israel, the West Bank. Jerusalem’s different, of course. In the international terms, we always talk about East Jerusalem and the West Bank. From Israel’s perspective, East Jerusalem is definitely part of Israel. It elected after the six-day war to incorporate the whole of the city into Israeli territory.

David (01:01:36):
Because originally East Jerusalem was supposed to be a maybe capital for a future Palestinian state. Yeah. So

Andrew (01:01:42):
That’s what they still say. And it was occupied by Jordan.

David (01:01:44):
Yeah.

Andrew (01:01:45):
Israel liberated it, six-day war, took it back and unified the city. So Israel said that one whole city is part of the state of Israel. So it exercises sovereignty over the whole city.

David (01:01:57):
Of Jerusalem.

Andrew (01:01:58):
Of Jerusalem.

David (01:01:58):
But West Bank is different.

Andrew (01:01:59):
But not the West Bank. Israel has said we were treated as occupied even though-

David (01:02:05):
Even though we could say that according to the Balfour Declaration or what was the other one?

Andrew (01:02:12):
The mandate for Palestine.

David (01:02:13):
Mandate for Palestine includes the boundaries of the West Bank.

Andrew (01:02:16):
Correct. So Israel’s official position is that sovereignty is in obeyance in the West Bank. That means there is a vacuum of sovereignty until an agreement is reached. Okay. That’s been their legal position. The Palestinians say, well, actually it belongs to us. We claim sovereignty. The Palestinians claim sovereignty over all of the occupied territories plus Israel.

David (01:02:40):
Yeah.

Andrew (01:02:40):
That’s their position.

David (01:02:42):
Yeah.

Andrew (01:02:43):
So Israel’s taken a weak position actually in this, in the hope that they will reach an agreement that will solve all the problems and that’s never happened. And in the meantime, we have this strange military administration in the West Bank, which is divided into three areas under the Oslo Accords. Some of it’s governed by the Palestinian authority, but the majority is governed by the Israelis. There are Israeli settlements.

David (01:03:12):
Yeah. I always tell people it’s like, CBA, A is completely Palestinian run, B is mostly Palestinian run, and C is like Israeli run.

Andrew (01:03:21):
That’s it.

David (01:03:23):
It’s a, what do they call that? A circle. Concentric circle. Yeah,

Andrew (01:03:27):
Exactly. So the Palestinians say, “Well, that actually belongs to us. Israel shouldn’t be, but actually they agreed under the Oslo courts that this would be the situation.” But nobody envisaged that it would take so long.

David (01:03:40):
Everyone thought it was a tiptoe step towards a better plan or a more solidified plan.

Andrew (01:03:45):
Right.

David (01:03:46):
So it was never supposed to last.

Andrew (01:03:48):
Never.

David (01:03:49):
40 years or however long it’s been.

Andrew (01:03:50):
So there’d be no agreement. So the Palestinians have elected now to go to the international courts to prosecute their claim of sovereignty.

David (01:03:59):
Over the West Bank or over? Oh,

Andrew (01:04:00):
The West Bank.

David (01:04:01):
Israel.

Andrew (01:04:01):
Well, over the West Bank particularly.

David (01:04:03):
So that’s happening right now in the courts.

Andrew (01:04:05):
Yeah. And in the UN. So that’s their official position. And that’s why you have states even recognizing the existence of a state of Palestine, which means sovereignty over the West Bank.

David (01:04:18):
But legally right now, is Palestine a place?

Andrew (01:04:23):
Palestine is not a state.

David (01:04:25):
Okay.

Andrew (01:04:26):
And why is it not a state? Because it doesn’t have the characteristics of a state.

David (01:04:30):
Which are?

Andrew (01:04:31):
A government over a people in a defined territory. They claim a territory. They have a people, but they don’t really have an effective government.

David (01:04:42):
Was the PLO or Hamas in kind of the Gaza, would they consider that a

Andrew (01:04:50):
Government? Well, they sort of say, “What we have is enough to be a government for a state.” And whatever lawyer you speak to will have a different opinion. There is no one answer to that question. Yeah. But I take the view, we take the view and many others as well, that the Palestinians want a state, they’re going towards a state, but they don’t have an effective government that can really … They certainly don’t have it in Gaza where Hamas is in control.

David (01:05:20):
Yeah.

Andrew (01:05:21):
You could say Hamas is a government with a state. It actually looks a little bit like a state. So there is an argument to be had there. But in the West Bank, the PLO represented by the Palestinian Authority is not recognized by many Palestinians as a legitimate government. It’s chaos in the West Bank. Yeah. So they’re not governing a territory as a sovereign would.

David (01:05:45):
Yeah. Would you say that Israel is at the point now post October 7th where they are not even considering a two state solution? Oh, definitely. And does that mean that there’s conversations about them claiming sovereignty over the West Bank? Yeah.

Andrew (01:06:04):
So a lot of people say … You’re definitely right. Since October the 7th, they’ve said it’s quite clear. We gave them everything they wanted and we get Hamas. So we’re not going to do that in the West Bank.

David (01:06:15):
Yeah.

Andrew (01:06:16):
If that’s what a two state solution looks

David (01:06:18):
Like. Because they pulled out of

Andrew (01:06:19):
Gaza. Correct.

David (01:06:20):
But they never pulled out of the West Bank.

Andrew (01:06:22):
Correct.

David (01:06:22):
So they’re saying Gaza was the test.

Andrew (01:06:24):
Correct.

David (01:06:25):
We pulled out in what, 2005?

Andrew (01:06:26):
Yes.

David (01:06:27):
And we got 25 years of tunnel building and resistance building that ended with the greatest massacre of Jewish people since World War II. So-

Andrew (01:06:39):
We’re not going to see that happening.

David (01:06:41):
We’re not pulling out of West Bank. So I guess the only other option is either stay in this place of suspension, which is probably not smart, or declare sovereignty.

Andrew (01:06:48):
They’re the two main options. And the moment the international community, even Trump saying, “You cannot claim sovereignty over the West Bank.”

David (01:06:56):
Trump said that?

Andrew (01:06:57):
Yeah. You’re not allowed to. I

David (01:06:58):
Thought that was Obama.

Andrew (01:07:00):
No, but even Trump is now saying because the Saudis … Trump wants the Abraham accords. Yeah. So he wants this big deal with all these countries. And for the moment, the Saudis and most other countries are saying there must be a two states. There must be a Palestinian state.

David (01:07:20):
That’s what all of them are saying in the Abraham Accords.

Andrew (01:07:22):
Yeah.

David (01:07:22):
Okay. So Trump can’t have Israel going into the West Bank because that defeats a two state solution.

Andrew (01:07:30):
Exactly. Yeah. Okay.

David (01:07:31):
So

Andrew (01:07:32):
The Saudi said, this was a while ago, their position’s changed a little bit now, but their position was we’re willing to contemplate an Abram accord, but one of the conditions is that there will be a Palestinian state. And Trump said, “Well, okay.” And he said to Netanyahu, “Well, there’s no room to claim sovereignty.” Now, that position may change, but that’s the moment for the time being. So everybody’s kind of going, “Well, what is the answer?”

David (01:08:01):
And

Andrew (01:08:01):
Nobody knows. So for the time being, it’s simply business as usual. And Israel is applying more and more security measures in the West Bank because it’s a hotbed of Palestinian terrorist organizations and Israel knows the only way to secure itself is to expand the settlements and impose more security.

David (01:08:26):
And is it true that Israel is allowing more of these settlers to letting them lose to go and take sovereignty or are they turning a blind eye or what’s happening there?

Andrew (01:08:42):
I think, if I’m not mistaken, over half a million, if it’s not a million Israelis living in the West Bank, they are settlers to establish

David (01:08:52):
Really big communities.

Andrew (01:08:53):
These are towns.

David (01:08:53):
Yeah. These

Andrew (01:08:54):
Are cities which have

David (01:08:55):
Been

Andrew (01:08:55):
Established. They’re very peaceful and they have peaceful relations with Palestinians around them. Then you have these sort of more fringe settlements, the hilltop

David (01:09:06):
Groups- That are going deeper into the Judaism area. They’re more outposts,

Andrew (01:09:10):
And this is where you get this more radical elements where they’re really doing things they shouldn’t be doing, inciting violence. This is not going in the right direction.

David (01:09:20):
And this is part of all the tension that’s happening.

Andrew (01:09:22):
Yeah, I think it is part of the tension. People are sensing, they’re frustrated, there’s anger on both sides, the settlers, the extreme settlers, if you like, are very frustrated with their own government for not supporting them, not taking sovereignty.

David (01:09:38):
Living intention for too long. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew (01:09:42):
So it’s a very complicated, messy and unsatisfactory situation,

David (01:09:47):
But

Andrew (01:09:48):
It’s not apartheid.

David (01:09:49):
Oh yeah, that’s good. Well, thank you for helping us kind of figure out some of these words and wrap our heads around genocide, apartheid, two state solution, all these things that we hear. And just like we do in the Bible, there’s complicated, overarching context that we need to explain this one verse. People want to talk about the one verse. You’re like, “That’s great. Let’s talk about that entire letter or the entire Bible and kind of where that’s coming from.” So I hear you doing the same thing. We can talk about this one buzzword, but let’s give context. And oftentimes when we talk to people about theological concepts regarding Israel and the Jewish people, people leave saying, “Oh man, that’s complicated because I thought it was the Jews.” And you’re like, “Yeah, but Jesus is Jewish. His disciples are Jewish. The 3,000 that got filled with the Holy Spirit and started the church are all Jewish.” So you have this Messianic Judaism is kind of what we would call it today, but then you have rabbinic Judaism that kind of develops later post temple.

(01:10:51):
You have secular Jews who don’t care about religion, don’t see themselves with the orthodox. So people are like, “Oh man, it was so much easier when I could just say the Jews rejected Jesus.” Yeah.

Andrew (01:11:00):
Why make us

David (01:11:01):
Ideal? And you’re like, “Well, it’s not entirely true. It’s complicated.” But I think in that tension, one, we can have a little bit more clarity and nuance in our understanding, but we can also fully depend on the Lord realizing, I don’t see how we can come to a perfect agreement, understanding, solution. We really need the Lord to do your work. We really do,

Andrew (01:11:24):
David. We need the Lord to … From a human perspective, it’s, I think, totally impossible to solve it. The interests are too complex and they’re too opposed. And that’s why I think without oversimplifying it, but there is this kind of battle for Jerusalem happening, I think. God’s bringing the people home, the nations don’t like it, Satan doesn’t like it, and he’s opposing it. It’s the cup of trembling that we know is part of the end time

David (01:12:01):
Scenario. Yeah. Well, it ends with the nation’s surrounding Jerusalem. It does.

Andrew (01:12:06):
It

David (01:12:06):
Does. And that’s October 7th, the Hamas terrorists called the plan, the Alaksa flood, Alaxa being the mosque that sits on the temple mountain. So for them, their eyes were set in Jerusalem.

Andrew (01:12:19):
Absolutely.

David (01:12:20):
It wasn’t, “Let’s go to some kibbutz in Southern Israel.” And that was the entry point. Their goal was Jerusalem. Like you said, it’s always been about Jerusalem. Yeah,

Andrew (01:12:31):
I think so.

David (01:12:32):
I think so. I know we have to leave, but before we leave, I’m sure there’s so many people listening just like myself who are wanting to ask one more question, one more. I’ve heard this word or this thing has been said. So you have done a great job of not only helping us in this podcast, but you’ve created resources that anyone can learn from and participate in. So talk about all the resources, especially the foundational course for lay people like me that aren’t lawyers.

Andrew (01:13:00):
Right. Well, so we’ve created a platform, it’s called the Think Academy. It’s our learning platform where we have created some courses, we’re developing more, and therefore lay people as well as lawyers. So they’re different layers. And if you’re just starting, we’ve got some stuff for you. We have a course on Israel international law on the Bible. That’s a kind of conversation I do with a German theologian called Johannes Gerlof. We talk through some of these issues.

David (01:13:32):
That’s

Andrew (01:13:32):
Great. We have one called Who’s Land, which is a series of shorter episodes looking at historical and legal issues. And we have one called the Israel on Trial Foundational Course. And that’s like, okay, I want to take a series of lessons. It’s about 10 hours of learning, self-study. You do have to purchase it. There is a price tag on it, but it’s pretty accessible. And you learn about the history of the state of Israel and this whole legal battle. What is law? What is lawfare?

David (01:14:10):
Yeah.

Andrew (01:14:11):
How does the UN work? And what are these concepts of occupation of statehood, apartheid, genocide?

David (01:14:19):
Yeah.

Andrew (01:14:20):
So that’s like a course. If you just want to take some time to study, highly recommended. And as time goes by, we’ll be putting more stuff up on that platform.

David (01:14:33):
So great. And what’s the website?

Andrew (01:14:35):
It’s called … Well, you go to our website is think T-H-I-N-C.info. And you’ll click on our academy and that will take you into all those

David (01:14:43):
Courses. All the courses. Okay. We’ll make sure to link it in the description so you have it accessible to you. Thank you so much for spending time with us.

Andrew (01:14:51):
David, pleasure as always.

David (01:14:53):
I hope this will be one of many because I’ll make sure to get on TikTok and hear some more buzzwords and then come for the legal team. I love coming to

Andrew (01:15:02):
Texas.

David (01:15:04):
Well, that’s all we have for today. Yeah. We’re so excited that you drop by our podcast. Go to our website, centerforsrael.com for more information, articles, perspective papers, and check out those courses if you want to learn more about the legal fair, what’s going on in Israel, Israel on trial. We’ll see you next time.