What Brown’s Watson Institute Tries to Pass Off As International Law Related to the Hamas War Against Israel
What’s Next? Francesca Albanese delivering the first Joseph Goebbels Memorial Lecture on the Final Solution to the Jewish Question sponsored by Al-Jazeera and the Government of Qatar?
As I was writing this post, I learned of the Watson Institute at Brown’s (Watson”) stunning decision to invite Francesca Albanese, the UN’s “Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories” to speak at Brown on September 16. Her topic is “Anatomy of a Genocide: A Failure of the International System?”. Albanese has a long, well-documented history of hostility to Israel and anti-Semitic comments as recognized, e.g., by the US State Department, France and Germany. Simply stated, she’s a well-known bigot. The astonishingly poor judgment and indifference to blatant anti-Semitism demonstrated by Watson’s leadership led me to write a short piece I posted late in the evening on September 4. The post included attachments describing, in great detail, Albanese’s history of bigotry and bias and also her alleged improper financial dealings which currently are under investigation by the UN.
Within minutes of the post’s publication, I received emails underscoring how insidious it was of Watson to decide to host Albanese. One email passed on excerpts from a press conference given by US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on March 27 of this year. His comments are noteworthy for two reasons: he unequivocally notes Albanese’s anti-Semitism and dismisses the notion that Israel is engaged in “genocide” as “unfounded”:
“… QUESTION: Yeah, so let me ask you – have you – did you see or read the report made by Francesca Albanese yesterday in Geneva, where she cited – where she actually – what she showed was irrefutable – as far as she is concerned – irrefutable evidence that Israel engaged in genocide? Did you see the report? What is your comment on that?
MR MILLER: I did see the report. Let me say a couple things about it. First, we have long – for longstanding – for a longstanding period of time opposed the mandate of this special rapporteur, which we believe is not productive. And when it comes to the individual who holds that position, I can’t help but note a history of antisemitic comments that she has made that have been reported. And —
QUESTION: She has – she made antisemitic comments?
MR MILLER: And – she has. And comments she made in December that appeared to justify the attacks of October 7th, so I think it’s important to take that into account. But with respect to the report itself, we have made clear that we believe that allegations of genocide are unfounded. But at the same time, we have – are deeply concerned by the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, and that’s why we have pressed the Government of Israel on multiple occasions to do everything it can to minimize those civilian casualties…”
Given that Watson would host an anti-Semitic, in-the-pocket-of-Hamas speaker, a group of Jewish Brown alumni prevailed upon Watson’s temporary head, Professor Wendy Schiller, to allow Einat Wilf to speak at Brown on September 23. Wilf is former Israeli politician and a gifted speaker who can address Israel/Palestinian issues in an informed, intelligent, educational manner - competencies far beyond the scope of Albanese’s capabilities. The more shocking point is that Schiller actually had to be persuaded that if Brown were to give Albanese a platform, a prompt response obviously would be warranted.
The only good thing resulting from Watson’s Albanese invitation is that it tees up perfectly the grotesque level of illiberalism, anti-intellectualism and hypocrisy that permeates Watson. A bigot like Albanese is a welcome speaker at Brown, but Eli Rosenbaum is not.
On May 29 and again on August 14, I suggested to Schiller and Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies (“CMES”) and several others that Rosenbaum be invited to speak on international law issues related to the war Hamas terrorists initiated against Israel on October 7, 2023.
In doing so, I pointed out that Rosenbaum is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (BS and MBA) and Harvard Law School who devoted nearly 40 years to the investigation and prosecution of war criminals and violators of human rights; led the US Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations from 1995 to 2010 when it was merged into DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section and then named its Director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy; investigated and successfully tried Nazi war criminals and other human rights violators and oversaw investigations and trials conducted by others. I also noted that in June of 2022, Attorney General Garland appointed him to serve as DOJ’s Counselor for War Crimes Accountability and to investigate possible war crimes committed by the Russians in Ukraine. I further noted that he delivered the keynote speech to the “2024 Nuremberg Project Lawyers Luncheon” entitled “International Criminal Law: Its Use and Abuse from Nuremberg to the Present” and attached a copy of his presentation.
My August 14 communication had two attachments. One was a collaboration between Rosenbaum and six of his former U.S. Department of Justice colleagues, a prominently placed NY Daily News op-ed published on August 11 entitled: “The big lie of genocide & Gaza: Seven experts on Nazi genocide expose the canard of Israeli ‘crimes’”. The second was a brief he filed in the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) addressing that entity’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s transparently political, widely condemned effort to seek arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant.
Since August 14, Rosenbaum has delivered another keynote address - to the 16th International Humanitarian Law Roundtable held at the Robert H. Jackson Center in Chautauqua, NY. The Jackson Center event was co-sponsored by the American Bar Association, the New York University Center for Global Affairs, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, among others.
Neither Watson nor CMES responded to either Rosenbaum or me. To be sure, neither was under any obligation to do so. That CMES chose not to respond is hardly a surprise. As to Israel/Palestinian issues, CMES is in the propaganda business, not the education business. CMES is, in effect, a Fifth Column representing Hamas. Rosenbaum’s level of real-world, practical experience in arenas where facts matter, and his expertise on issues related to genocide, the laws of war, and the ICC of course disqualified him as a CMES speaker.
But apparently Rosenbaum has too much expertise, experience and knowledge even for Watson, an institution that claims to be “seeking to promote a just and peaceful world through research, teaching and public engagement”. What possible reason could there be for Watson to have no interest in hearing from Eli Rosenbaum? Or if not Rosenbaum, someone else sufficiently knowledgeable about the issues to challenge the one-sided, anti-Israel, facts-be-damned worldview marketed by Brown as evidenced by, among many other things, the Albanese invitation.
The Watson website does note a program on “Current events in Israel and Gaza”, a lecture series that began in the fall of 2023. The first lecture in 2024, on February 8, was entitled “Resistance Literature from the Pre-Islamic Arabic to Palestine” delivered by Huda Fakhreddine, an associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. On October 17, 2023 Fakhreddine tweeted that “Israel is antisemitic, anti-human, anti-children, anti-life!” That same day Fakhreddine posted on Facebook that “the assumption that all Jewish people condone the genocidal Zionist project in Palestine is the epitome of antisemitism and a desecration of the Holocaust martyrs”. For Brown and Watson, Fakhreddine is apparently the epitome of a serious scholar when it comes to issues related to Israel/Palestinians.
Indeed, insofar as Watson is concerned, she is such a serious scholar that she will be returning to Brown on October 1. Her presentation is entitled “Palestinian: Every Time They Erase Us, We Become Clearer” and will be delivered with Ibrahim Nasrallah, a Palestinian poet. Nasrallah’s most recent poem, translated by Fakhreddine into English, is “Mary of Gaza”. Its lines include: “…Peace on earth is not for us. It is for our enemies, O God, for their planes. It is for death as it descends and death as it ascends, for death as it speaks, lies and dances. Nothing satisfies it, neither our blood in sorrow, nor our blood in beauty, neither our blood in the seas, nor our blood in the fields…” One need not be a poetry critic to understand the message that Watson, through Fakhreddine and Nasrallah, will be sending to the Brown community and beyond on October 1: genocide, genocide and more genocide - facts and law completely irrelevant.
As I went through the Watson website and found more of Fakhreddine’s ilk listed as featured speakers on its “Current events in Israel and Gaza” series, I was tempted to comment on others Watson deemed appropriate to be given a platform at Brown. But my focus was limited to speakers Brown sold as competent to speak on the laws of war.
The last two presentations in the spring of this year seemed most directly relevant. The speakers were practicing international lawyers purporting to address primarily legal, as opposed to, e.g., political issues like “the occupation”. On April 18, 2024, Melanie O’Brien, an Australian currently serving as “Visiting Professor at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota, USA and President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)” spoke on “The Laws of War, International Crimes and the Israel-Palestine Conflict.” Her regular position is Associate Professor of International Law at the UWA Law School, University of Western Australia. On April 25, Karin Loevy, “manager of the JSD Program at NYU School of Law and a researcher at the Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ) where she leads the History & Theory of International Law workshop series” was “featur[ed]” on “(Where is) Gaza in International Law?”.
Who are O’Brien and Loevy? Their Watson presentations, so far as I can tell, unfortunately were not recorded. I do no social media and don’t know whether either has a social media presence. That said, a January 2024 presentation by O’Brien is available on YouTube and suggests the positions she likely expressed at Brown last April; the essence of Loevy’s Brown presentation can fairly be gleaned from her work in Israel.
O’Brien:
O’Brien’s YouTube presentation was, in general, a relatively straightforward description of the procedures, and necessarily resulting failures, of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rendering that body basically irrelevant in the real world. At times her beliefs as they relate to Israel seeped through, e.g., when she suggested that the US could be exposed to genocide claims for providing weapons to Israel to assist the Jewish state in defending itself, as our country has been doing for decades. She expressed no position as to the ICJ having to take seriously a claim brought by South Africa - among its countless failings, a country that is a Hamas ally - against Israel.
But the real Melanie O’Brien came through in correspondence where she was one of the principal authors and/or a signer. She had concluded - by November 3, 2023 - as noted in a letter to Australia’s Prime Minister, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Minister for Defence and Attorney General that Israel was engaging in “atrocity crimes”. She called for an “end to the occupation of Palestine” and “halting defence exports to Israel, confirming what military-specific goods have been provided with the 322 export permits granted between 1 January 2017 and 31 March 2023 and whether these defence goods are being used in accordance with international law”. That letter contained 85 footnotes, 42 citing the UN or UN agencies like UNWRA and others relying on Hamas for supposed facts and data, 16 citing the International Committee of the Red Cross and a smattering of cites to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the ICC. In sum, she and her colleagues relied on “evidence” provided by entities with decades of well-documented, outspoken animus toward Israel. And all this less than a month following the savagery of Hamas on October 7. The full text of the letter can be found at “lawyersletter.au”.
In response to O’Brien’s letter, in sum, the Australian government explained its view that Israel’s conduct following October 7 was consistent with the laws of war. O’Brien and her colleagues were not satisfied with that response. Accordingly, on December 15, she and seven others wrote to those same Australian leaders saying the government’s reply “includes a combination of novel and fundamentally flawed legal arguments to claim a proportionate response on the part of the State of Israel”. She argued they relied on “flawed legal arguments that do not reflect the majority legal opinion” - what “majority” she did not say - and claimed that, e.g., “Within one month after 7 October the Israeli military had already dropped the equivalent level of explosives of two nuclear bombs on the Gaza Strip”. In her letter, O’Brien describes the US as “the Israel government’s persistent shield from accountability for transgressions of international law”. O’Brien’s December 15 letter also can be found at “lawyersletter.au”.
To say O’Brien’s views as to, e.g., the conduct of the Israeli military, are directly contrary to the views of people who actually know something about how war is conducted is an understatement. See brief attached below filed in the ICC on August 5 by the “High Level Military Group” - a group of 11: eight retired senior military officers from Italy, the US, the UK, France and Spain joined by several others, another from Spain and one from The Netherlands and one from Finland. (The brief can be downloaded by clicking “download” in the square to the right of the descriptive box.)
Loevy:
Loevy is the “manager of the JSD program at NYU School of Law”. I have no idea what that position entails, but it is not a faculty position. Was there no member of the faculty at NYU Law available to speak on “(Where is) Gaza in International Law”? Was there no faculty member at any law school in the US available to speak on the issue? No faculty member at any law school in the world?
How did Loevy, who “manages” a law school program and has no faculty affiliation, land a speaking role at Brown? One possible answer is that after law school at Tel Aviv University, she joined Avigdor Feldman’s law office in Israel. Feldman is a legendary civil rights lawyer in Israel. To his credit, and to Israel’s, Feldman is one of the founders of B’Tselem, an Israeli organization dedicated to, among other things, protecting the civil rights of Palestinians. Statements and cases handled by B’Tselem are often cited by Hamas and its supporters as evidence of Israeli wrongdoing. As a result, Feldman and B’Tselem are both lionized and detested by Israelis across the political spectrum. Feldman’s law firm is where Loevy cut her legal teeth; it is reasonable to assume that her views channel his and that she brought those views to the fore during her presentation at Brown. (One can’t help but wonder whether any Brown students or faculty ceaselessly whining about Israel ever ask themselves why nothing resembling Feldman’s law firm or B’Tselem exists in any Arab or Muslim-majority country.)
In short, as Israeli journalist Matti Friedman recently described Brown professor Omer Bartov, Loevy, like Bartov, may belong to “Israel’s most unfortunate export category - namely, academics who find a home for themselves on an increasingly unhinged Western left by reassuring their comrades that their dark fantasies about Israel are sane”.
There are two possible explanations why, for Watson, Albanese, O’Brien and Loevy are welcome speakers on international law but Eli Rosenbaum is not. One is that Watson did no due diligence at all before selecting speakers and chose based on, e.g., recommendations from Brown’s Israel-detesting CMES faculty or perhaps Middle East “experts” at Columbia, Berkeley or UCLA. The other is that Watson in fact did extensive research and chose Albanese, O’Brien and Loevy specifically because of their views. Given Fakhreddine’s return to Brown next month, the explanation is likely the latter. But whichever path Watson followed in selecting speakers as “experts” on international law, its leadership managed to add one more embarrassing, perhaps indelible, stain on Brown’s reputation. So much for intellectual integrity and a liberal education at a place that once understood the importance of, and revered, both.
Willis J. Goldsmith, Brown Class of 1969
Sent from my iPad
If the Watson Institute weren’t so interested in stacking the deck, they might have invited an actual expert on war from Columbia University’s School of Law, Prof. Matthew Waxman - but then the risk to their simplistic and false narrative might have been too great.
Here’s an interview worth listening to
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/school-of-war/id1589160645?i=1000634758371
and here’s another
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/call-me-back-with-dan-senor/id1539292794?i=1000656681316
This is what thoughtful scholarship sounds like.