The Crimes of War in Gaza: Moving Beyond the Vitriol

Many discussions of the Israeli-Hamas conflict in Gaza degenerate into epithets and acrimony. Yet it is possible to discuss the conflict more dispassionately, applying international human rights and humanitarian law to the facts.
Kenneth Roth will use such analysis to answer key questions, including:

• Are crimes being committed and by whom?
• Do war crimes committed by one side mitigate war crimes committed by the other?
• Is genocide being committed?
• How should we understand the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court?
• What is the significance of recent International Court of Justice rulings?
• How does the conflict relate to the quest for a Palestinian state?
• How should we understand antisemitism in the context of discussing the conflict?
• How should we understand Germany’s Staatsräson in relationship to the conflict?

The aim is to have a discussion based on facts and law rather than ideology. With that limitation, people from all perspectives are encouraged to join the conversation.

Join online via Zoom here. Open to the BCB community.

Part of the seminar "International Organizations and Human Rights Advocacy." In partnership with the American University in Cairo.

Kenneth Roth is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at the Princeton School for Public and International Affairs. Until August 2022, he served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations, which operates in some 100 countries. Before that, Roth was a federal prosecutor in New York and for the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington.

A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigative and advocacy missions around the world, meeting with dozens of heads of state and countless ministers. He is quoted widely in the media and has written hundreds of articles on a wide range of human rights issues, devoting special attention to the world’s most dire situations, the conduct of war, the foreign policies of the major powers, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between autocracy and democracy.

Roth’s first book, Righting Wrongs, will be published by Knopf in February 2025. It offers an insider’s view of the strategies used by Human Rights Watch to put pressure on governments to respect human rights, drawing on his years of experience. The book can be preordered here (North America) or here (Europe).

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Online (Zoom)

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