Letters Blogatory

The Blog of International Judicial Assistance | By Ted Folkman of Folkman LLC

Posts tagged “Palestine”

Conundrum of the Day: Palestinian Statehood

Posted on March 19, 2020

Update: I am closing the comments to this post. My commenters cannot seem to decide whether I am an anti-Israeli bigot or an anti-Palestinian bigot. Mission accomplished? Anyway, the comments section seems to be taking a turn that isn’t appropriate for this blog. As you know, I am not a public international law expert. I do try to keep up with the news, though, and I have been particularly interested by the Prosecutor’s December 2019 request for a ruling on the territorial jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, which amounts to a request for a ruling about whether Palestine is or is not a state. I have been following Professor Heller’s Twitter feed for updates, including…

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Everything About The Tlaib/Omar Story Is Terrible

Posted on August 18, 2019

Everything about the story of Representatives Omar and Tlaib’s aborted visit to Israel is terrible. No one in the whole affair has acted well. And the political motive for the whole fiasco—Donald Trump’s attempt to drive American Jews into the arms of the Republican Party—is so venal, so transparent, and, I hope, so doomed to failure that it makes me despair.

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Jerusalem Two Weeks On: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Posted on December 20, 2017

Almost two weeks ago, the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. At the time, I applauded the move in principle though I expressed prudential concerns about the potential for a violent reaction. I had the strange experience of applauding President Trump’s speech, which plainly was written by people who knew their stuff and which—if people bothered to read it—was much more nuanced than press reports indicated. In summary, the President said that the United States was recognizing the reality that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital but was not making any assertions about the borders of Jerusalem. He called for maintenance of the status quo at the Temple Mount, and he referred to the holy site by its Arabic name, the Haram al-Sharif. So despite…

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