Avrum Burg, Konstanty Gebert, Nahed Samour
Judging Israel: Why It Matters
No single question has rocked international communities like the question of how to judge Israel, particularly since October 7, 2023. The very criteria by which we judge the actions of a nation are uncertain. What should be the role of international law, and what the role of history? How can we determine whether words like “genocide” or “apartheid” are polemical and when they are justified? What should be the consequences of those judgments? The Einstein Forum has taken strong positions on these and related questions while preserving room for civil and reasonable disagreement, as we will continue to do in this discussion.
Avrum Burg is an Israeli author and politician. He was advisor to prime minister Shimon Peres, a member of the Knesset and Speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003, Chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization. Since retiring from politics he has become an international bestselling author. In 2007, Burg published a book entitled The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes in which he argued that Israeli society has become violent as a consequence of the continuing trauma over the Holocaust. In 2021, Burg appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court to have the Interior Ministry erase from its records that his nationality is Jewish, in response to the 2018 Jewish Nation State Law which, in his view, codified “built in discrimination”.
Konstanty Gebert is an international reporter and columnist with the leading Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza. Born in Poland, he received his degree in psychology from Warsaw University in 1976. He has taught at Hebrew University, the University of California at Berkeley, Grinnell College, and Warsaw University’s Collegium Civitas. He has served as a war correspondent covering conflicts in Turkey, India and Kashmir, Myanmar, Israel-Palestine, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Gerbert has also advocated for a revival of Jewish life in Poland as a co-founder of the underground Jewish Flying University and the Polish Jewish intellectual monthly Midrash. He has served as a board member for the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Paideia Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, and the Dutch Jewish Humanitarian Fund in The Hague. In 2018 he received the American Jewish Press Association Rockower Award.
Nahed Samour, Research Associate at Radboud University, has studied law and Islamic studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard and Damascus. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin, and held a Post Doc position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland and was Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. She has taught as Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy from 2014 to 2018. From 2019 to 2022, she was Core Emerging Investigator at the Integrative Research Institute Law & Society. Together with Hanan Badr she co-edited the volume Arab Berlin. Dynamics of Transformation (2023).