2025-08-11
9 分钟Hello, Rosie Bloor here, co-host of The Intelligence, our daily news and current affairs podcast.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist read aloud.
We hope you enjoy it.
On May 14, 1948, in its Declaration of Independence,
Israel embraced universal human rights, irrespective of religion, race, or sex.
This belief in individual human dignity is also enshrined in the Geneva Conventions,
submitted to governments that same month.
Today, the founding vision of Israel and the laws of war are under attack in Gaza.
In its bombed and barren landscape, the fate of both lies in the balance.
From the beginning, the world has struggled to live up to the high ideals of 1948.
Israel was born in violence,
and ever
since it has wrestled with the tension between upholding universal rights and being the home of a people in a contested land.
The Cold War was a standoff between two systems that too often treated humanitarian law as inconvenient.
Even so,
the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union gave rise to aspirations that law-breaking leaders could be held to account.
Gaza shows how this vision is failing.
The laws of war are being broken, and the system for upholding them is not working.
However, that failure does not exonerate Israel from having to answer for its actions in Gaza,
including war crimes and crimes against humanity.