UKLFI Charitable Trust held a webinar on “Two States for Two Peoples? – The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, International Law and EU Policy with Andrew Tucker and Prof Dr Wolfgang Bock and chaired by Natasha Hausdorff on Thursday 19th January 2023.
In this webinar Prof Dr Wolfgang Bock and thinc. director Andrew Tucker explained the origins of the EU’s policy of “Two states for Two Peoples” and how international law was invoked to justify pro-Arab policies developed in the 1970s to advance economic self-interest. They also discussed Palestinian political culture and the obstacles that all Western governments face when seeking to promote the establishment of a Palestinian state.
More about the speakers
Professor Wolfgang Bock writes and teaches on Constitutional Law, Security Law, Islam, Islamic Cultures and Islamism, and on Policies and Legal Cultures in the Middle East and North Africa region.
He worked from 2012 till his retirement in September 2017 as Counsellor for Constitutional and International Law at the Federal Academy for Security Policy, an institution of the German Government. He has worked as a lecturer at the Centre for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Marburg and as associate professor at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen.
He has also been a judge at the Frankfurt/Main Regional Court in civil and criminal matters as well as at the Wiesbaden Administrative Court. He studied Law and Political Science at the Universities of Geneva, Giessen and Frankfurt/Main.
Andrew Tucker co-founded The Hague Initiative for International Cooperation (thinc.) – a non-profit think tank educating and advising politicians, policy-makers and others on the fair and non-discriminatory application of international law in relation to the Israel Palestinian conflict and the Middle East generally.
Previous positions include in-house counsel to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). He has been Research Fellow at the T.M.C. Asser Institute for European Law, International Law and International Commercial Arbitration, in The Hague, Netherlands, and Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Law, University of Melbourne
He is a graduate of the Universities of Melbourne (BA, LLB) and Oxford (BCL). He practiced for 20 years as an attorney in Australia, UK and Netherlands, advising governments and corporations mainly in the energy, transport and telecoms sectors.
Natasha Hausdorff is a barrister at 6 Pump Court Chambers, and a frequent speaker on International Law. She has a law degree from Oxford University, qualified as a solicitor at Skadden, and subsequently gained an LLM from Tel Aviv University, focussing on public international law and the law of armed conflict. She clerked for Miriam Naor, President of Israel’s Supreme Court, and was a Fellow at Columbia Law School’s National Security Program. Natasha is legal director of UKLFI Charitable Trust.
