Senior Israeli army official boycotted by lawyers in Belgium

INTAL, the NGO behind this initiative is financed by ... the Belgian government ...

BRUSSELS (EJP)---A lecture by an Israeli army senior official in Brussels was cancelled following pressure by pro-Palestinian NGOs on the organizers, EJP has learned.

Colonel Liron Libman, head of the International Law Department in the Military Advocate General’s Headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was scheduled to speak Wednesday at the invitation of the Belgian section of the International Law Association about “the challenges in asymmetrical warfare: an Israeli experience”.

But several days ago, he was told by the organizers – the Belgian section of the International Law Association - that the conference had to be cancelled for “reasons out of their control” and that an alternative date “was being sought later” for a new event, Libman told EJP in Brussels.

Several Belgian NGOs had called for a boycott of the event in a letter to the chairman of the Belgian section of the International Law Association, Kim Van der Borght, a university law professor [at Westminster University (England) and Professor of International Economic Law at the Centre for Economic Law & Governance (University of Brussels VUB)].


“We find it politically and morally unacceptable for such an institution to give the floor to an important officer of the Israeli army who defends crimes against humanity,” the NGOs, which advocate a boycott of Israel, wrote in the letter.

Instead, Libman addressed an audience from Tzedek, the European Jewish Lawyers, and the European Jewish Community Center on the IDF’s viewpoint in international law.