Here is the link to the original Gresham lecture and the version on Youtube. Italian version of summary below.
Summary
Here's a 10-point summary of Clive Stafford Smith's Gresham lecture, with keywords bolded:
- Framing: The piece opens with a Michael Franti lyric ("we can't bomb it into peace") to argue that Israel-Palestine discourse is dominated by blame ("antisemitic" vs. "Islamophobic") rather than genuine paths to peace, now spreading into Iran and beyond.
- US decline: Traces American soft power collapse from 9/11 through the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and rendition to torture, arguing US actions — not just extremist hatred — fueled anti-American sentiment (citing the small original Al Qaeda "charter member" list as proof the threat was self-inflated by the response).
- Core principle — hypocrisy: Introduces the recurring thesis "hypocrisy is the yeast that best ferments hatred," applied throughout to the US, UK, and Israel alike.
- Starmer's failure: Argues Keir Starmer's unpopularity stems from personal weakness and hypocrisy (banning MPs, proscribing Palestine Action as terrorism, eroding jury trials), not from genuine antisemitism among critics — and that this conflation actually fuels antisemitism.
- Personal/family history: A long autobiographical thread on the author's Jewish heritage (discovered late in life), his gay pacifist grandfather (WWI ambulance driver), and his university years in Jewish fraternities at UNC, used as a "microcosm" for competing visions of Israel.
- Israel's political arc: Contrasts the Labour/left-wing Israeli governments (Rabin, Peres, Meir — Nobel Peace Prize, 1994) before 1977 with the Likud-dominated, Netanyahu-era politics of today.
- History of antisemitism: A survey of 2,000+ years of Jewish persecution (Roman expulsions, medieval England, the Holocaust), used to validate Israeli/Jewish fear as historically grounded — including a personal anecdote about a pro-Hitler death-row executioner.
- The Palestinian counter-argument: Presents a Guantánamo client's case against Israel's legitimacy (Balfour Declaration, post-WWII founding, apartheid framing) — which the author partly engages with but ultimately rejects as unworkable ("turning back the clock").
- Critique of Netanyahu and the ICC: Blames Netanyahu for prolonging conflict in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, contrasts him unfavorably with Ariel Sharon, and dismisses the ICC indictment as counterproductive (also flagging ICC racial bias in indictment statistics).
- Proposed way forward: Closes by comparing the conflict to Northern Ireland's sectarian violence (resolved partly via EU integration), and floats an unspecified "no-state solution" as a "Plan 3" beyond the standard one-state/two-state binary.
Transcript: Give Peace A Chance: Legal Implications of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
By Professor Clive A. Stafford Smith 30th April 2026
Michael Franti sings a mantra in the "Armageddon Version" of one of his best-known songs:
"We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace."
