Professor Eugene Kontorovich - Should America punish Ireland over Israel?

Ireland has approved legislation targeting goods from Israeli settlements, raising questions about whether the United States should respond. Professor Eugene Kontorovich, Senior Legal Fellow at Advancing American Freedom and professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia School of Law, joins the show to discuss Ireland's boycott, U.S. anti-boycott laws, and the potential economic consequences.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to the Lawrence Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you. Well, Ireland just picked a trade war with Israel and dared America to do something about it. Is Washington ready to call their bluff? I thought we'd ask Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who is a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom and a professor at the George Mason's uh Antoninskalia School of Law. Professor, welcome to the program.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Thank you, Oz. Good to be with you.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Would you mind outlining for my audience exactly what's going on between Ireland and Israel? What's the fight about?

SPEAKER_01 0:38

So it's not clear why Ireland should have a fight with Israel, but it has passed an unprecedented law, which they've been trying to get passed for many years, banning trade with Israel in part. In particular, they ban trade with Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, also known as West Bank, and much of Jerusalem. The area where the U.S. Embassy sits, the U.S. Embassy to Israel is in an area that they call occupied Palestinian territory. So you could not bring something to Ireland from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Well, and and and and why I I I suppose it was the usual suspects, the Free Palestine folks who've been chanting on American college campuses, these are the folks who are pushing for this kind of nonsense.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Yeah, the difference is in Ireland the everybody is free Palestine folks. That is to say, both the conservative, the more conservative parties, the uh more liberal parties, they are the only thing they argued about is, you know, who was going to boycott Israel the most. And it's quite an extraordinary thing because Israel's right now fighting side by side with America against Iran, right? Hundreds of American planes are coming and using Israel as a base. So to declare a trade war against an American ally as it is helping fight uh uh fight Iran, that's quite extraordinary. But you know, they actually wanted to go even further. Um, but the the problem is that there's a lot of American companies who are based in Ireland. All the big tech companies, biotech companies, they all offshore to Ireland for tax benefits. But that's a real problem because under US law there's uh restrictions on companies on countries boycotting countries with which America has open and free trade relations, including Israel. So these uh American companies are now gonna be either gonna have to choose to comply with Irish boycott law or American anti-boycott law.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

That's real tickle, isn't it? What do you do you have a sense as to which direction those companies will go? Because I in fact it it occurs to me, isn't Starbucks even uh don't don't they have a headquarters in Ireland because of Ireland's very favorable tax status?

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Starbucks, Apple, Google, you name it, all of them. But uh it really depends what the Trump administration is gonna do now, because the Trump administration has been very much against uh this law. In fact, even the Biden administration was against it. So it's been quite bipartisan in America. But the question is, are they gonna really enforce the anti-boycott laws against these uh these companies? I think it's a brilliant, uh, you know, it's a political win-win for the Trump administration, because it's a a way of also kind of creating a tariff on American companies that have chosen to take jobs overseas. Uh, but I think the Irish are hoping it's just small potatoes, they're gonna ignore it, they're busy with other stuff.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Well that's that's their hope. Professor, is it something about Ireland's history that leads them to all be pro-Palestine?

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Um, I think you know, it it's something s subtle. Um I don't uh I think what it is in part is they're very sympathetic, you know, they were very sympathetic, and some of the leading political parties in Ireland are the Irish nationalist iRA descended parties, uh, like Sinn Sein. Now, those parties, you know, were basically supported by the Soviet Union, and their leaders went to uh terrorist training camp in uh the Soviet Union with the heads of the POO. So basically they have the same alma mater as the Palestinians.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

So they're pro-communist and pro-terrorist. Am I being unfair if I sum them up that way?

SPEAKER_01 4:24

Yeah, that's certainly their intellectual history. Um, and there's just vast anti-Jewish sentiment in uh in Ireland, which is very hard to understand. There's not many Jews there, but it's it's it's very broad.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

And yet support for a country that doesn't exist, and frankly, I'll tell you, Professor, I've been to the Holy Land a coup I'm a Protestant Christian, but I've been there about five times. And one of my trips, I went to a uh it was a small light industrial site in Judea and Samaria. I can't remember which particular region, but it but it was notable because there were about 6,000 people who work there, and half of them were West Bank residents. I mean, uh they were Palestinian residents and Arabs, and half of them were Jews. And I remember being amazed by it because I thought this is the stuff you never hear about in America, because I said to them, so what kind of stuff they make? And they said they make plastic goods and they make they're they're basically small, light industrial businesses. I said, 6,000 workers. I said, should I assume that in any one of those little companies that's popular in this thing, you know, the Jew is the boss and the and the Arab is the is the worker? And he said, Oh no, no, no, it's both directions. Uh it's it's very, you know, it's very bipartisan. You know, in some of them, the Arab is running the little business and the Jews are working for him, and in some it's the other way around, and they all work together very, very well. And the Palestinians who work there, you know, they make a much higher salary than they would at anything else in the West Bank or even in Gaza. And I said, Oh, so they can't even tell their neighbors where they're working because they'd have to admit, yeah, I'm over there working with all those Jews and I'm making a really good paycheck. And and we had to travel to the place in a in a bus that had bulletproof windows, if that gives you an idea of the kind of neighborhood we were in. But it was it was fascinating to me, and I thought, why is it nobody in the United States ever reports on this kind of stuff?

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Yeah, and the amazing thing, so this is for sure gonna hurt uh Palestinians, but for for the Irish, this is such a fundament, this is like one of their religious beliefs now that they've stopped going to church. This is their main uh, you know, this is like their main thing. And uh uh it's purely symbolic. There is a religious aspect of it. That is to say the amount of goods that are imported to Ireland uh from uh Judean Samaria estimates range from $700,000 a year to zero dollars. In other words, they've they've spent you know more on passing this bill than is uh is really gonna have any effect on Israel. Um but it's so it's a kind of uh it's kind of virtue signaling, but uh at the same time it's deeply problematic because they have no such boycott on any other place on earth. You know, the film uh The Odyssey, Chris uh Christopher Nolan's film, uh was filmed in part, it turns out, in Western Sahara, which the UN says is occupied by Morocco. They're not they don't have any problems screening the Odyssey in Ireland or importing, you know, probably vast amounts of goods from slave labor camps in China. Uh so this is really a rule about the Jews. That's the way to understand us.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

That's what it sounds like. Professor, thanks very much. That's Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who's a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, Professor at George Mason's Antonin Scalia School of Law. Thanks so much for the uh time. By the way, everybody likes to talk about weight loss injections. You know those GLP ones? I don't trust them. And the results are dramatic. I'll give you that. But they work by lowering your blood sugar and reducing your appetite. But what if you want to lose weight, but you don't want those painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of the crazy side effects. That's why doctors created a weight loss supplement. It's called lean. And the results are remarkable. The studied ingredients in lean will lower your blood sugar, burn up fat by converting it to energy, curb your appetite and your cravings. That means you're not as hungry. But lean is not for the casual dieter who only has a few pounds to lose. The doctors at Brickhouse Nutrition created lean for frustrated dieters with 10 or more pounds to lose. I want to get you started with 20% off the regular price and free rush shipping, so you can add lean to your healthy diet and exercise plan. Visit takelean.com and put in Lars for your discount. That's takelean.com and promo code Lars. Coming up in a moment, the government quietly sending a hundred million dollars to people who are already dead. We'll talk about that up next.