YouSaid · the spoken record

Theodor Meron

lines on the record: 35
first: 2026-06-12
most recent: 2026-06-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Dreaming about canoeing? I never thought about this aspect, but I think that you have a point, sir. We need some daydreaming. I don't believe it has come. I think that should we move into the mode of despair, we will not improve the world. We should try to improve it and do it from now on. And I very much like to hope that eventually before long we will go from the to use a biblical expression, from linears into richer years of a constructive progressive approach to international criminal law.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, let me tell you that being at least in part an optimist is part of a job description of international criminal judges. You cannot deal with those things, deal with those horrors that you see before your eyes, and lead and reach judgments which are based not on any prejudice, but on law and evidence without being a little bit optimistic. If you look at the past in which international justice has developed, international criminal law has developed, you see that there is not a simple linear upward and upward way, that international law develops in ups and downs, and some of times the worst atrocities lead to greater reform of the law and improvement.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have an obligation to arrest him. And imagine that because of a storm or otherwise, it's a plane carrying Mr. Gallant or Mr. Netanyahu would land somewhere in a country which is accepted, which is a party to that country, I cannot now predict what decision politically they would make whether they in fact deliver arrest Mr Netanyahu, Mr. Gallant and delivered him up to the Hague, but this is not impossible.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I did not inherit from my great ancestor is to be a prophet. So I will hesitate to answer very clearly. But please do remember that lots of countries, most of the European countries, for example, which you need to overfly when you go elsewhere, have accepted our parties to the court.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would not be willing at this point in time to reach this negative conclusion. Things happened. Governments changed. Attitudes change, and people can find themselves at the Hague without willing to go to the Hague. This was our experience in the Balkan Wars. This was the experience of the International Criminal Court recently when they got custody of the ex-president of the Philippines.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It may very well be that some of them were in fact hijacked or plundered by Hamas, but still there is no question that looking at the picture as a whole, the population was suffering from starvation and this was one of the items on which we approved of the charges”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the responsibility of Hamas for using civilians as covers for military combat activities was well established. There is no question that the fact that Hamas combatants were embedded in every school, in every hospital, in every civilian building made the situation extremely difficult. But again, you had to put it into the different components, smaller components. There is no question whatsoever. The evidence which was presented to us on the main charge which was presented pushed against breast against Netanyahu in his cabinet defense minister Mr. Galland was the question of starvation. There is no question that there was a deliberate policy of the Israeli government at that time to limit terribly provision of supply and food and medicine to the Gaza Strip.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that I would have hesitated much more had the arrest warrant not included on the very same day charges against the Hamas leaders. I think that the talk which I resented then and I do resent now is accusing Karim Khan of moral equivalence because at the same time he went against both parties. There is no question in my mind that what happened on the 7th of October when one of the most cruel inhuman events But here we are, and if we are going to have justice, it must be. Following principles of rule of law, the same justice for everybody, for both parties.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me emphasize that our function was very, very narrow. It was limited. It was to determine whether according to the evidence which was presented to us by Karim Khan, we would think that that evidence would be adequate for charges before an international criminal”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It placed me more in a sort of conflictual situation. I wish I would not be. I would not have to deal with issues pertaining to a country which was very good to me historically. Which I owe a lot. But I felt that when it comes to war crimes, we really as professionals, as lawyers, as judges, we have a higher obligation to try and get people respect the law. And one of the ways to do it is to strengthen the principle of accountability, to put an end to the practice of impunity for war crimes. So he asked me, in fact, to take the plane. We want you at the Hague on Monday.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me explain that I joined the International Criminal Court in a way about two years before the Gaza war and the Netanyahu war. I was approached by the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. And I said to myself, it would be a hypocritical if I, having spent nearly twenty years. Leading international criminal courts when they pertain when we were involved in cases on Rwanda On the breakup of the Balkans, when it comes to something which touches me, I say I stay out. I said to myself, I have an obligation to say yes. I told Karim Khan, I wish you would not have phoned me. I wish you would not have approached me. But I am afraid that I have no choice now.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that legal advisors of governments, I think the judges in international criminal courts have a very high ethical obligation, professional obligation, obligation of integrity to call the things the way things are.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really breaks my heart. I told you in a different context. Recently I started writing poetry and one of the poems which I have recently written which was published, I call it the pogroms, speaking of the memory of terrible pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe and saying how horrible it is that Jews who for centuries were subjected to pogroms, to rapes, to burning of property, to plunder of property. Yet some of the, not all of them I'm sure, but many of their religious fanatic settlers on the West Bank resort to a phenomenon to action which I am forced as a lawyer to regard as pogroms.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sky says that fiction didn't even survive for a long time. After a few months, the government, and let me make it clear, at that time it was not a liquid government, it was a labor government led by a labor leader, Levy Schol. Decided to ignore it. And you know what really makes me very unhappy about it looking back is that I say to myself, that's the government accepted my opinion and not only accepted it formally in formal terms, but really carried it out. We probably would have been living in a different Middle East, in a different world, in a world which maybe we would have had peace between the Arabs and the Jews between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, intended to ignore it from the beginning, but the question was how are we going to present the decision to ignore that opinion to the world? And they said, well, we will in the beginning call settlements that we establish, and it was a total fiction, of course, as a military basis. They were disguised.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose they were too polite to do it in a very explicit way, but there were a few weeks where the cabinet hesitated as how to handle the opinion.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said the Geneva Convention No. 4, which is the Geneva Convention dealing with occupation and protection of civilian populations, has provisions which would prohibit entirely and in an in-ambivalent way establishment of civilian outposts, villages, communities on the West Bank. I also said that establishing a military basis in the territory was lawful because it was a war and countries may establish military outposts.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in a way, decisions as serious and perhaps historically as important. I took already many years earlier in 67 when I was asked by the Israeli cabinet to give an opinion to the Israeli government as to whether civilian settlements on the West Bank and on the other territories occupied in the June war by Israel, whether the government could establish their civilian settlements.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps not entirely stop, but at least cause them to become less frequent and not as terrifying and as successful in themselves as they were, bearing in mind the fact that Hitler managed to destroy not only to kill millions of Jews, but also to destroy a whole tradition, a whole culture, a setup of communities.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but translated into smaller factors which are so critical in one's life. The one thing which I found during the war and immediately after the war really so terribly horrifying is not going to school for five years, not seeing a book over five years, being constantly in company of adults, not seeing anybody more or less my age. And the reaction that I developed, which I think was in a way quite logical and natural, was to develop an incredible hunger for education, for books, for being with people my age, not people looking twice bigger and taller than I was at the time.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was dreaming of going to school. I was dreaming of biking in a park. I was dreaming of kayaking. I was dreaming of those wonderful things from which I benefited as a child, all of which suddenly overed and one day disappeared. I was horrified by the loss of autonomy. I was horrified by not going to school for five years.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Observe all of the above and also The ability in the worst of times to find refuge in daydreaming, I found daydreaming at that time a real sort of life savior bringing me back to quasi normality”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you join the main budget, they would put loaders on trucks and sent to quarters outside of the city and machine guns. I would have been one of them.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as I approach, I saw that our house is understatement to describe the habitat that we had at that time. We're surrounded by German paratroopers. And of course, you could not approach it.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The crime of being Jews. What happened to us in Was sort of general interest in the sense that we were given a sort of a living place, which was very primitive. No electricity, no water, no nothing. And Jewish resistance one evening came home. They were armed and they said terribly sorry to impose on you. But we are going to dig tunnels under the barbed wires to try and smuggle arms from Polish resistance when we can get it and eventually try to escape when the inevitable day comes. And I got a small job in the community council and worked typically until 5 o'clock or whatever it is. And I would try to come home on time so that my mother and my father who lived with us. He was on a labor assignment out of town. Would not worry. And one day I came, I was about 15-20 minutes late. I did not know what was happening.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me tell you first that the Germans proceeded with the Holocaust in a very, very systematic way. First, they created large ghettos, then people, Jews from surrounding communities, towns, villages were forced to go to the ghetto. Then eventually the big ghettos were liquidated by people being sent to one of the killing camps, Auschwitz, Rablinga, Maidanik, Sobibor. We were first in a big ghetto and eventually were moved, most of my family was sent to Trebling and liquidated.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's late. Yeah, I often said to myself, looking back at my life, except for terrible childhood, the most terrible imaginable, I had a lot of luck in life.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He attacked a German senior German officer, and that was with a deliberate intent of being killed and not being shipped in terrible conditions to Treblinka. And years later, my father met in Tel Aviv, a barber who survived Treblinka, and he knew my brother, and he said he was involved in the uprising there. This was one uprising which led to a complete destruction of the killing fields of the crematoria. He was involved and survived it apparently, and escaped never found.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was five years older. He was, in a way, for me a sort of a model of bravery because he was an incredibly good cyclist and he could do simple gymnastics miracles on a bicycle. Later, after his deportation, I learned of the fact that in the city, in the ghetto where we lived in Chancehova, he was involved in resistance activities. When he was led to a place where people were being selected either for staying in a labor force or being deported to Treblinka,”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We fled east, we were wandering through Poland, carrying our luggage on our backs, catching trees and stones, rivers where the bridges had been bombed, and eventually we made a decision which was not very wise. We decided to stay in the German part.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think the arrest warrant was required by the application of something that I've always tried to apply in my life law and evidence.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Demonization of Israel did contribute, I think, to manifestations of anti-Semitism all over the world, including in the United Kingdom.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Police is doing something about it, that people are trying to see whether in terms of the existing law it might be strengthened or might be more effective, but the situations were quite different.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still very, very different. The difference lies in the fact that it seems to me that the British government, the Prime Minister quite frequently, speak very loudly in a very articulate way, in a very persuasive way against the growth and existence and manifestations of anti-Semitism. In Poland, to the extent that there were pogroms, there were anti-Jewish acts, there were hooligans in the streets who would love to beat up Jewish boys or Jewish children. At that time, there was no public reaction. The mayor of a city or of a village certainly not cabinet ministers would not speak about it. So I appreciate the fact that the government of the United Kingdom speaks loudly and clearly about the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, which is frightening, and it's good that the”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a child I was really not aware of antisemitism at school. I went to a state school most of the children were Catholic or Jewish. I remember constant playing of Chopin's March military and so on. I remember all the holidays, celebrations of the great victories of Poland over the Soviet army in the 20s, but I did not suffer or was even aware of anti-Semitism. Holocaust was quite a different beast. It was the first ever industrial genocide.”
2026-06-12 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · 'We need some daydreaming': lawyer Theodor Meron on surviving the Holocaust, and issuing Netanyahu’s arrest warrant · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source