He addressed it pretty head on in another interview. His thinking is, he’s an academic who is trying to study and explain exactly what international law says should happen, and what the law says is that Israel is a legitimate state, but it also says that all the actions that Israel is engaged in constitute a genocide and should therefore be sanctioned. This is his main disagreement with BDS, where he claims that BDS wishes to simultaneously condemn Israel on a legal basis, yet also go against international law by claiming that Israel is an illegitimate state.

Obviously this line of thinking is very problematic and assumes that international law is 1. correct and 2. static. People have the right to say that the international law isn’t working and was established on an unjust premise of justifying the creation of an ethnostate because of the Holocaust. That doesn’t mean that it becomes hypocritical to use the same international law to criticize the Zionist project’s illegal actions, it just means that there are multiple dimensions (moral and legal) to the transgressions of the Zionist entity. I think Norm understands this point to some extent and limiting his scope to always siding with the law is more just a way to stay grounded and always having an undeniable basis for his arguments, even if they’re not fully there morally.