Laws/Rules Made Up to Apply to Israel

Over on X, @Optimist_Gaza challenged readers to list five examples of supposed international law Israel’s critics invented to apply to Israel’s detriment.

Shany Mor (@ShMMor) quickly came up with twenty-three off the top of his head (reprinted with Shany’s permission).

1. Designating a combatant a journalist automatically immunizes that combatant from attack.

2. A territory is occupied even if there is no presence whatsoever after a hostile armed force by virtue of being blockaded.

3. A famine can be declared where people are not dying of starvation.

4. A territory becomes the sovereign title of one party — even when that party never exercised sovereignty over it in the past — when a second party conquers it from a third party which attacked it.

5. An armistice line explicitly set by all parties in an armistice agreement as not constituting an international border becomes one when the armistice is violated and war relaunched. But only to the advantage of the aggressing and losing party.

6. An unimplemented non-binding resolution to create an international zone permanently excludes sovereignty by one state over any part of the zone, but has no such effect on other parties, such that, say West Jerusalem can’t be considered to be in Israel, but Bethlehem is “occupied Palestinian territory.”

7. A state is not allowed designate a city inside its sovereign borders as its capital.

8. If one belligerent party attacks another with rockets, the attacked party is now responsible for feeding the civilians of the attacking party.

9. A sovereign state can be immune from attack even after it attacks another sovereign state as long as those attacks are carried out by proxy armies, openly funded and trained by the first state.

10. A state that attacks a neighbor and is defeated is entitled

to a full restoration of everything it lost in the war it initiated.

11. Warning civilians to leave a combat zone is “ethnic cleansing.”

12. The taking of hostages is, apparently, ok after all.

13. A person is a refugee even if they have not actually crossed any international border.

14. A person is a refugee even if they acquired citizenship of another country, in other words are fully rehabilitated and no longer stateless.

15. A person is a refugee even if they are born somewhere with citizenship of that country to parents who were born in the same country, also with citizenship, as long as their grandparents were recognized as refugees despite either not fleeing across any border and having been rehabilitated from their displacement.

16. A normal act of war is “collective punishment” if it affects lots of people.

17. When one armed force sustains fewer casualties than another in combat, this is a violation of proportionality.

18. A standard deception operation is “perfidy.”

19. A terrorist holding a weapon in the middle of combat is somehow “hors de combat.”

20. Allowing civilians to move into an occupied territory without sovereign title is a violation of the prohibition on population transfer. But not granting automatic residency upon marriage for citizens of enemy nationalities is not only not a block on population transfer but itself a violation of fundamental human rights (even if no such provision exists anywhere else in the world).

21. A law of return for immigration is “apartheid.”

22. An entity meeting zero of the four Montevideo conditions can be recognized as a state.

23. “Genocide” can be redefined if it feels really good to throw it at those people who are always going on about that Holocaust thing.