Three East European-born Jewish lawyers present at the Nuremberg trials did much to shape the trials’ lasting impact on our understanding of both the Holocaust and international law, although their roles in the actual proceedings were peripheral. Each had his own theory of the trials’ significance, as Michael Marrus explains:

[Jacob] Robinson’s, [Hersch] Lauterpacht’s, and [Raphael] Lemkin’s work at Nuremberg may be understood as three different efforts to contend with the inadequacies of the interwar mechanisms for the protection of minorities on which all three had worked and that all three had supported in one way or the other during an early part of their careers. Robinson’s answer was to tie Jewish fortunes to the story of the Jewish catastrophe, seemingly in a belief that the moral effect of knowledge of the Holocaust, energetically promoted by the United States, would help achieve justice for a people sorely wronged.

Less bound to specifically Jewish perspectives, Lauterpacht and Lemkin looked to the trial for new structures of international law. Consistent with his longstanding critique of national sovereignty, Lauterpacht’s great cause was international human rights, defining their juridical and institutional platforms, and seeking a way forward for their acceptance internationally. For him, Nuremberg’s insistence on the accountability of German war criminals was an important step on a path to achieving this goal.

And Lemkin, for his part, saw in the cause of genocide the most fitting response to the global catastrophe. Consumed, not to say obsessed by his project, he failed to appreciate much of what the trial had accomplished. Human rights were well and good, he thought, but as he protested a decade after Nuremberg, they “are concerned with different levels of existence, while genocide deals with nonexistence.” Notwithstanding these differences, each of the émigrés would have agreed that the postwar world order had to address, as a matter of priority, the most vulnerable.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.