When international law is applied to Israel, Shany Mor recently wrote, it doesn’t function like law at all, in the sense of general rules applied consistently to particular cases. Another basic requirement for a legal system is that judges are impartial and free to evaluate cases on their merits. But this too is something the International Court of Justice lacks, as Peter Berkowitz observes:

The court’s bylaws call for its fifteen judges to “be elected from among persons of high moral character, who possess the qualifications required in their respective countries for appointment to the highest judicial offices, or are jurisconsults of recognized competence in international law.” But the qualifications for appointment to their highest judicial offices differ from country to country. In particular, the qualifications in free and democratic nation-states differ from those in authoritarian regimes as do the qualifications in nation-states that protect religious liberty differ from those in countries that don’t.

Currently, the court includes judges from the world’s two most powerful authoritarian regimes, Russia and China. Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China oblige judges to put the regime’s interest in the nation’s supremacy ahead of human rights and international law.

[Moreover], the neglect by the ICJ and member nations of war crimes and genocide elsewhere in the world erodes the court’s claim to administer impartial justice. Last November, the ICJ issued its first ruling against Syria, requiring it to prevent torture. Why, for example, has it taken the court and member nations twelve years after the commencement of the Syrian War – which has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced 12 million people (more than half of the country’s population), and produced 5 million refugees abroad—to address war crimes in Syria?

Israel’s attorney Tal Becker admirably used his opening statement not only to contest the charges, but also to turn the tables on the accusers. In Berkowitz’s summation, “it is the complainant South Africa that should be directed by the ICJ to take remedial action, because of its close relations over many years with [Hamas], an organization whose very reason for existence is, in defiance of the Genocide Convention, to destroy Israel.”

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.