As the Palestinian Authority prepares to take Israel or Israeli citizens to the International Criminal Court, some have argued that such a move will surely backfire. After all, Israel has scrupulously observed international laws, while Palestinians are guilty of numerous violations. Eugene Kontorovich, however, writes that the ICC’s deck is stacked against Israel, and not only because of an anti-Israel proviso in its founding statute:

Even absent any bias, the Court is structured in a way that cannot do equal justice, and is thus properly seen as a Palestinian tool against Israel. Moreover, recent statements by the [Court’s] prosecutor give troubling evidence that she may be willing to replace legal analysis with the off-the-shelf views of the “international community” on the conflict. . . .

[T]he Palestinians are so-to-speak “judgment proof.” First, non-cooperation is easy in a place where the killing of “collaborators” is institutionalized. . . . No one in Gaza will say, “Hey, there was a Hamas launcher in this school here.” Nor will the Palestinians be punished for non-cooperation—just as Kenya and Sudan have not been. Indeed, it is likely that the Palestinians will claim that as a “state under occupation,” they simply cannot cooperate with investigators on-the-ground since they will claim they are (for these purposes) under Israel’s thumb. In Israel, on the other hand, a bevy of Israeli NGOs will be lined up to supply the prosecutor with the dirt on alleged Israeli misdeeds, and many jurisdictions are only looking for an occasion to impose sanctions on Israel.

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.