There is a contradiction at the heart of the legal case against Israel, and it has gone largely unremarked.
Those who invoke international law most loudly, citing opinions by the International Court of Justice, U.N. resolutions and the laws of armed conflict as though they were self-executing moral verdicts, are the same people who, when pressed on the foundational property question underlying this conflict, argue that local custom should override law.
They cannot have it both ways. And the fact that they try tells you something important about what is actually going on. This is not law. It is law as a weapon, applied with precision against one party and quietly set aside wherever it produces inconvenient results.
Start with the land question. It is one of the least discussed dimensions of this debate, which is part of why it is the most revealing.
In 1858, the Ottoman Empire enacted a sweeping land reform requiring formal registration of property. The law operated identically across what is now Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Its effects were consistent everywhere: Rural peasants who had farmed land under customary arrangements for generations often failed to register, frequently to avoid taxation and conscription, while urban elites registered large tracts in their own names.
When Zionist organizations began purchasing land in the late 19th century, they purchased it from the legal titleholders. Under Ottoman statutory law, those purchases were clean.
The tenant farmers displaced by those transactions had a real grievance. Customary usage rights carry genuine moral weight. But here is the contradiction critics never address: If international law is the supreme authority, Israel must obey without caveat, then Ottoman statutory law governed property in late 19th-century Palestine. That law recognized the deeds. It did not recognize unregistered customary usage. The purchases were lawful.
If you want to argue that the peasants were wronged, then you must argue that lived custom should override positive statutory law. That is a defensible moral position. But it is the exact opposite of the framework these same critics deploy when citing the ICJ or the Geneva Conventions.
You cannot demand that Israel obey international legal instruments to the letter while arguing that Ottoman legal instruments were illegitimate because local custom said otherwise. That is not a legal argument. It is two incompatible philosophies of law, whichever one damages Israel more in any given moment.
The irony deepens when you examine what the legal instruments actually say.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal from “territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Not “the territories.” Not “all the territories.” The omission was deliberate.
Lord Caradon, the British diplomat who drafted the resolution, said so explicitly: The text did not require full withdrawal because the pre-1967 lines were not recognized borders and were, by the drafters’ own assessment, indefensible. Israeli statesman Abba Eban called them the “Auschwitz borders,” not merely as rhetoric but as a geographic description of a nine-mile-wide coastal strip, vulnerable to Arab attack, overlooked by the West Bank plateau.
U.N. Resolution 242 linked withdrawal explicitly to “secure and recognized boundaries.” That linkage is not incidental; it is the resolution’s core bargain. Critics who cite 242 as requiring full Israeli withdrawal are citing a document whose text does not say what they claim. This is not obscure. Lord Caradon said so on the record. It simply goes unreported.
The recent ICJ proceedings are cited with similar imprecision. Advisory opinions are not binding rulings. Preliminary findings are not adjudications. The word “plausible” in a provisional measures ruling is not a finding of genocide. These distinctions matter enormously in law. They are routinely erased in advocacy.
Then there is the asymmetry problem, perhaps the deepest one of all.
International humanitarian law was developed primarily around state-on-state warfare. Its rules on proportionality, targeting and civilian protection were not designed for adversaries whose explicit strategy is to erase the distinction between combatant and civilian, and applying those rules as though the strategic context is identical produces outcomes that are neither legally coherent nor morally serious.
Applying it to a conflict where one party deliberately embeds military infrastructure in hospitals and schools, treats civilian casualties as a strategic asset and faces zero legal accountability, while holding only the responding state to the full legal standard, is not neutrality. It is structural bias dressed as principle.
A basketball game where one team shoots from the high school three-point line and the other from the NBA arc, as many of these political pundits referee Israel’s wars against terror organizations, is not a fair game.
Law functions when it is applied consistently to all parties. Applying International Humanitarian Law honestly to Hamas—and its use of civilian shields and explicit targeting of Israeli civilians—would produce conclusions that advocates of this framework have no interest in reaching. The developed narrative is telling.
The final irony is historical. The legal architecture most frequently cited against Israel—the Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration, the laws of occupation—was built in direct response to what happened to European Jews. Invoking that architecture against Israel while declining to apply the Genocide Convention’s text to an organization whose founding charter called for the killing of Jews is not legal fidelity. It is an inversion of the history that produced the law being cited.
None of this places Israel above scrutiny. Some settlement activity is hard to defend. Military operations that produce wanton civilian casualties require accountability.
It is also true that as things stand in the West Bank, Israelis and Palestinians are not held to the same standards of law—a genuine inequity that serious people across the political spectrum acknowledge. But correcting that disparity requires a Palestinian leadership willing to negotiate a final-status agreement. That leadership does not currently exist.
What cannot be sustained is a framework that treats international law as an absolute moral obligation for one side—and sometimes demands even more than that law requires—while granting the other complete exemption, and then calls the result justice.
