Two years ago, left-wing activists barricaded the Jerusalem offices of Kohelet Policy Forum, an Israeli think tank with conservative and libertarian leanings. The vandals ascended the fifth floor of the building in the capital’s Givat Shaul neighborhood and blocked the forum’s doors with garbage, bricks and barbed wire, locking one employee inside.
The ire directed at Kohelet came on the backdrop of large protests against the government’s bid for judicial reform. Opponents of the reform attributed the legal framework behind the move to Kohelet and its intellectual work on the subject.
U.S. billionaire Arthur Dantchik announced on Aug. 23, 2023, that he was pulling his financial support from the forum, calling for “healing and national unity.” The think tank reportedly dismissed half of its staff and turned to the public to raise funds.
On Monday, Kohelet hosted its first in-person conference in at least 18 months, titled “The Legal Battlefield.” It focused on the application of international law to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, as well as the legal battle waged against the Jewish state at the international level by state and non-state actors.
For all the clamor surrounding the conservative think tank, the English-language event at the forum’s Jerusalem offices was anything but controversial. The speakers unanimously agreed that Israel should adhere to the rules of international warfare, as devised by the United Nations after World War II, albeit acknowledging that the system is biased against Israel.
The one scholar who leveled criticism at the Israel Defense Forces’ prosecutors for probing soldiers over alleged crimes during the war was quickly rebuked by other panelists. The speaker, professor emeritus of law at Ariel University Talia Einhorn, later clarified that she was not calling on the army to violate international law.
The conference kicked off via Zoom with Maj. (ret.) Andrew Fox, an expert on disinformation, defense and security who served in the British Army for 16 years, completing three tours in Afghanistan.
Addressing the audience of several dozen, Fox remarked that Israel is facing a frustrating disinformation war against the truth that it is not committing war crimes or genocide in Gaza, “beyond any question of a doubt.
“A component of every war is the taking of human life … , and people will see that as a fundamentally immoral action, regardless of whether it was legal, because legal and moral are not the same thing,” he said.
The core struggle, he continued, is justifying dead civilians to the world as acceptable collateral damage when discussing the legality of warfare and proportionality. The regular civilian cannot contextualize the outcomes on the battlefield, Fox stressed, and thus recoils at images coming out of a confined warzone such as the Gaza Strip.
The emotional campaign against Israel
Fox was one of the scholars at the London-based Henry Jackson Society who painstakingly combed through the casualty figures published by the Hamas authorities in Gaza and published a study in December 2024 that showed the numbers had been inflated to portray Israel as deliberately targeting civilians.
The study suggested that the majority of those killed in Gaza were males in Hamas’s general combat ages of between 15 and 45, and that IDF figures of 17,000 terrorists killed out of a total of 44,000 fatalities in the conflict were highly reasonable.
This ran contrary to the United Nations statistics, which claimed that about 70% of Gaza casualties were women and children.
A more recent analysis by HonestReporting found that Hamas quietly updated its fatalities list last month, removing thousands of names of people who had died of natural causes or were still alive. The result was that of all deaths recorded by Hamas between the ages of 13 to 55, 72% were of males.
Despite these reports reaching the news, allegations of a genocide in Gaza persist.
Fox mentioned that even with all the military experience under his belt, he too was “horrified” when he saw the magnitude of destruction in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, during an organized tour with the IDF.
This is what Israel is fighting on the world stage, the British scholar noted—“that human reaction to seeing the devastation of warfare.”
Fox relayed that “the emotional activation that the disinformation campaign is trying to aim for starts with the amygdala in your brain. The fact that it’s in the center of the brain tells us that it is an early evolutionary part of the brain. And it’s connected to survival at a very basic level. It controls your ‘fight and flight’ mechanism. It can be a caveman seeing a saber-tooth tiger … or it can be someone sitting on a sofa in London being horrified by an impact of an airstrike [on the television]. It still generates the same rush of hormones; and one of those effects is that it bypasses your prefrontal cortex, located on the outside of the brain structure, which means it’s a later evolutionary part of the brain, and that’s where our critical thinking happens.”
The bypassing of one’s critical thinking is an important component for the propagandists who want people to be “emotionally activated with anger, fear or disgust,” said the researcher.
When asked by a member of the audience why this generated emotion did not work in Israel’s favor in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, Fox replied that “Oct. 7 isn’t as appreciated worldwide as it should be. The main reason [being] that the images weren’t really shown. We’ve seen the Telegram videos that Hamas published on that day, we’ve read the reporting afterwards, but actually very few people have seen the really unpleasant footage.”
If someone wants to take the time to read comprehensive reports on the atrocities, it takes effort, Fox remarked, while on the other hand, everyone has seen footage coming out of Gaza.
“Most people haven’t seen what happened on Oct. 7, and I don’t think that most people understand just how horrifying it was.”
‘Bullets, not attorneys’
Einhorn participated in a panel discussion on the implications of international humanitarian law for the war in Gaza. She opened her remarks with reference to “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free” (2024), by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“The enemy,” Hegseth writes, as cited by Einhorn, “should get bullets, not attorneys. … These strange rules [of engagement] make modern wars much longer than necessary.”
She went on to say that with today’s rules of engagement, “soldiers need to fight not only the enemy but the attorneys. This is something that we’ve learned very much at home.”
The professor said that the IDF prosecutors oppose establishing a military court to put Hamas’s brutal Nukhba Forces commandoes on trial, and instead brought “prosecutions against our own soldiers,” referring to a video that was leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 in which troops were allegedly seen raping a Palestinian prisoner—a charge that was later dropped.
This “blood libel was spread all over the world,” Einhorn lamented.
The laws of war, she continued, reflect the understanding that wars must be won.
She stressed that Hegseth, in his boo,k did not oppose the international laws of war, but rather changes made to the U.S. Defense Department Law of War Manual in 2023. “Otherwise, the 1,250-page manual from 2015 is excellent,” she said.
Law versus policy
Speakers Col. (res.) Noam Neumann and Col. (res.) Pnina Sharvit Baruch, both former officers in the International Law Department of the IDF Military Advocate General (MAG) Unit, pushed back on some of Einhorn’s comments.
With more than 30 years’ study of international law, Neumann stressed that there is a distinction between the chosen policy of a military and the laws of war.
“There are a lot of issues with regard to the Americans that are derived from policy consideration and not from law consideration,” he said. However, in war between state and non-state actors, such as terrorist organizations, around the early 2000s, questions about whom you can target arose, he continued.
Israel was one of the first Western countries to stipulate that the law applies also to civilians engaged in hostilities and members of militant groups that operate like armies with a chain of command, regardless of whether an operative is a terrorist by night and farmer by day, Neumann relayed.
He went on to suggest that interpreting international law is a bit like interpreting Judaism. There are basic norms, which “everyone in this room accepts,” but their application can be contested.
Neumann divided the norms into three principles: no deliberate targeting of civilians; taking precautionary measures to minimize civilian harm; and proportionality, namely, that collateral damage from a military attack cannot exceed the military advantage gained.
Sharvit Baruch began her remarks by saying that the international campaign against Israel is part of a military campaign aimed at physically destroying the Jewish state.
While the legal campaign seeks to tie Israel’s hands, understanding the legal tools to fight back can help prevent this, she maintained.
“The ones who understand these tools are the legal advisers,” she said. As a legal adviser herself who was in charge of all legal advisers in the IDF between 2003 and 2009, her “aim was to win [‘Operation Cast Lead’ in Gaza],” she remarked. After Sharvit Baruch retired from the army, she was accused of being a war criminal and could not travel abroad.
“It was a small price to pay for me because I believed that what I was doing was to help win the war. And the legal advisers today are doing the same. To try to argue that they in any way are trying to prevent us from winning—I won’t say what I think about it,” the former officer said.
Within the system
“So, how do you win this war? You have to play within the rules. It’s not logical to say we don’t accept the rules, because then you are confessing that you are breaking [international] law,” Sharvit Baruch said.
Winning the legal battle requires being part of the legal discussion, the former military adviser said. She related that during her service, she approached legal advisers from the American, British, Australian and Canadian armies and persuaded them that the laws of war should cover all members of an organized armed group, without the need to wait for a particular moment when a member carries out a task on behalf of the terrorist group.
In these discussions held at an International Committee of the Red Cross workshop, Sharvit Baruch’s arguments were accepted—but with caveats.
Yet, the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel all published their own positions, without these caveats, she went on to say. And since international law develops through practice, major countries that rejected the position of the ICRC, which is an NGO, set the standard for the law in practice.
Indeed, bodies such as the United Nations and human-rights organizations take more extreme positions—ones that are unfair, she continued. However, “we have to oppose them, not go against the whole concept of the laws of armed conflict.”
Sharvit Baruch ended by noting that internal military investigations are important because “if somebody did something very bad, I think yes, they could be even prosecuted. You don’t have to defend everybody at any price. … But the investigations are more important to give a good answer of complementarity” for courts around the world that can dismiss accusations against IDF soldiers if they know that Israel has already investigated their cases, she concluded.
‘Put the UN on trial’
The theme of using the existing system and rules to fight for Israel’s legitimacy in the international arena also ran through the second panel discussion at the conference.
Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), asked the panelists whether “we had been willfully blind to processes of total warfare in every front: political, diplomatic, legal, media, social media, psychological operations over the last six decades,” which led up to the Oct. 8, 2023, response throughout the world?
“In that context, I would suggest that we stop defending ourselves, we stop apologizing, and we go on a 24/7, 365 campaign, to hold international institutions accountable—because they have been complicit in the worst 24-hour mass murder of modern political history,” Diker said.
“That is why we must place the U.N. on trial,” he continued, proposing to create a community of democracies that will work as a pressure group within and outside the United Nations on issues of international security.
Tal Becker, a former legal adviser to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, talked about how the state representatives in the United Nations who least care about international law get to be the ones who write and apply its code.
He proposed the establishment of a higher reviewing mechanism that would scrutinize the activities of the international body as a sustainable solution, so as not to rely on a favorable U.S. administration for Israel’s good status.
Yifa Segal, founder of the International Legal Forum, said that contrary to popular conception, decisions at the United Nations have always been driven by realpolitik rather than any moral ideals or values.
“We need to explain internally in greater depth how the system really works. It’s not enough to have a superficial conversation in the media about antisemitism in international institutions,” Segal said.
We can also learn from our enemies, she suggested.
Segal pointed to Iran’s plea to the International Court of Justice against Israel, indirectly via South Africa. “Why don’t we try [to do something like that]?” she asked. Israel needs to be creative to use the system to our advantage, she said.
The Trump era opportunity for change
Professor Amichai Cohen Scholar, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, suggested that the entire framework of international law might be in question for the first time in eight decades, in the wake of the Trump administration. Although not declaring it explicitly, it seems that Washington seeks to undermine international institutions, he said.
Cohen cautioned Israel against taking a similar course. It would be “extremely problematic” for Israel, he continued, for three main reasons: the Jewish state is a small country that needs certainty; we do not know if this will be temporary or not; and this could make Israel “completely dependent” on the United States.
He went on to say that there is a sentiment in Israel that international law is not important in war and that Israelis can do away with its limitations. Cohen said that unless an alternative normative standard is developed, this approach is risky. But he added that a third alternative may be up for grabs—push for institutional change and also for new normative understandings that would favor Israel.
In the Q&A period, the panelists were asked what some of the practical consequences would be if Israel left the United Nations.
Anne Herzberg, legal adviser at NGO Monitor, said that if Israel decided to withdraw on its own, it would not make much of an impact. When Israel withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review process in 2013, it did, because it put the whole institution in jeopardy due to its universal mechanism that requires equal participation from its members.
Becker, who was an Israeli representative at the U.N. for five years beginning in 2001, replied that the “game” at the international body is that the Jewish state wants to show that it belongs, while the Arab states want to show that Israel does not belong.
“The metric of whether pulling out is a good idea or not is a metric of how you understand legitimacy, and what it means for us to be seen as belonging to groups we want to belong to. I think it would make it much harder for us to be in partnership and have the support of those countries whose support we actually care about if we do that—unless we can create a move” to form an alternative international community,” Becker said.