The time-honored role of the exiled Jew was to be downtrodden, bearded and bookish. Then Zionist dreamers pulled a state out of the hat, and went on to win war after war. Even non-belligerents were bamboozled. The idea of military Jews, even without the victorious part, was a travesty. To put the clock back offended powers cloned a funny law to neuter the juggernaut. Afterwards, they trusted, mortal enemies would do what mortal enemies always did when Jews were downtrodden in exile.     

To the cognoscenti the funny law is known as IHL – International Humanitarian Law. Calls to indict Israel for war crimes rely on it implicitly, as well they might. IHL is an anti-Semite’s dream. Applied with careful malice it holds the power to transform Israel from a light unto the nations into a Lucifer with killing power. I devote a full  chapter to the malleability of that body of law in my book, Hadrian’s Echo. Hadrian’s Echo.  IHL is the weapon of choice to punish Israel for having the chutzpah to win on the battlefield. If the Chosen won’t succumb to physical onslaught, let morale-sapping verbal onslaught cow them into surrender. Curse the life out of Israel!

Alternatively known as “Lawfare”, the vindictive onslaught breaks down into four elements that chill the heart.

The agenda: To bring the offensive nation to its knees by expelling it as a pariah from the world community.

The design: to hamstring the IDF, so making the work of terror groups that much easier.

The trap: To set the legal bar high enough (far higher than elsewhere on earth) to ensure that Israel fails to clear it.

The looked-for result: To blow the whistle, then to haul Israel and its leaders before the UN, the media, the court of public opinion and the International Criminal Court. Together the elements amount to denying Israel the right to defend itself.      

Lawfare, without a class of effective ‘Jew-prosecutors’, would be dead in the water. The UN Human Rights Council appoints them from shortlisted professors of law. The type has long been among the worst of anti-Semites. Recall that the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi execution squads that roamed Russia to eradicate Jews, town by town, had law academics in the ranks. One commander, Otto Ohlendorf, had degrees from three universities and a doctorate in jurisprudence.

Today, such law academics do the UN’s bidding. Some, like John Dugard and Richard Falk, are given the title, ‘Rapporteur’ with a brief to drum up crimes that will turn Jewish leaders into a criminal class. Others, like Richard Goldstone and Mary McGowan Davis, head up commissions tasked by the Human Rights Council to find Israel guilty in the aftermath of mini wars with Gaza. If not for malleable, Jew-trapping IHL they’d all be out of business.

It’s not often when one of these UN hitmen lets his faculty gown slip to reveal what lies beneath. Professor Dugard once did. Ostensibly concerned with rights and justice for Palestinians, Dugard applied IHL to deny Israel the right to halt rocket barrages raining on its towns. His successor, Professor Falk, has been altogether careless at dropping the academic veneer. With the kind of face that Heinrich Himmler used to launch many a pogrom, Falk posted a religious Jew in the form of a bloodthirsty hound slavering at the chops. He’s also blamed Jihadist attacks on America to Washington’s bedfellow, Israel.  

But for the most part UN hitmen try to keep up appearances. At least on paper, they concede to Israel the universal right to defend its people. They must take care to appear even handed, and even magnanimous. They can’t, they daren’t, reveal what lies beneath, unlike Mr Louis Farrakhan who loses nothing by speaking his mind. “Judaism is a dirty religion and the Jews an accursed people,” he can say publicly. But they have not Farrakhan’s freedom. Juridical gown and wig are the minimum accoutrements for UN hitmen to ply their evil. New windows for condemning Israel won’t open without legal attire. That juicy prospect of dragging criminal Jews up the courthouse steps is another incentive to keep Jew-prosecutors in line. Weighing what is practical and what is not, they reign their hatred in. Compelled to pick words, the words they pick, the lies they tell and the opinions they deliver nonetheless bow to one imperative: to turn Jew into wanted criminal. For that purpose IHL is a God-send. 

So when conceding Israel’s right to strike or counter-strike, IHL applicators set funny conditions: the IDF may not kill the enemy, injure the enemy, or damage property belonging to the enemy. It takes only one of the above to happen for the whistle to blow. Needless to say the demand for waging war safely so that that no one gets hurt and nothing gets damaged applies to Israel and only to Israel. That’s one red light.

“The aspiration of every legal system,” writes Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, Alan Dershowitz “is to be governed by the objective rule of law rather than the ad hoc decisions of biased human beings.” Dershowitz compares this foundation principle to the modus operandi of appointed, and self-appointed, IHL applicators, the latter being people that  make a living (a good one) from human rights. In common, he writes, they begin with the actions of Israel rather than with neutral law that governs the acts of other states. Further, the Jew-prosecutors measure acts of the IDF “against unrealistic, anachronistic and abstract principles that could not be, and have never been, applied to (other militaries.)”

Dershowitz refers to the Goldstone and Mary McGowan Davis Commissions, and to Israeli NGOs that kept them supplied with crimes. One of those outfits, B’Tselem, actually boasts about trading in Jewish crimes. “The Guardian, The New York Times, Washington Post, AP, CNN, NBC, and many other news channels used our essential data. The UN report on the 2014 Gaza Conflict cited our figures and findings more than those of any other (NGO).” So wrote Oded Diner of B’Tselem, appealing to donors to open their wallets.  

Abstract law was one red light. A second red light is that concern for Palestinian lives does not drive the demand for Israel to wage war safely. Assad the butcher of Syria starved to death hundreds of Palestinians, and the human rights industry was caught studying its toes. Here were the same Palestinians that Israel is forbidden to harm, but that Syria may slaughter with impunity. No wigs and gowns scuttled for IHL when Assad did his dirty deeds.

The word ‘disproportionate’ sets off another red light, ticks a third box. UN-hired cursers rely heavily on that word, never stopping to explain how and why IDF acts are disproportionate. Some don’t even wait to gather evidence. Christine Chinkin, law professor at the London School of Economics, simply can’t suppress the impulse to demonize weapon-wielding Jews. “Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is not self-defense - it’s a war crime. Israel’s (disproportionate) actions amount to aggression, not self-defense.” When delivering her verdict Chinkin had yet to set foot in Gaza; had not weighed a shred of evidence for herself.

Professor Dugard keeps his cool better. “It is not possible to adopt an armchair attitude in assessing Israel’s response to suicide bombings and Palestinian violence. Israel is entitled to a wide margin of appreciation in its response.  But, even allowing for this, it is suggested, on the basis of evidence provided, that Israel’s response to terror is disproportionate.”

That word again. Has it a dimension that can be measured? Probably not when even a law professor takes disproportionate to mean what he considers to be excessive force – force that offends him. But how much weight to give the feelings of an investigator whose brief it was to hear no evil, speak no evil, report no evil about crimes that Palestinians commit? The hired hitmen indict Israel without legal argument. Jews kill indiscriminately. Period.

The International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia long ago confessed: there are no hard and fast rules for disproportionate force, or for targeting civilians. War crimes have to be proven one by one, case by case. The Jew prosecutor not only fails to do that, he applies no objective yardstick at all. One terrorist victim of Israel is a victim too many. An Israeli attack is simply an attack that MacGowan Davis and her ilk don’t like – or an attack by people they don't like.

Concerning all of this, Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer posed the right question. Charles Krauthammer     “If no military tactic is permissible for Israel, what's left? Ah, but that's the point. What's left? Nothing. The whole point is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million, refusing every invitation to national suicide.” 

It’s right there, in the small print of the funny law: “No right to live.”