Judge Nawaf Salam, president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), presides over the ICJ during a ruling on South Africa’s request to order a halt to Israel’s Rafah offensive in Gaza, in The Hague, Netherlands, May 24, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Johanna Geron

It all began with an exchange on X.

On April 7, former Israeli spokesperson Eylon Levy wrote that critics of Israel had “invented new international laws” that, if applied globally, would undermine international order by protecting aggressors and terrorist groups.

The account @Optimist_Gaza replied sarcastically: “Can you list just five of those laws?” Political analyst Shany Mor quickly responded: “I can list far more than five,” and proceeded to publish many examples of legal concepts that, in his view, have been reinterpreted and applied exclusively against Israel.

The list deserves attention. Democracies should be criticized, and wars demand scrutiny. But there are legitimate reasons to question whether the scrutiny applied to Israel follows the same standards used in other conflicts — or whether a parallel body of legal interpretations has gradually emerged, valid only when Israel is the defendant.

Take the concept of military proportionality. Under international law, proportionality does not mean equality in casualties; it means that incidental civilian harm cannot be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. It is not an arithmetic equation. Yet in public debates about Gaza, casualty figures have frequently become the only metric invoked — as though Israel were required to suffer greater losses in order to legitimize its own defense.

The same applies to the definition of occupation. After Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 — with no permanent military or civilian presence remaining inside the territory — institutions such as the United Nations continued to classify Gaza as “occupied,” based on Israel’s control of borders and airspace. This interpretation exists within international legal discourse, but it is far from universally accepted among specialists. The issue is not that the interpretation exists, but that it is often treated as unquestionable truth only in Israel’s case, without applying the same interpretive rigor to comparable situations involving other states.

The definition of Palestinian refugee status is also unique. The mandate of UNRWA, the UN agency created exclusively for Palestinian refugees, differs fundamentally from the model adopted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which oversees every other refugee population in the world. In the Palestinian case, refugee status is inherited across generations, including by descendants born in countries where they already possess full citizenship. There is no comparable precedent for any other population. Yet this is rarely presented to the public as the exceptional arrangement that it is.

Even more troubling is the growing use of the term “genocide.” The 1948 UN Genocide Convention requires proof of specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. It’s clear from every sense of the term that genocide is not happening in Gaza — in fact, more children were vaccinated in Gaza in 2025 than before the war.

But perhaps the most revealing episode occurred in January 2025, when Ireland formally intervened in the proceedings requesting that the International Court of Justice adopt a broader definition of genocide — replacing the requirement of intent with mere foreseeability. The request itself revealed the underlying problem: if the existing definition, in force since 1948 and reaffirmed by decades of international jurisprudence, is insufficient to implicate Israel, then the proposed solution is to redefine the term itself.

None of this means Israel is immune from criticism. But serious criticism requires serious standards. When terms such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupation are applied selectively or imprecisely, they lose force,  including in the face of the real crimes and atrocities they were meant to describe with precision.

International law was built to be universal. The moment it is twisted into a selective instrument against a single state, it ceases to be justice altogether. What emerges in its place is something far older, far darker, and far more dangerous — a hatred that long ago escaped the confines of X or any social media platform.

Nira Broner Worcman is a Brazilian journalist, CEO of Art Presse, and author of A Sisyphean Task (translated from the Brazilian), who writes about media coverage of the war between Israel and terrorist groups.