"Another recent United Nations report once again condemned Israel for defending its civilians against rockets fired by Hamas from densely populated civilian areas. Once again Israel responded by releasing information compiled by independents experts. This article attempts to put these issues in a broader jurisprudential context...
[T]he writers [of the rules of law] cannot know whether they will be male or female, gay or straight, white or black, handicapped or fully able, Jew or gentile, handsome or ugly, strong or weak, smart or not so smart, poor or rich, healthy or unhealthy, etc. etc, when they draft the rules that will govern their future conduct.
In this way, they will be incentivized to enact laws that will be fair to all...
How then do these general principles, about which there is universal agreement in theory, apply to the subject of our discussion today? Directly!
The way Israel is being judged today is a dramatic exception to the rule of law and the principles articulated above. Under the current approach, the international community first considers Israel's actions, in isolation from the actions of other nations; it judges them to be imperfect, when evaluated against abstract rules; it then creates specific rules applicable only to the nation-state of the Jewish people, and to no other nation. This has clearly been the case with the Goldstone Report, the more recent report by Mary McGowan Davis, the decisions of the International Court of Justice, the resolutions of numerous United Nations bodies, especially the misnamed Human Rights Council, and even the reports of Israeli NGOs such as B'tselem and Breaking the Silence.
These so called applications of the rules of international law all share a common modus operandi: they begin with Israel's actions rather than with neutral principles of law designed to govern the actions of all nations and groups. They then judge Israel's actions against unrealistic, anachronistic and abstract principles that could not be, and have never been, applied to other nations or groups. They then condemn Israel, without articulating rules of general applicability..."