The Long Brief: Holiday From History [Part 4]
When courts, feeds, and “process” become weapons, defense must become doctrine.
This is the final installment of February’s four-part serialization of Holiday From History. This week closes the loop: institutional warfare, narrative control, deceptive diplomacy—and the return of history in its most explicit form. Full book: Holiday From History on Amazon
Shabbat shalom, friends.
This last installment of Holiday From History is about constraint as a weapon: how law and institutions get turned into handcuffs for democracies; how propaganda becomes operational; how negotiation becomes camouflage; and how the moral operating system of the West buckled under pressure.
It ends where analysis must end: with a prescription—what guardianship looks like when euphemism is no longer survivable.
Holiday From History:
The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War
Chapter 19: Lawfare and Institutions
Modern war isn’t just fought with tanks. It’s fought in courtrooms, at the UN, and in the headlines. Lawfare is the deliberate use of legal systems, human-rights language, and international institutions to pin down democracies while their enemies fight with no rules at all. It turns the law from a shield into a sword.
The tactic is simple: flood courts and global bodies with accusations, however flimsy, the moment a democracy fights back. File suits in the most sympathetic forum, demand “urgent” injunctions, and push headlines that scream War crimes! before the facts are even known. Activists and lawyers coordinate with media campaigns so that the accusation itself becomes the punishment. Democracies, sensitive to public opinion and bound by their own laws, hesitate. Terror groups and authoritarian states ignore it all. That asymmetry is the heart of lawfare.
Israel has been the prime target. In 2009, activists in Britain secured a universal jurisdiction warrant against former foreign minister Tzipi Livni. It was a stunt—one magistrate, one partisan filing—but Livni had to cancel her trip. Israeli generals avoided European airports for fear of arrest. Hamas commanders, meanwhile, traveled freely between Damascus, Tehran, and Doha. No court threatened them.
In 2014, as rockets rained down on Israeli cities, the Palestinian Authority rushed to join the International Criminal Court. It pushed the prosecutor to investigate Israel while saying nothing of Hamas deliberately firing on civilians and using its own people as shields. The gambit worked: even before any evidence was reviewed, headlines declared Israel “under ICC investigation.” Diplomatically, that was leverage. Militarily, it was handcuffs.
This is why lawfare matters. Democracies—Israel, the U.S., Europe—try to live by rules. They investigate their own militaries. They care about legitimacy. That very decency becomes a weakness when enemies weaponize law. Putin shrugs off rulings. Hamas laughs at the Geneva Conventions. They exploit the fact that the West ties itself in knots to follow norms.
The institutions built to defend justice have too often become arenas of abuse.
UN councils packed with dictators pass endless resolutions against Israel while ignoring China’s gulags or Iran’s executions. Courts and commissions are bent into tools of propaganda. Lawfare is not about truth or justice—it is about bleeding democracies with paper cuts until they hesitate to defend themselves.
In theory, the United Nations treats all nations equally under law. In practice, it has become a stage for relentless campaigns against Israel while tyrannies skate free.
Between 2015 and 2023, the UN General Assembly passed roughly 154 resolutions against Israel—more than twice the number it adopted against all other countries combined. Not Syria as it gassed civilians, not North Korea’s gulags, not Iran’s hangmen—Israel, a democracy of under ten million people, was the punching bag.
The Human Rights Council institutionalized this bias. Since its founding in 2006 it has condemned Israel more than any other state and even created a permanent agenda item—Item 7—just for Israel. No genocide regime, no terror sponsor, enjoys that “honor.” Of thirty or so emergency sessions held by 2021, nine were devoted to Israel. The verdict is always assumed: guilty first, facts later.
Why? Because bloc politics rules the UN. The 56-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation pushes anti-Israel measures, often joined by the Non-Aligned Movement and by dictatorships keen to deflect attention from their own crimes. Western democracies often abstain or quietly go along. The result is a paper mountain of resolutions portraying Israel as the planet’s worst violator, providing cover for Iran, Russia, and others to sneer, “Even the UN says Israel is the problem.” The absurdity is endless: Syria, in the middle of dropping barrel bombs, won a seat on UNESCO’s human rights committee. Israel, meanwhile, was condemned by UNESCO for archaeological digs in Jerusalem. The UN’s Commission on the Status of Women once singled out only one state for oppressing women—Israel. Not Saudi Arabia. Not Iran. Israel.
UNRWA shows how humanitarian agencies can be turned into political weapons. Founded in 1949 to care for Palestinian refugees, it created a system where refugee status is hereditary. From 700,000 in 1949, the number has swollen to more than 5 million, many with citizenship elsewhere. That isn’t relief—it’s institutionalized grievance, preserving the claim that millions should “return” into Israel. Operationally, UNRWA runs schools and clinics, but those schools have doubled as Hamas armories and propaganda mills. Rockets were found in UN buildings in 2014 and dutifully “returned” to Hamas. Textbooks erase Israel from maps and glorify martyrdom. Staff have been caught praising Hitler or cheering massacres online. Donors grumble, but funding flows on—better UNRWA than Hamas, they say. Yet the effect is the same: militants exploit UNRWA’s halo. Every time a firefight damages a school, the headline reads UN school hit—the perfect PR trap.
International courts add another layer. In 2004, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel’s security barrier illegal, barely mentioning that it stopped a wave of suicide bombings that killed hundreds. The fence cut terror by 90 percent, but the court spoke as if Israel built it for spite. More recently, the General Assembly asked the ICJ to rule on whether Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria is “annexation” or “apartheid.” Everyone knows the purpose: secure a judicial-sounding condemnation to fuel sanctions campaigns.
The International Criminal Court is no better. In 2021 it declared “Palestine” a state for jurisdictional purposes and opened investigations into Israel. Hamas, which fires rockets at civilians and uses children as shields, faces no risk—its leaders will never be handed over. Israel, which actually investigates its soldiers, becomes the focus. The process is the punishment: headlines about “war crimes probes,” travel worries for Israeli officers, new ammunition for boycott campaigns. Russia and China laugh at the ICC; Israel and the U.S. denounce it but still feel the political sting.
This is lawfare through institutions: resolutions, agencies, and courts turned into weapons. They don’t stop war crimes. They don’t deter tyrants. They generate paper trails that delegitimize democracies defending themselves. The next chapter shows how NGOs and media pick up those rulings and resolutions, turning political theater into what the world soon treats as established fact.
Lawfare runs on a conveyor belt. NGOs feed it claims. Academia blesses those claims with footnotes. Media blasts them into headlines. The loop pressures courts, parliaments, and diplomats to treat advocacy as fact.
Follow the money and you’ll see how it’s weaponized. Gulf donors bankroll Western campuses and “centers” that reliably produce papers accusing the U.S. and Israel while looking away from Hamas or Hezbollah. EU ministries write big checks to “civil society” groups in Gaza and Ramallah whose core business is filing complaints and lobbying tribunals. Large foundations fund the same networks. Grants are framed as neutral. The outputs aren’t. If a university lab is endowed to study “occupation and international law,” you know where its conferences and conclusions will land. If a Gaza NGO is paid to count “civilian” deaths, you know the numerator and denominator will be curated. Many true believers fill these jobs. The selection effect still rules: money amplifies one story line.
Now watch one allegation travel. Step one: an NGO publishes a report. The photos are wrenching. The citations are opaque. Hamas-run ministries supply the baseline numbers. Context vanishes. Human shields are a footnote. Proportionality is redefined as “no civilian may ever die.” Step two: headlines. “War crimes,” “apartheid,” “indiscriminate bombing.” The brand name of the NGO stands in for evidence. Nuance does not trend. Step three: professors and pundits hold panels. Students are assigned the report. Op-eds declare that “we can no longer ignore” the crimes that yesterday did not exist. Step four: lawmakers cite the coverage. Petitions and court filings annex those same stories as “authorities.” An activist brief becomes a parliamentary talking point, then an exhibit in court.
Once embedded, the claim hardens. Corrections never catch up. In Gaza 2014, early “80 percent civilian” death tallies came from Hamas sources and their NGO partners. Months later, cross-checks showed far more combatants. Many names later celebrated by Hamas as fighters remained on NGO lists as civilians. Misfired Hamas rockets that killed Gazans were still blamed on Israel. None of that reversed the headline.
The pattern repeated in 2021. NGO lists labeled almost every dead adult male a civilian. Analysts then found those same men praised by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as “martyred commanders.” One “farmer” and his teen son turned out to be a field commander and a trainee in combat gear. A “passerby” was a Qassam Brigade operative near a training site. Rocket debris that killed a family was from a Hamas launch that fell short. By the time these facts surfaced, diplomats had moved on to condemning “disproportionate” response. The human shields tactic had worked again. If civilians deter a strike, Hamas wins. If civilians die and cameras roll, Hamas wins twice.
The “apartheid” label shows the laundering mechanism. A Palestinian NGO pushes the analogy for years. A large international NGO then adopts it, packaging the same talking points as a 200-page report. Media amplifies it. Campus activists adopt it. UN investigators cite it. The word becomes “common sense” in elite circles, detached from law and from Israel’s reality as a democracy with equal rights for its Arab citizens and a territorial dispute next door. One assertion. Five echoes. Instant orthodoxy.
UN inquiries add a seal of faux neutrality. After the 2021 war, the Human Rights Council created a permanent “root causes” commission led by figures with long anti-Israel records. One member even babbled about the “Jewish lobby” on tape and kept his post. Reports were prewritten in spirit. The logo did the rest. The Goldstone episode still instructs: the Council’s 2009 mission accused Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. Years later Judge Goldstone recanted the core claim. The retraction landed with a whisper. The original accusation is still quoted.
It all forms a closed loop. NGOs cite each other. Academics cite NGOs. Reporters cite both. Then NGOs cite the coverage and the “scholarship.” Try breaking the cycle with a sober rebuttal and you’ll get a page A17 brief long after the front-page blast. The record gets corrected in archives. The policy damage stays.
Lawfare is not just a foreign sport. It plays at home, in our courts, universities, HR offices, and payments platforms. The aim is simple: make critics of extremism shut up or pay dearly for speaking.
Start with SLAPPs. You publish evidence that a “charity” fronts for Hamas. Or you name a financier. Instead of a rebuttal, you get a lawsuit. Not to win on the merits. To bleed you on process and frighten everyone else. Rachel Ehrenfeld learned that the hard way when a Saudi billionaire sued her in London over a book sold almost nowhere in Britain. She refused to appear. Default judgment. Message received. Only after that stunt did New York and then Congress pass laws blocking foreign libel tourism. Europe still invites it.
The tactic scales. In the U.S., CAIR dragged critics through court for years. One case ended only when discovery threatened to expose records. In France, historian Georges Bensoussan was prosecuted for “incitement” after quoting an Algerian sociologist on antisemitism. He was acquitted. The trial did the work. Every journalist who watched took notes: risk your mortgage if you write plainly about Islamist realities.
Next comes speech policing. Democracies hate hate. Good. But “hate speech” codes and campus rules now often muzzle those who name jihadist ideology while leaving actual incitement to fester. A British cop will knock on a citizen’s door over a blunt tweet. A radical preacher who flirts with the line keeps his slot until after the damage. On American campuses, veterans of the IDF or reformist Muslims get labeled “unsafe” and disinvited. The point is not safety. The point is veto power over uncomfortable facts.
Add institutional leverage. Activists file professional complaints to shred reputations. Professors who document radicalization face inquisition letters. Lawyers who defend soldiers get harassed by regulatory bodies until they run out of hours. Banks and payment processors, spooked by campaigns, cut off groups that expose extremism with vague “terms of service” violations. A country that cannot move money cannot move arguments. At the same time, “charities” with clean logos and dirty partners keep their tax status and their accounts.
Process becomes punishment. The UK learned this after Iraq. A law firm solicited hundreds of abuse claims against British troops. Years and millions later, most “war crimes” collapsed as fraud. The lawyer was struck off. The soldiers were still dragged through a lost decade of suspicion. That is lawfare’s dividend: a demoralized military and a headline that lingers long after the retraction.
Visa games play, too. Reformist Muslim voices get bottled at the border after smear campaigns brand them “far right.” Firebrands slide in to rally crowds. Bureaucrats choose the quiet life and stamp accordingly.
The chilling effect is measurable. Reports unwritten. Courses redesigned. Editors who say “not worth the fight.” People who know better keep quiet, then tell themselves that silence is civility. It is not. It is surrender to a tactic designed to make you doubt that telling the truth is worth the trouble.
Accountability matters. Real wrongdoing by officials or soldiers must be punished. Lawfare is not accountability. It is punishment without proof. It is law used to hamstring those who defend liberal order, while those who despise it dance through the gaps.
International bias, the NGO–media echo, and domestic intimidation all meet on the battlefield. They shape commanders’ choices. They sap political will. They tilt the field against the side that plays by rules.
Name the tactic. Strip it of its mystique. Then set firm rules: robust anti-SLAPP laws, due-process discipline in universities and professions, viewpoint-neutral speech policies, financial rights for lawful advocacy, equal enforcement against genuine incitement.
Modern Western armies bring lawyers to war. They should. Law disciplines force. But lawfare turns that virtue into a vise. It pushes commanders past compliance into paralysis. That is the point.
Rules of engagement already require distinction and proportionality. Western forces honor both. Lawfare adds a shadow code: if a civilian might be harmed, don’t shoot or you will be tried on TV and in court. So pilots wave off strikes at the last second because a figure walks into the crosshairs. Special forces hold fire as a gunman sprints into a crowded home. Under the law, enemies who hide behind civilians bear responsibility. In practice, democracies still hold back. Terrorists learn the lesson. Use human shields and live to fight again.
A target package that once took hours now takes days. Intelligence locates a senior commander in an apartment. Lawyers model blast radii. Ministers game out the UN session and the ICC headline. The window closes. Hamas learned to surround decision-makers with women and children. Israel sometimes lets them go. Those men then direct the next salvo at Israeli cities. In Afghanistan, “courageous restraint” sounded noble. It often meant insurgents escaped to plant the roadside bomb that killed a family the next day.
Sometimes restraint costs more lives on the spot. In Jenin in 2002, the IDF cleared a terror redoubt house by house to spare civilians rather than use airpower. Twenty-three soldiers died in booby-trapped alleys. A “massacre” rumor raced around the world. It was false. About 52 Palestinians died, most of them fighters. The smear still shortened the operation and let gunmen melt away. Israel’s caution did not buy it mercy. Lawfare turned Israel’s morality against it.
Targets that lose legal protection still become untouchable for optics. A mosque used as an armory is a military site under the law. Strike it and the image detonates around the world. Insurgents exploited mosques in Iraq and the U.S. often held fire. Hamas buried a command complex beneath Shifa Hospital. Everyone in Gaza knew it. For years Israel avoided the place. When evidence finally forced a careful entry, outrage arrived on cue. Lawfare would keep a terror nerve center immune forever because it sits under sickbeds.
In 2014, as Hamas flooded the media with wreckage, Europe wobbled. London reviewed export licenses. Madrid talked embargoes. Washington slowed deliveries and leaned hard for a halt. Hamas read the room. If it could survive and generate enough photographs, allies would “rein in” Israel and call it balance. By day eleven in 2021, the cease-fire arrived. Hamas declared victory. Then it rearmed.
UN cease-fires lock in failure. Resolution 1701 ended the 2006 war with promises. Hezbollah kept its rockets and built more under the nose of UNIFIL. The terror statelet survived and grew. The pattern is not subtle. If the IDF or any Western military had unlimited time and no diplomatic choke chain, it could dismantle a militia that embeds in apartments and schools. It never has unlimited time. The enemy hangs on, sacrifices its own civilians wholesale, and counts on the world to stop the democracy first. Often it does.
Information war seals the deal. Get the legal labels into the bloodstream early and the accused fights uphill. “War crimes.” “Genocide.” “Apartheid.” Journalists ask spokespeople about indictments, not victory. Even when the facts flip, the narrative sticks. In October 2023, an explosion at a Gaza hospital compound became “Israel bombed a hospital.” Protests ignited. Within days, open-source evidence showed an errant rocket from Gaza likely caused the blast. The correction never caught the original lie. Politicians still cite the myth. Commanders take note. One image like that and the phones ring off the hook from friendly capitals. So they trim objectives or stop early. The enemy keeps breathing.
Lawfare forces short-term image over long-term security. It saves lives today to cost more lives tomorrow. Every “round” that ends with Hamas or Hezbollah intact guarantees the next round. Civilians pay again. Troops pay again. The same is true beyond Israel. In Afghanistan, rules that barred firing without perfect visual certainty saved a few at night and killed more the next morning. This is the brutal math. Lawfare pretends there is none.
It also erodes faith in law. Soldiers learn that the side that follows rules gets punished with process while the side that celebrates murder gets a pass. Veterans say “they wouldn’t let us win” and tune out the Geneva Conventions. Israelis who grew up with tohar haneshek ask why they should trust tribunals that ignore human shields and reward liars. That is dangerous. The answer is not to discard law. It is to reclaim it.
Reclaiming law means insisting on facts before verdicts. It means calling human shields what they are and assigning blame accordingly. It means allies backing each other when they fight terrorists who hide under infants. It means stiffening domestic spines against performative outrage. It means refusing to let a UN logo launder bias into binding “truth.” It means teaching editors and courts that a Hamas press release is not a casualty ledger.
Law should be a shield, not a trap. We built courts and treaties to guard life and liberty. Lawfare flips that purpose. It dresses propaganda as procedure and ties the hands of the people who actually defend free societies. Time to take the law back.
Start with the forums most easily gamed. If a UN inquiry cannot meet basic standards of impartiality, transparency, and equal scrutiny of all parties, it should not exist. No more “investigations” staffed by activists who declared the verdict on Twitter last year. No permanent agenda item singling out the only liberal democracy in the Middle East while serial abusers glide past the microphone. Donor states hold the purse. Use it. Condition UNRWA funds on vetting staff, fixing textbooks, and keeping rockets out of schools. If an agency will not reform, redirect aid to providers who will.
Armies must fight with law and with clarity. Publish plain-English urban warfare doctrines that explain how distinction and proportionality work when the enemy hides in hospitals and schools. Pre-declare lawful tactics for human shield scenarios. Collect and release evidence in real time. When a strike is lawful, show why. When a rumor is false, kill it within hours, not weeks. Create integrated legal-intel-comms teams that plan for the lawfare hit as carefully as they plan for the raid.
Stop playing only defense in court. File cases against the people who use human shields and fake surrenders. Submit their crimes to any venue that will hear them. Even when enforcement is limited, you shift the frame: not “state versus victims,” but “terrorist commanders versus law.”
Teach the basics again. Most citizens, journalists, and students have never been taught what the laws of war actually require. Distinction. Proportionality. Necessity. Perfidy. Human shields. These are not abstractions. They decide whether a neighborhood survives. Say clearly that the party who turns an ICU into a bunker bears moral and legal blame for the tragedy that follows. That is not spin. That is the law.
Chapter 20: Propaganda and Narrative Control
Modern wars are fought on screens first. If you can seize the storyline, you can make a democracy doubt its own right to defend itself while you launder aggression as justice. That is not a side show. It is a strategy.
A tiny emirate built a very loud mouth. Qatar bankrolls Al Jazeera and uses it as a strategic asset. The network’s Arabic channel did not simply “cover” the Arab Spring; it cheered Muslim Brotherhood movements and attacked their rivals. In 2013, enough staff in Cairo quit over the slant that the walkout itself became news. During the Iraq War, Al Jazeera looped civilian carnage and hosted Saddam’s spokesmen while saying little about Saddam’s decades of mass murder. It railed against the United States even as American jets launched from a U.S. base on Qatari soil. That two-step is the point: Qatar plays host and arsonist at the same time, and Al Jazeera supplies the fire.
On Israel, the pattern hardens. Hamas gunmen become “martyrs” and “fighters.” Israeli dead are “settlers,” if mentioned at all. Rocket fire is “resistance.” Israeli strikes are “massacres.” Context fades. Human shields vanish. The result is a moral universe in which only one actor can ever be guilty and only one cause can ever be righteous. It is propaganda sold as passion.
The effect is real. In every Gaza war of the past decade, Al Jazeera’s live shots of rubble and grief set the global mood before facts caught up. That coverage primed publics, fed UN chambers, and teed up “war crimes” claims within days. By the time evidence surfaced of rockets launched from courtyards or bunkers under clinics, the narrative high ground was already occupied.
Qatar did not stop at cameras. It bought classrooms. Since 2001 it has been the single largest foreign donor to American universities, with gifts and contracts measured in the billions. Cornell’s branch in Doha alone sits on roughly a billion and a half dollars. Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Northwestern, and others took huge checks to anchor campuses and programs tied to Doha. In Britain, Qatari money endowed chairs and centers. The funds are “restricted.” They steer agendas. Middle East centers dependent on Qatari grants do not usually host panels on Hamas repression or Doha’s patronage networks. They do mainstream Brotherhood fellow-travelers as “reformers” and recast Israel through the settler-colonial lens. Students marinated in that stew become the editors, NGO staffers, and junior diplomats who carry those frames into newsrooms and ministries.
You saw it on October 7, 2023. After Hamas’s massacre, student statements at elite campuses rationalized the slaughter as “decolonial resistance.” That vocabulary did not appear by magic. It was taught, funded, and laundered through prestige.
Watch the pipeline run in a day. Morning: Al Jazeera airs a child pulled from rubble, pins it on Israel, omits that a third of Gaza rockets fall short. Afternoon: the clip floods social feeds with “Genocide” hashtags. Evening: an emergency campus rally repeats the claims and live streams them. Night: NGOs and sympathetic scholars draft an open letter to the ICC. Next morning: lawmakers wave the letter in hearings and Al Jazeera reports the “global outrage” it helped to manufacture. The circle closes. The lie arrives first. Corrections limp behind.
