“Justice needs to remain still, otherwise the scales will move about and it won’t be possible to make a just verdict.” — Franz Kafka, The Trial
The law, at least on paper, is not complicated. The International Committee of the Red Cross states plainly that international humanitarian law prohibits attacks directed against civilians and prohibits indiscriminate attacks. Human Rights Watch says the same: civilians may never be the deliberate target of attack, and parties to war must distinguish civilians from combatants at all times. Those are not obscure principles buried in some licentious footnote of legal commentary. They are among the most basic and important rules of modern warfare.
And yet something strange happens when the civilians under fire are Israeli. The rules do not formally disappear; no treaty is amended; no tribunal announces that Jews are suddenly excluded from human protection. The language remains universal and the declarations remain solemn; however, the scales begin to move and urgency dissipates into a languishing procedure. Clarity becomes equivocal. A population can spend years running to shelters under rocket, missile, and drone attack, and the international response somehow remains cooler, detached and more transient than the legal principle itself would seem to require.
This is not a matter of isolated launches or rhetorical exaggeration. By late December 2023, public tallies were already placing the number of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel at roughly 11,000 to 12,000. Reuters later reported that over the first year of the war Israel had faced more than 26,000 rockets from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Times of Israel also reported that the Houthis alone had launched 40 missiles and 320 drones at Israel since the start of the war. ACLED, one of the more sober conflict-monitoring organizations, said Iran and Hezbollah launched more than 850 missile and drone attacks on Israel during March 2026 alone, with the pace rising again in early April.
A civilian society living under that kind of bombardment is still a civilian society. The law does not become less binding because many of the projectiles are intercepted, because Israelis have shelters, or because some of the dead are “only” counted in dozens rather than hundreds. The whole point of the prohibition on deliberate and indiscriminate attacks is that civilians are not supposed to be fair game for coercion, terror, or attrition. If missile and drone warfare aimed at urban populations is not a paradigmatic violation of civilian immunity, then the phrase has lost almost all meaning.
The modern logic of such attacks is not new. One can trace it back at least to the Nazi V-1 and V-2 campaigns against London, when long-range weapons were used not simply to strike but to terrorize an urban population and break civilian morale. More than 8,000 V-1s were launched against London from June 1944 to March 1945, and the V-1 itself was openly called a “Vengeance Weapon.” Technology has changed. Guidance systems have improved. Drone swarms now accompany missile barrages. But the governing idea remains grimly familiar: when you cannot or will not defeat a society cleanly in the field, you turn civilian life into the battlefield.
What is remarkable is not only that Israel’s enemies have adopted this method, but that so much of the international community has adapted itself to the method’s repetition. Even Human Rights Watch acknowledged in September 2025 that Iranian missile strikes on Israeli civilians were likely war crimes, noting that at least five ballistic missiles struck populated areas in Israel and that large munitions hit far from military targets. In other words, the basic legal characterization is not mysterious. The rule is known. The offense is recognizable. The problem is not ignorance; the problem is the poverty of follow-through.
Consider Majdal Shams. On July 27, 2024, a rocket strike on a soccer field in the Druze town killed 12 children and teenagers. Reuters and AP both reported the deaths. There were political condemnations and statements, the usual diplomatic incense, but there was no comparable juridical frenzy, no lasting international fixation, no rolling spectacle of subpoenas, warrants, emergency lawfare, and moral theatricality centered on those dead children. The world issued its ritual words and moved on while the crickets could be heard chirping over the blood-stained field where the children’s bodies had lain.
That asymmetry is the heart of the matter. When Israel is accused, the language of international law becomes highly animated, highly particularized, and almost liturgical in its intensity. Entire institutional vocabularies awaken. Learned arguments proliferate. Prosecutorial energy sharpens. But when Israeli civilians are the ones driven into shelters in Haifa, Tel Aviv, Kiryat Shmona, or Majdal Shams, the response too often collapses into brief sympathy without consequence.
Reuters reported on April 6, 2026 that four people were killed in Haifa after a missile strike hit a residential building. The same week, Reuters reported a Hezbollah missile launch that triggered sirens in parts of Israel, including Tel Aviv. AP and other outlets described recurring Houthi and Hezbollah attacks as part of the same broad pattern. The attacks are current. The law is clear. What is missing is equal moral force.
One begins to suspect that what calls itself international law is too often something more discretionary: a language of righteousness deployed where fashionable, softened where inconvenient, and in some cases used to immure reality behind procedure.
The issue is not whether every strike on infrastructure is automatically unlawful, or whether every battlefield claim is simple. War rarely is. The issue is whether the world is willing to say with the same steadiness, when Jews are the victims, that civilian immunity is real, that the intentional or indiscriminate bombardment of towns and cities is criminal, and that prolonged missile terror against a civilian population is not somehow normalized by repetition.
It is hard being a Jew in such a world, because the hypocrisy is so naked once one decides to look at it directly. You hear the endless fulminations of universalism, the pieties about human dignity, the invocations of law, humanity, and conscience. Then Jewish children are blown apart on a field, or families are jolted from sleep into stairwells and shelters by another night of sirens, and the supposedly universal conscience contracts into something selective and bloodless. The law remains on the books. The question is whether Jews are fully counted among those for whom it is meant.
Kafka’s epigraph is the proper place to end because it names the real scandal. Justice cannot wobble with politics and remain justice. If the scales move depending on the identity of the civilian population under fire, then the verdict has already been corrupted before it is spoken. Israeli civilians are either protected by the same law that protects every other civilian population, or the law is no longer universal in any serious sense. Once the scales begin to tremble, once the world discovers ambiguity only when Jews are the ones buried under the rubble, justice has ceased to remain still. And once it no longer remains still, it is no longer justice at all.
