By Mathew Giagnorio, November 12, 2025
The rules of war were created for a world that no longer exists. They were designed to regulate conflicts between states – actors with borders, uniforms, and at least a minimal respect for order. The Geneva Conventions assumed reciprocity: that both sides would follow the same moral code, even during armed conflict. But what happens when one side rejects those norms entirely? What happens when the law begins protecting those who operate outside it?
The war between Israel and Hamas exposes that contradiction with brutal clarity. On October 8, 2023, Israel did something unprecedented: it declared a formal state of war – not against another nation, but against a terrorist movement. The decision recognized what much of the international system refuses to confront – that Hamas is not a resistance movement or a political party, but a death cult that massacres civilians, hides behind them, and celebrates it. Yet in the eyes of international law, Hamas remains a “belligerent,” entitled to protections it has never earned.
That legal fiction has become the foundation of a moral farce. By invoking wartime authority, Israel triggered the full machinery of the Law of Armed Conflict. It must demonstrate proportionality, distinction, and necessity in every strike. Meanwhile, Hamas livestreams atrocities and then hides in hospitals, knowing that each civilian death it engineers will be tallied against Israel in global opinion and international courts. This isn’t war – it’s lawfare, the weaponization of humanitarian norms to discredit liberal democracies and shield those who commit war crimes.
The International Criminal Court’s decision in 2024 to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders alongside Hamas commanders marked the collapse of legal neutrality. To equate a liberal democracy defending its citizens with a jihadist organization dedicated to genocide is not impartial justice – it is ideological jurisprudence. The ICC was established to restrain tyranny, not constrain democracies. Its equivalence between aggressor and defender undermines its own legitimacy and reveals a deeper crisis: international law has become detached from the moral order it once reflected.
This crisis extends far beyond Gaza. Iran funds and arms Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, using proxies to wage wars it denies fighting, while sheltering behind the sovereignty it cynically exploits. Russia, too, blends statehood with criminality – deploying mercenaries, abducting children, and erasing borders – all while sitting on the UN Security Council that is supposed to enforce those borders. The pattern is unmistakable: rogue states and terrorist movements now exploit the very legal frameworks that were designed to restrain them.
Democracies, by contrast, still abide by the rules. They publish casualty data, issue evacuation warnings, and investigate their own militaries. And for this, they are punished. Every act of restraint becomes evidence of guilt; every transparent report becomes ammunition for condemnation. In the eyes of the new moral arbiters, good faith is proof of liability. The law’s neutrality, meant to ensure fairness, now serves those who reject fairness altogether.
The result is a grotesque inversion: liberal democracies are treated as war criminals for defending themselves, while regimes and militias that glorify mass murder are treated as legitimate political actors. The UN Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined. The International Committee of the Red Cross agonizes over fuel shortages in Gaza but says little about Israeli hostages or sexual violence. Neutrality, in practice, has become complicity.
This is not merely a legal debate – it’s a civilizational one. The Enlightenment project that produced modern law assumed a shared moral baseline: that life has value, that civilians should be spared, that wars have limits. When that baseline erodes, so does the law’s legitimacy. Hamas, Iran, and Russia have each discovered a truth the architects of Geneva never imagined: that the law itself can be turned into a weapon. And the West, bound by its own conscience, hesitates even to recognize it.
Canada is not immune to this confusion. It has turned a blind eye to the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that have crossed the line from political expression into intimidation and open antisemitism. While Ottawa designates Hamas as a terrorist entity, the language of our institutions increasingly mirrors its narratives. MPs accuse Israel of genocide while ignoring the deliberate targeting of civilians. NGOs issue statements on “occupation” but remain silent on mass rape and hostage-taking. The vocabulary of human rights has become detached from the reality of human wrongs.
If international law can no longer distinguish between those who uphold it and those who annihilate it, then it ceases to be law at all. It becomes theatre – performed by democracies, exploited by dictators, applauded by cynics. The challenge of our time is not merely to enforce the law, but to rescue it from those who would use it to destroy the very civilization that created it.
Because in the end, a world where the law protects the lawless is not a world governed by justice. It is a world ruled by impunity – and democracies will not survive long in it.
Mathew Giagnorio is a writer and journalist whose work examines the resilience of liberal democracy amid rising ideological extremism. He is the founder of A Further Inquiry on Substack, where he writes on the moral, cultural, and historical foundations of Canadian democracy. His work focuses on Islamism, illiberal movements, and the preservation of free expression and civic integrity in Western societies.
