Michelle Sieff has an interesting piece here in which she argues  against what she sees as a partial application of human rights law to Israel’s responses to Hamas. Her main  point is that the goals being pursued by an organization have to be considered when assessing what sort of response to it is justifiable and warns of the consequences if this is not done:

… history has shown that the failure to examine goals and ideology early on in a conflict can have catastrophic consequences. Historians and human rights activists have come to believe that the Khmer Rouge’s slaughter of more than 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 was a genocide. Scholars have reached this conclusion based on an intelligent analysis of the Khmer Rouge’s racist and totalitarian ideology, which had been publicly articulated by the early 1970s. Yet, as Samantha Power reported in her landmark 2002 book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” the leading human rights group at the time, Amnesty International, did not sound the alarm about the enormous threat posed by the Khmer Rouge. Nor, for that matter, did Amnesty describe the slaughter as a genocide until long after anything could have been done about it. Perhaps Amnesty missed the genocide because it didn’t pay sufficient heed to the Khmer Rouge’s ideology.