On Friday, campus police arrested nineteen students at California’s highly selective Pomona College when they stormed the offices of the college president during an anti-Israel protest. Meanwhile, Harvard decided to give around-the-clock protection to the “apartheid wall”—a row of posters with anti-Israel slogans—just a few months after it told Jewish students not to leave a menorah on the quad overnight since it could be vandalized.

The lesson from these two cases is that universities have considerable leeway in how they deal with the wave of vicious anti-Israel activism on their campuses, and with the anti-Semitism and harassment of Jewish students that have accompanied it. And when university administrations fail, there are ways that the government can step in without infringing on students’ or colleges’ freedom of speech. Peter Cordi spoke with three First Amendment experts about why this is so. The bottom line was expressed by Jeffrey Robbins:

Robbins explained that the matter comes down to two main principles; one being that speech is protected, and the other being that the speech and conduct “is in fact intended to hurt Jews and to drive a wedge between them and their identity.” He noted that there is a point when otherwise protected speech creates a hostile environment and can subject people or schools to liability under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. . . .

Robbins said the response to disruptions of university or college events “should be a no-brainer,” and argued that “if a university or college is serious about dealing with this stuff, then those people [disrupting events and classes] should be expelled.”

When anti-Semitic incidents go unpunished, Robbins said, “This implies something nefarious; that universities and colleges lack the guts or the will when it comes to Jewish students to enforce the rules that you just know they would not have to be pressured into enforcing if it were other groups.”

When universities who have been warned but have not addressed the issue are sued and have to “cough up damages,” he argued, “You may see them acting in a totally different way. And that is the kind of lawsuit which it seems to me needs to be explored. Quickly.”

Israel’s goals of freeing the hostages and defeating Hamas (the latter necessary to prevent further hostage taking) are to some extent contradictory, since Yahya Sinwar, the ruler of the Gaza Strip, will only turn over hostages in exchange for concessions. But Jacob Nagel remains convinced that Jerusalem should continue to pursue both goals:

Only consistent military pressure on Hamas can lead to the hostages’ release, either through negotiation or military operation. There’s little chance of reaching a deal with Hamas using current approaches, including the latest Egyptian proposal. Israeli concessions would only encourage further pressure from Hamas.

There is no incentive for Hamas to agree to a deal, especially since it believes it can achieve its full objectives without one. Unfortunately, many contribute to this belief, mainly from outside of Israel, but also from within.

Recent months saw Israel mistakenly refraining from entering Rafah for several reasons. Initially, the main [reason was to try] to negotiate a deal with Hamas. However, as it became clear that Hamas was uninterested, and its only goal was to return to its situation before October 7—where Hamas and its leadership control Gaza, Israeli forces are out, and there are no changes in the borders—the deal didn’t mature.