In December, the U.S. declined to veto UN Security Council Resolution 2334 and therefore allowed it to pass. The resolution declares it illegal for Jews to build homes or live in territory acquired during the 1967 war. It could, argues Josh Halpern, provide a legal basis for litigation against Israel in the International Criminal Court (ICC), thereby serving Mahmoud Abbas’s strategy of bringing international pressure to bear on the Jewish state:

As a political matter, the resolution’s legal language vindicates the Palestinian story of dispossession and could facilitate prosecutions of Israeli officials at the ICC. . . . [It] stabilizes the ground on which [the ICC prosecutor, Fatou] Bensouda might stand, were she to press for a “formal investigation” of Israel’s settlement activities. To move beyond the “preliminary examination” stage, the situation in the West Bank must satisfy the Rome Statute’s dual jurisdictional requirements of complementarity and gravity. The former restricts the ICC to cases where the state is “unwilling or unable” to investigate and punish violators, and here Israel’s settlement activities appear distinctly vulnerable. Not only do most settlements reflect official state policy, but Israel’s High Court of Justice has also deemed their status largely [outside its jurisdiction].

[But] the gravity requirement [is] where 2334 could have the greatest impact. To maximize the court’s legitimacy and limited resources, ICC prosecutors have so far focused primarily on physical brutalities like murder and sexual violence. . . . Resolution 2334 could alter this calculus. . . . [Its] renewed expression of “grave concern” about Israel’s “flagrant violation” of “international law” could prove decisive.

The approach certainly risks politicizing the court’s docket and straining its legitimacy, but it would also help defuse oft-cited concerns that the ICC has become an “African Criminal Court.” Signaling her sensitivity to this problem, the prosecutor recently promised to reshuffle her prosecutorial priorities, with a particular focus on two crimes, both of which the settlements are alleged to violate: “illegal exploitation of natural resources [and] dispossession of land.”

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.