Last week, the Israeli attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, announced his intention, pending a formal hearing, to indict Prime Minister Netanyahu for bribery and the vaguely defined crime of breach of public trust. The hearing will take place after the April 9 national election, in which the prime minister remains a front runner. At issue in two of the three charges is the accusation that Netanyahu offered favorable policies in exchange for positive coverage in the press. Avi Bell argues that Mandelblit’s case rests on seriously stretching the definition of the crimes in question:

One way to look at the investigation is as a neutral application of a new understanding of the traditional crimes of bribery and breach of public trust. Under this interpretation, Mandelblit’s capacious understanding . . . may be unprecedented, but will now be applied across the board to all public officials and politicians. The horrifying result will be police oversight of nearly all interactions between the media and public officials.

When the evening news devotes fifteen minutes of generally positive coverage to [Netanyahu’s challenger] Benny Gantz, or to Mandelblit himself, producers and reporters may have to expect a summons to a police interrogation where they will be asked to demonstrate the purity of their motives. Politicians and public officials in constant touch with the media—that is, everyone in public life—will always find themselves on the verge of conviction of the felony of taking bribes, or, at least, “breach of public trust.” The center of Israeli political life will move to interrogation rooms in police stations.

The other interpretation is that the investigations should be seen as Netanyahu and his supporters paint them: special rules that are meant to apply only to Netanyahu. Israeli political life will not move to the police station, but will face the constant threat that law enforcement authorities may suddenly decide to apply “Bibi rules.” The harm to Israeli democracy of double standards in criminal law based on prosecutor’s will would be incalculable. And law-enforcement officials could never be seen as nonpartisan again.

There’s ample evidence for both interpretations of the prosecution—neutral and partisan—but it doesn’t really matter which is right: both indicate a severe crisis in Israel’s democratic governance.

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.