In the wake of the Israeli court’s decision overturning the deal to exploit the country’s offshore gas reserves, Ayelet Shaked, the justice minister, has joined the chorus of voices criticizing the ruling. She has since been attacked for her comments on the grounds that it is inappropriate for a sitting cabinet member to express disagreement with the supreme court. Eugene Kontorovich argues that such criticism is not only appropriate but important:

The legitimacy of such criticism can be seen from the very form that judicial decisions take. When courts in countries with Anglo-American legal traditions, [including Israel], decide even routine cases, they issue written opinions. . . .

Why should the court not simply point to the winner? It is because the force of an opinion of the court derives from its logic and reasoning, from how well it follows prior cases and existing law. Opinions are published because the government and public are not supposed to nod meekly and accept the court’s decisions. The requirement to reveal their reasoning presupposes the legitimacy of criticizing decisions based on their rationale, or lack thereof.

All this is even more relevant for the Israel’s supreme court, which has given itself the power to negate the action of elected governments even without any written constitution, based on general principles like “reasonableness.”

In other Western democracies, the independence of the courts is part of a system of checks and balances—where the courts check the political branches and vice versa. Such checks include the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty that keeps courts from overturning certain laws, or the ability of the government to appoint the judges. In Israel, none of these checks is available. Indeed, political criticism is perhaps the only check there is, and it is minor and ineffective.

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.