The Jewish state’s High Court of Justice heard arguments yesterday about whether Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu should be allowed to form a new government despite the fact that the attorney general intends to indict him on charges of corruption. Previously, the court asserted that it is empowered to issue such a ruling, even though no law prohibits an indicted politician from serving as prime minister. If the court concludes that he cannot serve, the near-inevitable result would be to render the most recent election, like the two that preceded it, inconclusive—meaning that a fourth would take place in the fall. In March, before the current coalition was formed, David M. Weinberg warned of the possibility of such an intervention. He has republished his column on the subject, as it is now even more relevant:

The court is fond of a newfangled term that [its] former president Aharon Barak concocted, called “essential democracy,” which it contrasts to pedestrian “functional democracy,” where the ballot box is supreme. This means that the court takes on itself a made-up responsibility to set “essential” norms and standards of “decency” for public life, and to apply “broad interpretations” of the law to fit its own perceptions of “reasonability,” “values,” “balance,” “equality,” and “propriety”—even if the law books don’t contain any such terms or prescriptions.

The Israeli public decided [at the ballot box] that Netanyahu can be prime minister and a defendant at the same time. After all, the Blue and White opposition party made this the central issue of its campaign [but won fewer seats than Netanyahu’s Likud].

The Supreme Court already has invented gobbledygook terms like “the enlightened values of essential democracy” based on “objective purposes” of the law. This means disconnecting law from the “subjective” intentions of lawmakers and supplanting them with the “objective ends” of democracy as dictated from on high. In my view, the court mustn’t dare arrogate to itself powers which blatantly usurp and undermine Israeli democracy. It would cause a constitutional crisis that could rip apart Israeli society, and it might destroy the court itself.

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.