While Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), was initially reluctant to launch proceedings against the Jewish state, she has since given in to pressure from the judges themselves and laid the legal groundwork for a formal investigation. This week, Bensouda responded to objections—raised by Germany, Australia, Uganda, and other countries—that the court has no jurisdiction in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Richard Kemp explains:

The court’s founding Rome Statute allows investigations only within the sovereign territories of state parties to the treaty. But the prosecutor has unlawfully accepted delegated jurisdiction over the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and Gaza from what she calls the “State of Palestine.” Palestine is not a state and never has been. . . . Israel, [moreover], is not a state party to the court.

Beyond this narrow legal problem, important though it might be, lies a much broader one:

The ICC was not established to replace national judicial systems but to complement them—to act only where states themselves lack the capability or will to conduct their own investigations and prosecutions. Israel has a long-established and internationally respected legal system, with a record of investigating and bringing charges against those accused of war crimes, which renders the court’s process inadmissible.

As some of us foresaw from the start, the ICC has twisted itself into a political court rather than a serious legal body. Its notorious obsession with Israel is only part of the problem. Following accusations that the court was biased against African states, which led South Africa, Burundi, and Gambia to threaten withdrawal, the ICC has tried to deflect criticism by focusing on Western liberal democracies, alleging large-scale war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. and UK.

This makes the ICC an instrument of “lawfare,” intended to weaponize legal processes to deter or hamper law-abiding Western liberal democracies from fighting to defend themselves, and to undermine their core values.

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.