In December, Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), issued a 120-page brief arguing that the court should consider the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and parts of Jerusalem as the already extant “state of Palestine”—as a precursor to trying Israel for committing crimes against humanity there. Maurice Hirsch comments:

In order to invent a state that does not exist, and has never existed, Bensouda needed to complete a complex puzzle. On the one hand, she had to negate or ignore critical documents that designated for Israel all the areas she now claims to be part of the “state of Palestine.” These documents include the Balfour Declaration, the decisions made by the allied forces in San Remo following World War I, and the League of Nations mandate for Palestine. All these documents reaffirmed the historic connection of the Jewish people to the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and granted that area to the Jewish people for its future state.

On the other hand, she needed to discount . . . the Arab rejection of the [1947] UN Partition Plan, turn the 1948-9 armistice lines—which the Arab leaders demanded never be seen as borders—into borders, and negate clear provisions of the Oslo Accords that specifically deny the Palestinian Authority state status. These acrobatics were possible because the proceedings against Israel are not founded in either fact or law, but are entirely politically motivated.

Hirsch urges Jerusalem to discourage the ICC from making such a decision by holding the United Nations—which has some authority over the court, and has long cultivated the irrational and legally incoherent treatment of Israel that Bensouda has endorsed—responsible:

Israel should carry out a political preemptive strike by informing the United Nations that should the ICC decide to invent “Palestine,” all UN staff in Israel will be declared personae non gratae. First on that list would be the UN secretary-general’s special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov, who recently called for “Palestinian unity” against Israel. While this call may seem innocuous to some, in practice Mladenov called for Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud . . . to join hands with the internationally recognized terror organization Hamas.

Next, Israel should demand that the UN immediately vacate the Governor’s Palace compound in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood. The compound is home to the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, the UN force created to monitor the 1949 armistice lines. If the ICC invents [a Palestinian state] and sets its borders, thereby nullifying the armistice agreements, there is no need whatsoever for this UN force to remain in Israel.

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.