On Friday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled that its jurisdiction extends over the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and eastern Jerusalem—despite the fact that Israel is not a member of the court. To provide a logical framework for the decision, the court created the legal fiction of a Palestinian state with borders corresponding to the territory seized by Egypt and Jordan during their invasion of Mandatory Palestine in 1948. This ruling makes it possible for the court’s prosecutor to continue with an investigation into her claims of a “reasonable basis to believe” that Israel committed “war crimes” while responding to murderous attacks from Gaza, and by allowing Jewish citizens to live in the West Bank. Alan Baker comments:

What was intended to be an independent juridical body devoted to preventing the impunity enjoyed by the most serious and atrocious war criminals, by bringing them to justice, is now being politically manipulated against the one state that since the early 1950s has consistently advocated the establishment of such a body, the state of Israel.

The irony is all the more evident given the legal acrobatics of the politically oriented and politically influenced prosecutor of the court, and the majority of judges of the [court’s] pretrial chamber, in their obstinate and flawed insistence on attributing elements of statehood and sovereignty to a Palestinian entity that is distinctly—legally, politically, and by all international standards—not a state.

[Because it] is not a state, then it cannot claim to have any sovereign territory, and thus, even according to the statute of the ICC, which is open to states only, it cannot be the subject of the court’s jurisdiction. Thus the Palestinians have absolutely no standing in the court. This decision by the pretrial chamber to accept the contention of the prosecutor, based purely on nonbinding, non-legal, and unauthoritative political resolutions of the UN General Assembly, defies all legal logic.

[Thus] the court is permitting itself to become irreparably prejudiced. Any juridical integrity, credibility, and bona fides that it might have had are being irreparably harmed.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.