Last December, the student government of the City University of New York (CUNY) Law School adopted a resolution endorsing, “proudly and unapologetically,” the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. At the time, CUNY’s chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez cited a 2016 executive order from then-Governor Andrew Cuomo, which, he argued, precluded the public law school from participating in or supporting BDS. The matter might have ended there, Steven Lubet suggests, noting that many similar BDS initiatives at schools across the country have produced little practical effect. Last month, however, the law-school faculty council unanimously endorsed the student resolution, a move that Lubet argues “might jeopardize the law school’s legitimacy.”

The student government’s impressively researched boycott resolution covers six pages, with twenty paragraphs of accusations against Israel and 26 footnotes. It protests every conceivable university connection to Israel, from using Dell computers (because CEO Michael Dell “is an Israel backer”), to free tuition for NYPD officers (because of their exchange programs with Israel), to serving Sabra hummus.

It gets worse. . . . The scope of [the student government resolution] is only revealed by a link in a footnote, which leads to an extensive BDS website. A few clicks will then take readers to the “Guidelines for the International Academic Boycott of Israel,” which include “the cancellation or annulment of events, activities, agreements, or projects involving Israeli academic institutions or that otherwise promote the normalization of Israel in the global academy, [including] conferences, symposia, workshops, book and museum exhibits.”

If honored by any law school, these limitations would constitute a blatant violation of academic freedom for future teachers, scholars, or students interested in understanding Israel—beyond its purported crimes—in their research or education. At a public law school, such sweeping viewpoint restrictions on conferences, symposia and book exhibits—prohibiting anything that “normalizes” Israel—also violate the First Amendment.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].