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.

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.