Although Alan Dershowitz is skeptical about the reforms to the judicial system currently being considered by the Israeli government, he finds the attention they are receiving outside the Jewish state entirely unmerited:

The world paid little attention when left-wing Democrats demanded the packing of the U.S. Supreme Court and limitations on the terms and powers of the justices following the controversial overturning of Roe v. Wade. Even when President Joe Biden appointed a commission to study these issues and make recommendations, the international community ignored it. But the world seems obsessed with the Israeli debate, as it does about so many other issues relating to Israel. This obsession is part of the dangerous double standard that the international community has long imposed on the nation state of the Jewish people.

The international community has little or no stake in the outcome of this debate. It will have little effect, if any, on any peace process or on the Abraham Accords or on Israel’s relationships with other countries.

And what of the dire warnings, exported from the pages of Israeli newspapers to those of the New York Times and the Guardian, that democracy is under threat in the Jewish state? Dershowitz continues:

Democracy produced the new government [now pushing for judicial reform], and democracy produced the protests against it. So much for the fear mongering among those who are telling the world that Israel is on the verge of becoming an autocracy—or in the false and dangerous words of some extremists, that it has already become the Germany of the 1930s. . . . I don’t believe that the Israeli people will easily succumb to the temptations of authoritarianism—and certainly not fascism. They are too independent, opinionated, and ornery. They have chutzpah, in the best sense of that term. More importantly, and more relevant to this discussion, if the pendulum were ever to swing in the direction of fascism—which I do not believe it will—the Supreme Court alone will not save it.

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.