On Tuesday, Israeli troops entered the West Bank city of Jenin to apprehend the terrorist who murdered Hallel and Yagel Yaniv on February 6. As often happens during such raids, they were drawn into a shoot-out, resulting in deaths of the warranted terrorist and five of his associates. The wave of terror over the past year has made such incidents frequent; Akiva Van Koningsveld examines their permissibility under international law:

International law is not “law” in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, it is a combination of treaties and agreements between and among numerous sovereign nations and other subjects of international law. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, the relevant agreements are the Oslo Accords, a series of interim arrangements forged in the 1990s between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Crucially, the IDF’s withdrawal from [parts of the West Bank] was conditioned on the Palestinian leadership vowing to fight terrorism and incitement to hatred. . . . International law, specifically the Vienna Convention—which codifies universal rules governing treaties—embraces the principle that international agreements are reciprocal. Accordingly, if the Palestinian Authority (PA) refuses to act against incessant terrorism emanating from areas under its control in a way that constitutes a “material breach,” . . . Israel would likely be entitled to suspend “in whole or in part” its redeployment from parts of the West Bank.

It is safe to say that the PA’s record of compliance with the Oslo Accords, which are binding agreements under international law, has been poor in recent years, likely to the point where it justifies Israeli countermeasures in accordance with the Vienna Convention. [By contrast], the Israeli government has a duty to act against terror groups in the West Bank. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as adopted by the United Nations, makes it clear that nations should protect the safety and welfare of their own citizens.

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.