Last month, multiple Jewish organizations, along with a Catholic one, filed a brief with the Supreme Court urging it—on religious-freedom grounds—to strike down Mississippi’s ban on abortions after the fifteenth week of pregnancy. Setting aside arguments about the fitness of the legislation in question, or its constitutionality, Mitchell Rocklin and Howard Slugh argue that the brief’s claims abuse the principle of freedom of religion:

It is important to understand what these groups are not arguing. They are not arguing that, in some instances, courts might be required to grant religious exemptions from abortion laws. Such a claim would be akin to those that religious objectors typically raise. If the Supreme Court allows the Mississippi law to stand, courts would decide future requests for religious accommodations under the normal rules that apply to such cases. That is how the free exercise of religion is protected in American courts.

There is no precedent for doing what these Jewish groups support: invalidating a law as it applies even to non-objectors simply because it could potentially violate someone’s religious liberty. This untenable maximalist position undermines the cause of religious liberty by making it incompatible with the functioning of any government in a pluralistic society.

The pro-choice groups openly argue . . . that the Supreme Court should strike down Mississippi’s law because it is “at odds with the views of” their religious traditions. They also argue that the ban is impermissible because it “fails to account for—and indeed, disrespects” their religious views. This is not a request for a traditional religious accommodation that applies to religious objectors. It is a demand that religious adherents be granted a religious veto to prevent states completely from adopting any policy that conflicts with their faith.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.