Last week, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley law school and a distinguished constitutional lawyer, hosted members of the school’s graduating class for a dinner at his house. Anti-Israel activists had already put up posters with grotesque caricatures of a cannibalistic Chemerinsky reading “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.” At the dinner itself, some of the guests stood up (with a microphone) and began ranting about the evils of Israel. The professor and his wife asked them to leave, and the students have since accused her of Islamophobia and of violating their First Amendment rights.

David Schraub comments on the incident:

Protests like this are exploitations of trust, they rely on and take advantage of the host’s unguarded openness and welcoming. . . . To take advantage of that, to extract costs on that openness, invariably leads to more closedness, more guardedness, and more cloisteredness—a loss for everyone, and one that can and should be mourned.

Schraub then takes a closer look at why the protesters picked Chemerinsky as a target:

The most specific thing I’ve seen people point to in justification of “why Chemerinsky” is an editorial he wrote this past October—just a few weeks after 10/7—recounting the anti-Semitism he’s experienced as a Jew at Berkeley in the wake of the Hamas attack. The usual suspects make the usual claims in response: that Chemerinsky’s claims about anti-Semitism are wrong, unfair, smears, [and] conflations of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and those sins justify what might otherwise seem an obviously abusive overreach of a protest. On that point, one thing I haven’t seen commented on much is the deep and dangerous chilling effect this sort of position has (and is intended to have) on Jewish faculty speaking on the subject of anti-Semitism.

Schraub, a law professor himself, also explains why the protesters’ complaints about their freedom of speech being violated have no merit. If only there were some institution where they could have studied such things.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.