After seeing anti-Israel protesters reestablish their encampments and grow increasingly threatening for over a week, Columbia University yesterday allowed riot police to remove demonstrators who had taken over a campus building. That doubtlessly would not have been required had the school’s administrators been less reluctant to act. Ilya Shapiro, an expert on constitutional law, argues that academic administrators have ample means at their disposal to crack down on the sources of the unrest, without running afoul of protections on freedom of speech or other civil liberties:

Long before October 7, chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) were notorious among openly anti-Semitic pro-Palestinian groups. . . . During the 2022–23 academic year, SJP chapters were responsible for 423 of 665 documented campus anti-Israel incidents. The presence on campus of an SJP chapter is “one of the strongest predictors of perceiving a hostile climate toward Israel and Jews,” according to a 2016 study from Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies.

Threats, harassment, intimidation, and interference with educational programs are all lawful justifications for restricting students’ expressive activities. But can they justify disallowing student groups?

Indeed they can, Shapiro explains, when these groups can be shown—as is the case with SJP—to provide material support for terrorism:

Notably, soon after Hamas’s massacre, national SJP released a Day of Resistance Tool Kit that boasted: “we as Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.” As the Supreme Court ruled in 2011, the government may prohibit even nonviolent “material support” for terrorist organizations, including legal support and other advice, without violating the First Amendment. Though the government must provide valid reasons for dissolving the chapters, that may not be hard here.

What schools should do to avoid supporting nasty groups is adopt clear, neutral principles, requiring applicants to adhere to constitutions that ban discrimination based on ancestry, ethnicity, or religion, and they should apply the rules consistently. A low bar, perhaps, but that so many institutions fail to reach it further highlights the decay in higher education.

One need not be an expert in international law to see the absurdity of the ICC prosecutor’s determination that the leaders of Hamas and the leaders of Israel are equally guilty of war crimes. It takes only a little more knowledge to understand that the court has no jurisdiction over Israel, which is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty. In a careful analysis, Avraham Russell Shalev outlines some of the many legal holes in this case, and observes that the problems are inherent in the court itself:

A review of the ICC’s relationship towards Israel over its two decades of existence demonstrates a fundamental bias and double standard toward the Jewish state. This bias is not a function of any specific prosecutor. Rather, it is an institutional feature, found even in the Rome Statute. . . . Israel initially refused to sign the Rome Statute as it became apparent that the Arab states had politicized the Rome Conference and introduced language that departed from existing international law specifically to criminalize Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Therefore, argues Shalev, Jerusalem should deal with the case against it not as a legal problem, to which it would respond by dispatching lawyers to make carefully reasoned arguments, but as a political and diplomatic one. More specifically, he contends that

collaboration with the ICC will not reduce the very high chances of arrest warrants being issued against Israeli officials, but will give those charges great weight and legitimacy when they come. Instead, Israel must adopt a policy of non-cooperation and even offense.

And what does a policy of offense entail?

Israel has repeatedly stated that it does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction. Therefore, any legal proceedings are completely illegitimate and as such, the various legal bodies—the attorney general, the Justice Ministry’s International Affairs Office, the Foreign Ministry’s legal advisors, and the Military Advocate General’s International Law Department—will no longer communicate with the ICC. [In addition], the Knesset must pass legislation modeled on the American Service-Member’s Protection Act. This legislation would bar any government agency from cooperating with the ICC without a government decision.

While Israel has never accepted the ICC’s jurisdiction, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has willingly accepted it. The court can hardly turn around now and deny jurisdiction to avoid prosecuting Palestinian crimes. . . . Palestinian nationals, acting on behalf of Hamas, Fatah, and other terrorist organizations, and with no affiliation, have carried out serious war crimes against Israelis and Palestinians. Israel must publicly demand that the ICC issue indictments against them.