On Sunday, a synagogue in Los Angeles’s heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood held an event for those interested in purchasing real estate in Israel. Noah Pollak, who was present, describes what ensued:

Over the course of several hours, with dozens of LAPD officers decked out in riot gear largely staying out of the fray, around 100 pro-Hamas activists attacked, bear-sprayed, harassed, and brawled with Jews up and down Pico Boulevard.

The police occasionally stepped in, but their main activity Sunday afternoon seemed to be to ensure that the activists were able successfully to shut down the front entrance to the synagogue, ruin the event, and harass Jews more or less with impunity. Dozens of video clips from Sunday afternoon have been posted online. . . . The striking thing about the footage is that despite the significant police presence, there is scant footage of the police forcefully intervening in the numerous fistfights, brawls, and beatings.

When Pollak tried to enter the synagogue, the police advised him to leave. He later found out from a friend that it was possible to enter through a rear exit. “How hard would it have been,” he asks, to instruct the protesters to move to “a safe distance away from the entrance to the synagogue and ensure freedom of entry and exit?”

And that brings us to the similarity to the pogroms of 19th-century Russia, a comparison I mentioned in Tuesday’s newsletter. The violence of these outbursts was greater, but—contrary to popular perception—they were not organized or encouraged by the authorities, who didn’t like any kind of disorder and were constantly afraid riots would evolve into revolt. But police were generally reluctant to stop pogroms; the idea that it could be their job to protect Jews seemed to them counterintuitive. Similarly, Pollak writes that today,

as they have realized on elite college campuses and in . . . cities across the country, anti-Israel activists understand that they enjoy something like immunity. They can’t murder or severely beat people, but pretty much all other criminality—vandalism, graffiti, trespassing, harassment—will go unpunished. . . . If you think that’s unfair, just look at the statement released yesterday by the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass. She pledged to take three actions in response to the Pico pogrom.

None of them involve arresting and punishing the perpetrators.

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.