The UN Human Rights Council recently hosted an exhibit at its headquarters in Geneva with the sole purpose of defaming Israel and calling into question its right to exist. The exhibit, argues Anne Bayefsky, suggests that the UN means to turn the clock back farther than 1967, all the way to 1947:

The exhibit was entitled . . . “The Nakba: Exodus and Expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.” The occasion was the annual UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Solidarity Day marks the adoption by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947 of the resolution that approved the partitioning of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. The partition resolution was rejected by Arab states and celebrated by the Jewish people. Thus began the Arab war to deny Israel’s right to exist.

But in 2014, the UN has overtly jettisoned the usual diplomatic lie that the 1967 occupation is the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The exhibit focuses on the alleged crime of creating a Jewish state in 1948 and openly justifies the rejection of the partition resolution. . . . It turns out that the highly controversial exhibit has been circulating in churches and community centers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland since April 2008. Sought-after hosts like the city of Düsseldorf and the city library in Freiburg have refused the exhibit, which has also been formally criticized by the mayor of Cologne.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.