Hillel Fradkin considers the U.S. government’s increasing hostility toward the Jewish state in light of Joshua Muravchik’s recent book Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned against Israel. Fradkin concludes:

Obviously [the current trend in U.S.-Israel relations] presents a danger to Israel, but as one sees from Muravchik’s book, it also presents a danger to the United States—a danger to its principles and therewith to its political, moral, and intellectual health, a danger to which the European West has already succumbed.

What has saved America from this disease? As Muravchik observes, the United States held firm against the moral and political direction of Europe not primarily because of a “Jewish lobby” or an “Evangelical lobby,” though those were not unimportant. It held firm largely because most Americans recognized and respected what Israel truly is: a liberal democracy similar to their own and like all liberal democracies threatened by forces hostile to such regimes. . . .

That [America’s] material security would be at risk were Israel were to be destroyed is relatively clear. In the Middle East, America has no other liberal democratic ally, and Israel wields significant power. Yet even more harmful to our health would be the betrayal of our principles and its political and moral consequences. Joining the jackals, as Europe has now frequently done, may yield short-term gains. But as Muravchik ably shows, in the long term the U.S. bears the risk of actually becoming a jackal.

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.