Last Sunday, representatives of the respective rulers of the Palestinian Authority and Gaza met in Doha with Qatari and Turkish officials to discuss temporarily setting aside their differences, ostensibly as a prerequisite to renewed negotiation with Israel. Ruthie Blum doubts the talks will produce tangible results, let alone good ones:

[T]he only thing on which Fatah and Hamas actually agree is the ultimate goal of annihilating the Jewish state. They are at odds about everything else, including the pace at which their shared aim should be carried out. But mainly, they . . . are engaged in a deadly power struggle.

So perpetual is this battle that the so-called unity deals the two groups signed in the past, most recently in April 2014, have unraveled before the ink on their contracts was dry. But the signatures did serve an unwitting purpose: to show those who still could not see that the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, was a partner for jihad, not peace with Israel. . . . The current wave of violence against Jews, through the use of rocks, knives, cars, and pipe bombs, is being carried out predominantly by Palestinians living in the West Bank, not all of whom are Hamas loyalists.

For its part, Hamas is not only rebuilding the terror tunnels destroyed during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, but it keeps releasing videos boasting of this endeavor and threatening to kidnap and kill Israelis. . . . Hamas’s latest production, released on Sunday (coinciding with the jump-start of negotiations with Fatah in Qatar) is a music video calling on Palestinians to resume suicide bombings on Israeli buses. . . .

How appropriate, then, that the discussions between the stabbers and the bombers should be held in Qatar, a state sponsor of terrorism. The only minimally positive outcome will be the lack of a resolution. . . . The only player in this jihadist “peace” farce that has something to gain is Turkey, which will get its [natural-gas] pipeline from Israel, without even turning its back on Hamas.

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.