Although Bernie Sanders is unlikely to win the Democratic nomination, the relative success of his candidacy, argues Ron Radosh, will nonetheless have the effect of moving his party leftward—with results that bode ill for U.S.-Israel relations. The evidence can be seen in Sanders’s appointments to the fifteen-member committee responsible for writing the party’s platform:

Worried about keeping the support of Bernie’s people after her nomination is wrapped up, [Hillary] Clinton is being forced to tilt further to the left than she would like, making it much harder for her to shift back to the center in the general election campaign. . . .

[Furthermore], let us look at the five members [of the platform committee] that Bernie Sanders has appointed. What stands out is their well-known animosity to Israel, and support of not only the Palestinians but of Hamas. The most prominent name is that of the African-American professor, philosopher, and radical Cornel West. West has toured with Sanders and opened up rallies for him. West, moreover, is a leading BDS activist, who has said that the Gaza Strip is “the ’hood on steroids,’” and in 2014 wrote that the crimes of Hamas “pale in the face of the U.S.-supported Israeli slaughters of innocent civilians.” . . .

The second person appointed by Sanders is the American pro-Palestinian activist James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. . . . In 1996, . . . his group sponsored a rally at which protestors held signs saying “Peres and Hitler are the same—the only difference is the name.” . . . Sanders also put on the platform committee Representative Keith Ellison, who is also . . . a major critic of Israel, and will undoubtedly stand with Zogby and West. All three will work, probably successfully, to create a strong anti-Israel stance as the official platform to be implemented should a Democratic nominee become president. . . . Clinton’s choices for the platform committee likewise reflect her leftward tilt.

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.