In recent years, Israel has expanded its economic and diplomatic ties with various countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—links that could conceivably offset potential damage from an increasingly hostile Europe and a less-than-wholly-supportive U.S. Has Jerusalem, then, deliberately shaped business ties in support of its diplomatic initiatives? Yitzhak Klein and Elisheva Berenbaum argue that in fact the distribution of Israel’s foreign trade has remained relatively static:

That Israel is making efforts to create closer economic relations with new partners is indisputable. But creating such opportunities is not the same thing as manipulating trade relations to reduce exposure to potentially problematic trading partners while increasing trade with diplomatically more congenial ones. . . .

Israel’s economic performance over the past decade and a half has been a solid if not a stellar success, better than most developed economies’ records. This success is one of Israel’s most important diplomatic assets: Israel’s economy is stable, growing, and features brilliant technical achievements based on its comparative advantage—a highly educated and innovative workforce. Israel is a major beneficiary of the open global economy, and its trade is determined by domestic demand and production, not by the government picking winners, whether for economic or diplomatic purposes.

The actions of other governments may, of course, force Israel to change this pattern. So far, however, the lack of Israeli diplomacy’s influence on its trade has made a quieter, more consistent, and more substantial contribution to the country’s success than any diplomatic photo opportunity.

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.