A Labor-party member of Israel’s Knesset gave an impassioned speech last week accusing the Israeli right of having “lost Zionism some time ago.” In fact, Liel Leibovitz argues, the speech by Stav Shaffir, widely circulated online, shows Labor as the party that has lost touch with the Zionist spirit:

As students of history know, Zionism is notoriously elusive. Conceived as a movement to create a national homeland for Jews, the ideology had always contained multitudes, accommodating those who believed that Jews should settle only in the Promised Land and those who were willing to settle for Uganda, those who saw Zionism as a cultural undertaking and those who understood it as a socioeconomic quest, those who sought answers in the heavens and those who planted trees in the ground. It could welcome the pragmatist [David] Ben-Gurion and the hardliner [Vladimir] Jabotinsky, the agnostic [Max] Nordau and the pious Rabbi [Tzvi Hirsh] Kalischer. It was, by design, extremely elastic.

As such, Labor’s attempt to redefine Zionism with its own narrow political agenda is an affront to the very thing that has kept the movement vibrant and successful. And it’s more than a small slight: look deep in the heart of Zionism, and you’ll find a spiritual core that Labor’s current pronouncements have all but extinguished.

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.