Naftali Bennett, head of the Jewish Home Party, recently decided to withdraw his bid for either the defense or foreign ministry in Benjamin Netanyahu’s soon-to-be-formed government, and is instead asking for the post of education minister. The shift, writes Haviv Rettig Gur, signifies a strategic retreat for Bennett, who has worked to expand the appeal of his party beyond its traditional base:

Polling as high as sixteen seats just a couple of months ago, Jewish Home under Bennett seemed headed to unprecedented success, and Bennett talked explicitly about its eventually becoming Israel’s ruling party. Key to this surge, and to Bennett’s influence, was the dramatic change he tried to lead within the party itself, branching out of the narrow confines of the ideological West Bank settler community and the religious-Zionist fold. [In the event, however, the party ended up] with just eight seats in the new Knesset.

Like many sectoral Israeli parties, . . . Jewish Home is not just a political party. For its base, it serves as an expression and symbol of religious and communal identity. While its overarching ideology is anything but sectoral, seeking the “redemption” of the land, nation, and even the spiritual world of the Jews, it has succumbed to the same social segmentation that has come to define Israeli religious and political identity. Religious Zionists refer to themselves as a migzar, a “sector” or “camp” distinct from the mainstream, from secular Israelis, or from the ultra-Orthodox. . . .

Education was a traditional bastion of the religious-Zionist camp, a source of influence from which the idealistic “sector” could bring its religious and political program to larger audiences. . . . Bennett has spent the past two weeks speaking to his own camp to gauge the sentiments of his constituents. What he heard . . . was that it was time for religious Zionism’s ambitious, tech-savvy young leader to return to the party’s traditional priorities: the sacred tasks of education and settlement.

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.