In the aftermath of the murderous attack on a restaurant in his city earlier this month, the mayor of Tel Aviv intoned that, until the “occupation” comes to an end, terror will be inevitable. Marshaling a great deal of historical evidence, Efraim Karsh argues the opposite:

In the two-and-a-half years from the signing of the Oslo Accords [when Israeli withdrawal began] to the fall of the Labor government in May 1996, 210 Israelis were murdered—nearly three times the average death toll of the previous 26 years, when only a small fraction of the fatalities had been caused by attacks originating in the West Bank or Gaza due to Israel’s effective counterinsurgency measures, the low level of national consciousness among the Palestinians, and the vast improvement in their standard of living under Israel’s control. . . . In September 1996, [Palestinian violence escalated even more steeply].

If occupation was indeed the cause of terrorism, why was terrorism sparse during the years of actual occupation? Why did it increase dramatically with the prospect of the end of the occupation, and why did it escalate into open war upon Israel’s most far-reaching concessions ever? To the contrary, one might argue with far greater plausibility that the absence of occupation—that is, the withdrawal of close Israeli surveillance—is precisely what facilitated the launching of the terrorist war in the first place. . . .

It is not “occupation” that underlies the lack of “hope on the horizon” [for an end to the conflict] but the century-long Palestinian rejection of the Jewish right to statehood. . . . So long as that disposition is tolerated, let alone encouraged, the idea of Palestinian-Israeli peace will remain a chimera.

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.