Yesterday, the Israeli daily Haaretz published twin essays by American scholars of Jewish history announcing their disillusionment with and antipathy toward Zionism. The first author—who declares she will not only cease attending the World Zionist Congress but also cease buying Israeli products—complains that the “death of vast numbers of Jewish communities as a result of Zionist activity has impoverished the Jewish people.” Haviv Rettig Gur responds:

You read that right. Zionists, not Arabs or Europeans in the 20th century, are the ones responsible for the decimation of Jewish life and history across three continents. If Israel wasn’t there, the ancient Jewish communities of Baghdad and Warsaw would presumably now be flourishing and happy.

The [piece] continues: “The ideal of a religiously neutral state worked amazingly well for the millions of Jews who came to America.” Indeed. So it is unspeakably tragic that when millions of Jews needed refuge from annihilation, the doors to that ideal America were sealed shut. . . .

It’s entirely legitimate to complain about Israeli culture or Israeli policy. It is simple, inane prejudice to complain about the existence of a community of Jews that literally had nowhere else to go. The early Zionists weren’t proved right in intellectual debates, but by the destruction of the remaining options. The Nazis, not the Zionists, ended the German-Jewish [symbiosis]. The Iraqis, not the Zionists, caused very nearly every Jewish man, woman, and child to flee Baghdad. . . .

Nations do not lose their right to exist when they err. The argument that Israeli crimes or injustices disqualify millions of Hebrew-speaking Jews from our right to be, or to be ourselves, would be counted a genocidal idea if it was made against another people.

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.