Next year, the “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) between Jerusalem and Washington, signed in 2007, will expire. Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama are currently negotiating a new memorandum that, like its predecessor, will be concerned primarily with U.S. financial support for the Israeli military, and should run for the next ten years. Although in dollar terms the new agreement proposed by Washington is more generous than the one it replaces, Shoshana Bryen argues that it comes with conditions that make it far less helpful:

[All] of the money [offered in the proposed MOU must] be spent in the U.S., while Israel is presently able to spend 25 percent [domestically].

This is a subsidy for U.S. defense industries and constrains Israel’s defense choices by forcing the IDF to exclude weapons from Europe and elsewhere [and leaves it with less to spend on locally manufactured equipment]. While some think of Israel as an expense to the U.S., the fact is that [its technological] innovations—shared with Washington by agreement—have helped mitigate the decline in the American missile-defense budget in an era of growing threats. Without the ability to spend some money in Israel, it will be harder for smaller defense and high-tech industries to keep up. . . .

Israel will [also] be prohibited from asking Congress for additional funds, effectively removing a bipartisan [source] of support for Israel’s security from the equation and reducing Israel’s flexibility in addressing rapidly emerging threats. . . .

[The Jewish state currently] finds itself in a vastly improved international situation even as its neighborhood declines. It would have been in the larger interest of the United States to enhance [its defensive] capabilities rather than trying to constrain them.

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.