Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the Palestinian demand that a future Palestinian state be free of Jews as a call for “ethnic cleansing,” thereby causing a stir. Examining similar situations from the present and recent past, Eugene Kontorovich notes that this demand, whatever name one gives to it, is entirely without precedent:

When pressed, defenders of the Palestinian position characterize the demand as “no settlers” rather than the uglier-sounding “no Jews.” [This description] is hard to take at face value, as the Palestinians have never objected to Israeli Arabs settling across the Green Line, as they have in significant numbers. . . .

There is simply no support in international practice for the expulsion of settlers from occupied territories. In the many situations involving settlers around the world, the international community has never supported expulsion, and consistently backed plans allowing the settlers to remain in a new state. . . .

This is not because these settlers are beloved by the surrounding population. The opposite is true. In the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, representatives of the latter tried to raise the possibility of expelling the nearly one-million Vietnamese settlers. Their arguments were familiar: the settlers remind them of the occupation, rekindle ancient hatreds, and destabilize the peace. Yet the Cambodian demand for the mass removal of ethnic Vietnamese was rejected outright by diplomats.

Furthermore, argues Kontorovich, Israeli settlers have a claim to legitimacy absent in comparable cases:

The only reason [Jews living in the West Bank are] “settlers” was the Jordanian expulsion of 1949, and their subsequent nineteen-year enforcement of a Jew-free territory. International-law scholars like to say that Israel, as an occupying power, must maintain the prior status quo. Even assuming that is true, pointing out that the status quo was itself a result of recent, complete to-the-last Jew ethnic cleansing should hardly be bad form.

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.