On January 14, Mahmoud Abbas visited Rome to attend the opening of a Palestinian embassy in Vatican City, thus cementing the Holy See’s formal diplomatic recognition of a notional Palestinian state. Giulio Meotti comments:

[While in Rome, Abbas] met with Pope Francis for the third time since the start of his papacy four years ago. The high-profile get-together took place in the middle of the Palestinian attempt [in Paris and at the UN] to bypass peace talks with Israel and to internationalize the Israel-Palestinian conflict. . . . By opening the Palestinian embassy during this critical time of intensified anti-Israel animosity, was the Pope justifying the Palestinian-Arab attempt to isolate the Jewish state and to impose on it unacceptable conditions of surrender through international pressure?

Unfortunately, Francis’s papacy has been marked by a long list of anti-Israel gestures that do not advance the cause of peace that the pope claims to champion. When the pope visited Israel in 2014, he was photographed praying at Israel’s security barrier, which had been created simply to stop the wave of Palestinian suicide-bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. The pope stood before graffiti that compared Palestinians with Jews under the Nazis. . . .

Pope Francis then accepted an invitation to visit—along with Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, the grand mufti of Jerusalem—the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site and also the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. But this is the same Palestinian mufti who justifies terrorism against the Israelis by saying, among other inflammatory declarations, that “the hour of resurrection will not come until you fight the Jews.” . . .

During these four years, Pope Francis has continually put significant barriers in the way of peace between Israelis and Palestinians—a peace based on dialogue, mutual respect and the end of conflict. Instead, this supposed man of peace has strengthened Abbas’s refusal to negotiate with the Jews—the Christians’ “elder brothers,” as Pope John Paul II bravely called them—and to end hostilities with 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.