The State Department reportedly decided last week to allow Jibril Rajoub, a high-ranking Fatah official, to take part in upcoming meetings with American diplomats in the U.S., despite his history of participation in terror and his ongoing, repeated encouragement of attacks on Israeli civilians. Michael Rubin comments:

Let’s put aside the irony of [a State Department official] having to pair the insistence that Rajoub supports “a peaceful, non-violent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” with the need to press him “to refrain from any statements or actions” that could legitimize violence. Perhaps a man who threw a grenade at a bus, was sentenced to life, and has [subsequently] been released early and then re-arrested multiple times hasn’t really reformed. Likewise, perhaps Rajoub’s vehement opposition as head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee to a moment of silence for the Israeli athletes murdered during the 1972 Munich Olympics suggests that he really hasn’t embraced the spirit of peace or truly rejected terrorism.

The State Department has a long history of reaching out to terrorists. . . . It’s a strategy that [stretches from] Jimmy Carter’s desire to utilize Palestinian terrorists as intermediaries to win the release of American hostages in Iran to then-Senator John Kerry’s willingness to pass messages for Hamas to numerous officials who jumped on the Hizballah-is-legitimate bandwagon. In each case, U.S. diplomats legitimized terrorists but did not achieve their prime objective.

A far better strategy would be to utilize leverage—the U.S. government pays several hundred million dollars of it—in order to present the Palestinians with a stark choice: completely renounce and abandon terrorism as required by the Oslo Accords or lose everything. There should be no middle ground. What [Secretary of State] Rex Tillerson proposes to do, perhaps at the urging of the White House, . . . is nothing less than a quixotic effort and an insult to every American victim of terrorism.

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.