Every member of the UN belongs to one of five regional organizations that are responsible for distributing committee chairmanships as well as the rotating seats on the Security Council. Until 2004—when it was admitted to the Western European group—Israel was the one nation not included in a regional body, and was thus excluded from such positions. Now, writes the Israeli ambassador Danny Danon, Israel hopes to build on its admission to win a chance to sit on the Security Council:

It was only last year, in 2016, that I was elected to chair the Sixth (Legal) Committee, becoming the first Israeli to chair a UN permanent committee. What is usually a position confirmed by consensus [was obtained by] a protracted and complicated campaign in which we had to cajole and convince 109 countries to cast their ballot for an Israeli.

[Now] Israel has set the ambitious goal of obtaining one of the three non-permanent seats on the Security Council in 2019 [reserved for members of the Western Europe group]. To do so we must convince two-thirds of General Assembly members of the worthiness of this cause.

Make no mistake about it, we are as deserving as any other nation of this leadership role: Israel funds a higher percentage of the UN budget than do the other 65 countries yet to serve on the Security Council combined. Moreover, few countries have Israel’s firsthand experience of the failures of the UN—and its acute awareness of the possibilities were this organization to be set on the right path.

On our northern borders the peacekeeping forces of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) play a vital role in keeping volatile situations relatively stable. Still, this force has not lived up to its potential and must do much more to fulfill its mandates. Despite UNIFIL’s presence on the ground for decades, Hizballah has been allowed to grow largely unchecked. The Iran-backed terrorist group’s aggressive posture led to a bloody war in 2006. And more recently, it has increased its arsenal from 7,000 rockets in 2006 at the end of the Second Lebanon War to almost 150,000 rockets today, aimed at our cities and towns.

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.