On Monday, Hamas released a new manifesto that downplays some of the organization’s most incendiary anti-Semitic views; on Wednesday, the Palestinian Authority’s president was welcomed warmly by the White House. Michael Koplow contrasts the two events:

The domestic political benefits of [the visit] for Abbas cannot be overstated, as he will get to coast on the afterglow of being treated as an honored guest by President Trump rather than as an afterthought. Not only that, Abbas had a White House platform to emphasize all of the core Palestinian positions—a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with east Jerusalem as its capital—while getting an unexpected bonus from Trump as he extolled the virtues of Palestinian security cooperation with Israel. . . . As things stand now, there are few things Abbas could do that would give him more breathing room at home.

As for Hamas:

The new policy of accepting a provisional Palestinian state within the 1967 borders without giving up the larger fight for the entire land between the river and the sea, and purposely leaving out [of the manifesto] any mention of Hamas’s Muslim Brotherhood origins and ties, is aimed solely at external actors. . . . The question is whether these moves will fool anyone, as they do not represent real change within Hamas but are akin to putting lipstick on a pig. . . . Hamas’s continued terrorism will not be overridden by a change in rhetoric away from demonizing Jews to demonizing only “Zionist war criminals,” particularly when its odious anti-Semitic charter is still in full effect. Hamas also runs a real risk that this [rhetorical shift] will further weaken it at home, as its resistance credentials can now be called into question by even more intransigent actors, and indeed it is no accident that the rollout of the new document took place in Doha rather than in Gaza.

Those who already support Hamas are unlikely to be happy with the new changes, no matter how illusory they are, and those who don’t are unlikely to be convinced that this represents a new and improved movement.

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.