The Israel Broadcast Authority (IBA) aired its very last program on Israeli television on May 14, signaling the end of what was, until the 1990s, the Jewish state’s only regular TV channel. Commenting on the significance of its closing, Liel Leibovitz writes:

IBA saw itself—and made sure others saw it, too—as the indisputable voice of the nation. Its demise, which is the result of complicated political and economic processes that even most Israelis find too exasperating to follow, is a good opportunity to reflect on the many ways in which Israel has changed over the years. . . .

[T]he establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 put all broadcast transmissions under the thumb of the newly appointed government, headed by David Ben-Gurion. . . . Members of the political opposition were routinely denied [radio] airtime. . . When [some] poor creative souls tried, in 1962, to freshen up the format and air a more modern-sounding news program, Ben-Gurion called and demanded they scrap their plans and go back to the Soviet style of reading the official news. Ben-Gurion was not one for change. Which, naturally, meant that setting up a TV station was out of the question.

With Ben-Gurion’s retirement in 1963, the road was paved to welcome in the new medium, but the former prime minister’s spirit still prevailed. When broadcasts finally began, Israeli TV . . . was still tightly controlled from above, but not as heavy-handedly as broadcasting had been under Ben-Gurion. . . . The new lords of the screen looked and sounded like the establishment they embodied. They were almost exclusively male, and they overwhelmingly supported the dominant Labor party. There were hardly any Mizraḥi Jews among them, to say nothing of religious Israelis. They spoke proper, beautiful Hebrew, and they had no patience for anyone whose background was different. . . .

Only in 1993 did Israel get a second channel, but it took until the end of the century for a number of competitive stations to appear. Leibovitz concludes:

The decision to shut the channel down, then, has left some, mainly current and former employees, feeling nostalgic, but most Israelis barely suppressed a yawn. A few critics argued that by shutting down the station, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was simply taking a page out of the old Ben-Gurion playbook and curbing the press, but that criticism failed to resonate in a densely populated, highly competitive, and thoroughly free media landscape. . . . Liberty, in the marketplace of ideas and of commodities alike, has thrust Israel to unprecedented heights, propelling it to prosperity and innovation.

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.