Since the so-called stabbing intifada began in late 2015, Palestinian violence against Israel and Israelis has increased. But Israel’s response has remained, in the words of the retired IDF colonel Eran Lerman, “moderate and well-calibrated.”

It is true that perpetrators and would-be perpetrators are apprehended and sometimes killed. But the attitude toward the population at large, and toward the economy of the West Bank, is deliberately geared to avoid collective punishment and give the peaceful majority a stake in stability.

This strategy is not “a matter of leftist leanings in the IDF high command, misguided moral musings, undue respect for the opinion pages of Haaretz, or an inordinate fear of the International Criminal Court,” writes Lerman. Rather, it’s an effective cost-benefit analysis that takes into account the counter-terrorism lessons learned by both Americans and Israelis in the first decade of the 21st century:

Many of the senior officers are themselves veterans—as younger officers—of the intensive clashes of 2000-04 (mistakenly referred to by many as “the second intifada,” though this was not a popular uprising but a campaign of violence conducted from above—“Mister Arafat’s War,” as Thomas Friedman called it back then). They well remember the lessons learned during that period. Some have also internalized aspects of American field manuals on counterinsurgency, which bear the marks of what David Petraeus and others learned in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some surprising recent comments from Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah seem to support such a strategy, Lerman observes. At a meeting with Israeli Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, Hamdallah “offered uncharacteristic praise of Israel’s measured response to the wave of violence that began in October 2015,” feeling “obliged to take note—in public!—of Israel’s moderate and well-calibrated response.”

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.