On Monday, Avi Gabbay—a former telecommunications executive—won the race to be the new head of Israel’s Labor party, meaning that he would be prime minister in the event of an electoral victory for his party. A relative newcomer to politics, Gabbay only recently joined Labor, after spending a few years in the center-right Kulanu party and briefly serving as Benjamin Netanyahu’s environmental-protection minister. Michael Koplow explains the significance of Gabbay’s election:

For starters, Gabbay is Mizraḥi, born to Moroccan immigrant parents. . . . Until Menachem Begin’s 1977 victory, Israel was essentially a one-party state, and that party represented the Ashkenazi, socialist, secular, Labor Zionist elite. Begin’s election did many things, including ushering in four decades of right-wing dominance, but one of the most critical was empowering Mizraḥi Jews and giving them a voice. Begin was not himself Mizraḥi, but he openly represented a Mizraḥi constituency. . . .

Gabbay is not the first Mizraḥi Labor leader, but [if] the polling is accurate, he is going to siphon off votes from Likud, in no small part due to his background.

Gabbay also represents a break from Labor’s ideological past. . . . He is known for advocating populist economic policies during his brief time in politics, but he is decidedly not from the old Labor economic tradition. This too creates the potential for Labor to expand its pool of supporters, and to demonstrate that it understands the way in which it must craft economic policies that relate to the new economy. . . .

Israel is a center-right country, and the key to Labor returning to a position of power isn’t boosting its traditional turnout but [expanding] its base of support. Gabbay has the potential to capture new non-traditional Labor voters, and that is what makes his victory tantalizing to those who want to see Labor challenge Likud. . . . [None of this means] that he will be the next prime minister, or ever the prime minister. It does, however, mean that Labor may see itself back in a center-left coalition before too long.

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.