New Israeli regulations ban a number of organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), from entering the county. According to its mission statement, JVP “opposes anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab bigotry and oppression” and “seeks an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem.” It also supports the boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS), celebrates Palestinian terrorists, and dedicates most of its efforts to libeling the Jewish state. Even worse, writes Andrew Mark Bennett, is the organization’s underlying obsession with the evils it ascribes not only to Israel but to American Jews:

Beyond its anti-Zionism, JVP consistently positions Jews as the cause of society’s ills. . . . The most glaring example of JVP’s obsession with Jewish wrongdoing is its “Deadly Exchange” campaign. According to JVP, Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League sponsor “exchange programs that bring together police, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], border-patrol, and FBI [agents] from the U.S. with soldiers, police, border agents, etc. from Israel.” Through these exchanges, JVP says, “worst practices” are shared “to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing in both countries.” . . .

The campaign seeks to hold the Jewish institutions accountable for their alleged complicity in funding and promoting this “state violence.” [It is] an anti-Semitic libel designed to paint Jews with blood by . . . “exposing” the role of American Jewish organizations in U.S.-Israel exchanges as a shadowy Jewish conspiracy . . . to subvert race relations and to erode democracy and human rights. . . . In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate suspicions that these exchanges are in fact pernicious, let alone unusual or especially deadly. . . .

JVP has [also] long considered Zionism to be a form of white supremacy. That absurd [slander] became more prominent over the last year with the rise of the “alt-right.” As white supremacists maliciously drew spurious comparisons between Zionism and their own desire for a white ethno-state, JVP latched on to them as if they were legitimate. . . . .

[In short], it’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that JVP is anti-Semitic. As such, it does not merit . . . [a] defense when it is excluded from Jewish communities and the Jewish state.

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.