Haaretz is certainly not Israel’s most popular newspaper, but it is the newspaper of the country’s left-wing elite, among whom it enjoys a status similar to that of the New York Times. Many Israelis were thus outraged, if not surprised, when it published a feature in which its writers named the patriotic Israeli songs they disliked the most. Defending the survey on Twitter, the publisher, Amos Schocken, managed to cause something of a scandal with a comment he made to a woman with an obviously Middle Eastern Jewish surname. Liel Leibovitz comments:

At some point, one woman, Ravit Dahan, tweeted at Schocken that it was security-minded people like her who kept Israel safe and allowed Schocken “to continue [to] live here like a king and publish your surreal newspaper without interruption.” At that, the publisher lost his cool. “You insolent woman!” he tweeted back. “My family led the Zionist movement when you were still swinging from trees.”

It didn’t take long for people to note that a privileged, wealthy, Ashkenazi man accusing a Mizraḥi woman of apishness was, to put it mildly, wildly racist. Schocken must’ve realized it, too, as he deleted his tweet and issued an apology, claiming that he didn’t think accusing someone of swinging from trees had any racial connotations.

You may be tempted to write this story off as just another example of someone having a momentary lapse of judgment. . . . But Schocken’s tweet is hard to dismiss as just some unfortunate slip: rather, it is a startlingly clear expression of a systemically racist worldview that has been the lifeblood of the Israeli left for at least four decades now.

Anyone wishing to . . . understand this paradox—that a political camp that champions the rights of Palestinians, migrant workers, and other struggling groups is quick to resort to the most prejudiced stereotypes when it comes to right-wing Mizraḥi Israelis—would do well to study the seminal elections of 1977, which saw the rise of Menachem Begin’s Likud after 29 years of Labor-led governments. In his old-fashioned suits and his old-fashioned Hebrew, Begin visited neighborhoods and towns for which the left never had much use, building his base among Mizraḥi Jews who felt betrayed by Labor.

And not without reason. As an explosive Israeli documentary released late last year revealed, . . . the Labor-run governments of the 1950s deliberately dispatched newly arrived immigrants from North African countries to small and dusty towns down south, barred them from moving to Tel Aviv and other large cities—a restriction not placed on Polish immigrants who arrived a few years later—and went as far as threatening to take away the children of anyone who questioned the policy. At the same time, the very same architects of these horrendous policies spoke haughtily about peace and human rights—and were shocked when the Mizraḥi Jews they’d spent a lifetime disdaining finally rose up and voted against them.

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.