During the mass protests along the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel last weekend, sixteen Palestinians were killed. Western leaders like the EU’s foreign-policy chief, Frederica Mogherini, and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders responded as if the IDF had opened fired on peaceful protestors. But, writes Eli Lake, this was not at all the case:

It’s not just that the Israeli Defense Force claims to have video showing peaceful marchers interspersed with militants wielding Molotov cocktails and burning tires. The organizers of this civil disobedience, Hamas, are themselves devoted to bloodshed. As the Qassem Brigades, [a Hamas military unit], helpfully announced on Sunday, five of the sixteen marchers killed . . . were [its] members. [Israel identified five more as known terrorists.] . . .

Bernie Sanders . . . tweeted, [in reference to the demonstration], “it is the right of all people to protest for a better future without a violent response.” [But] the organizers of the march, Hamas, do not allow Palestinians to “protest for a better future.” As the sovereigns of Gaza, Hamas authorities arrest Palestinians for spreading rumors online. They have cracked down on male barbers for cutting women’s hair. If you are deemed a
“collaborator,” Hamas has been known to drag your corpse behind a motorcycle.

All of that aside, even if Hamas were committed to nonviolence—which it clearly is not—its aims should horrify Western progressives and conservatives alike. Hamas does not seek a two-state solution; it seeks to replace the world’s only Jewish state with one ruled by fanatics. The title of the weekend’s event, “The March of Return,” is a giveaway. The idea is that every Palestinian family and its descendants have a right to return to the Israeli territory that Palestinians fled during the 1948 war for independence. Such a return would overwhelm the existing Jewish majority.

And this is why it’s so dangerous to treat last weekend’s march like the Arab Spring or the brave demonstrations in Iran a few months ago.

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.