In 2017, the “Walled-Off Hotel” opened in Bethlehem, just a few feet from the security fence that runs through the West Bank. Its owner, the anonymous British “street artist” known as Banksy, has decorated it with his own artwork, making the entire hotel an exercise in fake-war-crimes kitsch. David Collier reports on his visit to the hotel:

On the one side, [the hotel] can be viewed as an obscene gimmick. A privileged activist gaining publicity through a stunt that objectifies people immersed in a real-world tragedy. On the other are the Jews, who are thoroughly demonized by the false narrative presented inside. Jews become alien god-killers, too greedy and racist to open their arms to a peaceful downtrodden people. In the middle are the useful idiots: ignorant tourists who come to the hotel, see the exhibits, and then leave slightly more radicalized than they were before they came. . . .

Inside the [hotel’s] museum are several videos. The most important one [purports to] place the conflict into context. . . . It is difficult to overstate the historical distortion in the video. . . . It completely denies Jewish history in the land and presents Jews as alien invaders. . . .

Throughout the museum, there is use of Holocaust imagery, part of an ongoing strategy of equating the results of the 1947-48 conflict with the Holocaust. . . . [One piece] suggests Israelis kill for money, Arabs die just so Israelis can test weapons, and the conflict only [exists] so that Jewish business can thrive. . . . Everywhere you look is the image of a brutal Holocaust committed by money-grabbing Jews against a defenseless and helpless population. . . . [This is not to mention the] classic anti-Semitic imagery [of] Jews as god-killers, [found in] an image of a Christlike figure with a red-dot sight on his forehead. . . .

[T]he truth is that . . . far more hate went into building the exhibits within the hotel than went into building the defensive wall it was designed to protest. One was designed to save lives, the other only sets out to demonize a people.

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.