By October 24, 1973, Israel had turned the tide of the war it was fighting against both Egypt and Syria, and both countries’ forces were on the run. Leonid Brezhnev, then the ruler of the Soviet Union, panicked at the prospect of the defeat of his two most important Middle Eastern allies—to an extent made clear by documents made public only recently. Eric Cortellessa writes:

According to letters and notes collected and translated by the Woodrow Wilson Center, Brezhnev sent a letter to then-President Richard Nixon warning him that he would send troops to the Middle East if both countries did not act together to curb the Israelis. . . .

[In particular], the Soviets had a vested interest in Egypt, one of its major client states. The new documents show that Brezhnev sought to take advantage of Nixon’s political strife back in America —this was during the apex of the Watergate scandal—to secure an Arab victory. . . .

[T]hen-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger . . . first received Brezhnev’s threatening letter to Nixon. Given the U.S. president’s precarious position—and the fact that he was indisposed when the letter came in—Kissinger consulted with then-White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig and other national-security officials, who jointly decided to move America’s nuclear alert level to Defcon 3.

The new documents show that this was not just a reaction to the Soviets’ sending a naval brigade into the Mediterranean, which was believed to be the reason at the time. It was, in fact, because intelligence reports found that a Soviet ship believed to be carrying nuclear weapons was en route for the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

The Soviets backed down, and the next day Israel and its enemies agreed to a cease-fire.

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.