Two of Yitzḥak Rabin’s grandchildren spoke at a memorial service for their grandfather, held in Jerusalem on Sunday, the Hebrew-calendar anniversary of his assassination. For both, the occasion offered a chance to issue veiled and not-so-veiled attacks on the current prime minister—who was in attendance—and the Likud in general. Liel Leibovitz comments:

[Rabin’s granddaughter, Noa] Rothman, wasn’t content merely portraying Israel as a close cousin of Enver Hoxha’s Albania; looking straight at Benjamin Netanyahu, she accused an unnamed spokeswoman at his office of recently tweeting a photograph of Rabin shaking Yasir Arafat’s hand with a caption accusing the slain statesman of treason.

It’s a common theme among the Virtuous Vanguards of Tel Aviv. Ask any Israeli journalist, academic, or intellectual who killed Rabin, and they’ll tell you that while Yigal Amir pulled the trigger, it was Netanyahu who made the murder possible by inciting his followers to see Rabin as a traitor. That Netanyahu himself was caught on camera on one well-documented occasion beseeching the crowd at a large demonstration in Jerusalem to refrain from using the T word, or that he had asked Rabin, shortly before the assassination, to issue a joint statement calling for civility—an offer Rabin refused—hardly matters. Nor did it matter to Rothman that the alleged spokeswoman was not a government employee but an independent journalist, or that her tweet was a clearly marked bit of satire. But, again, why let facts get in a way of a really good story? . . .

Rabin’s assassination is one of very few national symbols most Israelis still cherish, irrespective of their political opinion. It is seen as a perpetual call for national unity, a legacy that helped keep Israeli society cohesive even as his successors, including Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Ariel Sharon, continued to make painful territorial concessions in the face of rising Palestinian violence. In their ugly, divisive, and vicious comments yesterday, Rabin’s grandchildren sacrificed all that for the sake of settling cheap partisan scores. What a blessing it is that most Israelis know better.

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.