After anti-Semitic flyers were posted on the University of California, Davis campus last fall, administrators invited the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to lead workshops on anti-Semitism. But the ADL happens to be in the sights of the rabidly anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which sent an angry letter to administrators urging them not to cooperate with the organization. Here SJP follows in the footsteps of a related, and equally vicious organization, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has been pursuing the ADL for helping U.S. police officers visit Israel. Jonathan Marks explains:

[JVP’s] “Deadly Exchange” campaign cynically seeks to exploit the relative popularity of Black Lives Matter by pinning anti-black discrimination on Israel and American Jewish organizations opposed to the demonization of the Jewish state. JVP specifically targets educational trips to Israel by U.S. law enforcement. . . . Review the logic: U.S. law enforcement, the argument goes, systematically discriminates against black people. To do that, they must travel to Israel, since that is where you go shopping for evil. But to make such shopping trips happen, you need Jewish organizations.

As one promotional video put it, “Who is making this deadly exchange possible? The main groups are actually U.S.-based Jewish organizations” Get it? Scratch American race prejudice and you reveal the Jewish state, working with American Jews who care more about it than they care about their vulnerable fellow citizens. . . .

[A]ccording to UC Davis’s student newspaper, the Aggie, [SJP’s] charges against the ADL were compelling enough to move UC Davis to put its plans on hold. So frightened was UC Davis’s chancellor Gary May by 149 signatures that he denied any involvement in one ADL workshop. . . .

[E]ven when it tries to focus on anti-Semitism, Davis’s administration is blind to it when it comes from the left.

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.