Last month, a Palestinian terrorist shot a pregnant Israeli in the abdomen, leading to the death of her child. If the perpetrator is arrested or killed, he or his family will receive regular, generous payments from the Palestinian Authority (PA). The U.S. and a few other nations that fund the PA have finally taken steps to punish this practice, but Ramallah has rejoined that under no circumstances will it cease to make the payments. Sander Gerber and Yossi Kuperwasser write:

Palestinian officials, in Arabic, characterize terror trust-fund recipients as “soldiers and sons of our nation.” In English, they defend these payments as “social welfare,” used to support “innocent individuals” suffering from the loss of a head of household “breadwinner.” This claim, which attempts to [disguise] blood money [as] benevolence, is usually phrased like a July 2017 statement by Husam Zomlot, a former Palestinian envoy to the U.S.: “This is a program that is used for the victims of the occupation. . . . It’s a program to give the families a dignified life; they are provided for, so they and their kids can lead a different future.”

Characterizing payments for terror as social welfare is a deception that is frequently accepted at face value by Western governments that fund the Palestinian Authority and its terror-payments policy. The problem with this claim . . . is that it is demonstrably false. . . . Simply put, the Palestinian system governing payments to terrorists is far superior to the regular needs-based welfare system. Perversely, by using its budget to pay terrorists, the Palestinian Authority is depriving those less fortunate members of Palestinian society of their fair share of government aid.

In the PA’s 2018 budget, funding levels for “pay-for-slay” programs and social-welfare programs are disclosed. Terror payment programs include salaries to prisoners set at nearly $150 million. Allocations to those killed or injured in “wars” with Israel is budgeted at over $180 million, together more than $330 million overall—consuming over 7 percent of the annual Palestinian budget.

These payments go to approximately 10,500 imprisoned and released prisoners and some 37,500 families of martyrs and injured. By contrast, the entire 2018 budget for the Palestinian Authority’s social-welfare system is about $214 million and supports 118,000 households: a much larger group subsisting on a much smaller budget. . . . The maximum welfare payment is 57-percent less than the minimum pay-for-slay salary.

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.