In 1946, President Truman, along with a number of Jewish organizations, urged Britain to allow Holocaust survivors living in displaced-persons camps to leave Europe for the land of Israel, then still a British mandate. In response, the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, organized an Anglo-American committee of inquiry to interview Jewish and Arab leaders in Palestine and report on the situation, hoping to convince the U.S. of the impossibility of letting more Jews into the country. Norman Goda describes the telling testimony of the Arab interviewees:

Arab speakers attempted to straddle a moral line. Overt anti-Semitism was to be avoided. The Nazis, after all, had recently discredited racism. Instead, they attempted to turn the tables, attacking Zionism as an imperialist and racist political doctrine, very much akin to Nazism itself. Keeping the Jews from Palestine thus was painted as a noble act of tolerance in a post-imperial world. But the imagined line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitic tropes could not be maintained. . . .

The Cairo hearings in March 1946 were . . . carefully choreographed. Richard Crossman, a British member of the committee, would remember that “[the] Arabs were determined not to submit to the detailed cross-questioning which we had used in dealing with the Zionist spokesman. Their purpose was to deliver to the committee, as a ritual act, a statement of the Arab attitude, and to make it clear to us that this statement could not be modified. . . .” Thus Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia—a country where the Nazis had persecuted and murdered Jews just three years earlier—insisted that “[it] is for the Jews to change themselves, to change certain contentions that they hold which make them offensive sometimes to the locality where they live.”

[In hearings in Jerusalem], Ahmad al-Shuqayri, later the first chairman of the PLO, lamented Jewish control of the global media and economy: “We have not the gigantic financial enterprises of Wall Street in New York and the City of London to lure consciences and direct minds.”

In the end, the entire enterprise backfired: the American committee members became more convinced of the rightness of the Zionist cause, and pressured their British allies to sign a report recommending additional entry visas.

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.