On the Hebrew calendar, Saturday was the 100th anniversary of the battle of Tel Ḥai, a Jewish farming village in the Galilee that was attacked and overrun by Arabs. The date is usually associated with the heroic stand made there by Joseph Trumpeldor, whose remarkable life was the subject of a recent essay in Mosaic. But among the other Jewish fighters who fell in battle was Dvorah Drechler, who in prior years had campaigned for the Zionist self-defense organization Hashomer (“The Watchman”) to allow women to participate in its patrols. Amit Naor writes:

Drechler was born in the Ukraine in 1896. Though hers was the only Jewish family in her village, they nevertheless maintained Jewish traditions and were sympathetic to the “Love of Zion” pre-Herzlian Zionist movement in Russia. In 1913, Drechler arrived in the Land of Israel to join her sister, Ḥayah, who had immigrated several years before and married Eliezer Kroll, a member of Hashomer (“The Watchman”), the Jewish defense organization. Because of her sister and brother-in-law, Dvorah also joined a group of Hashomer members who settled that year in the northern community of Tel Adash, known today as Tel Adashim.

During World War I, despite the fear imposed [on Palestinian Jewry] by the Ottoman regime, [Drechler] made daily visits to Hashomer’s prisoners in Nazareth, bringing them food and information. She also did not hesitate when the group sent her as reinforcement to [the Galilean village of] Kfar Giladi, from which she and Trumpeldor were sent to defend Tel Ḥai.

This was how Drechler came to be at Tel Ḥai and how she found herself assigned to a defensive position on the top floor of the courtyard’s main building. . . . In that top-floor room with Drechler was another woman—Sarah Chizik. According to legend, their bodies were found in an embrace, alongside the three other members of the group who were killed in the room.

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.