One-hundred years ago last week, Herbert Samuel—the Anglo-Jewish politician who had just been appointed high commissioner for Palestine—T.E. Lawrence (a/k/a Lawrence of Arabia), and Winston Churchill arrived in the Holy Land by train from Egypt. Churchill, himself recently made the secretary of state for the colonies, remained in Palestine for eight days. Lee Pollock describes the visit:

Churchill’s experiences during that visit served to solidify both his admiration for the Jewish people and his support of Zionism. He set himself up in Government House in Jerusalem, meeting with both Arab and Jewish delegations. A talented amateur painter, he also found time to create a beautiful landscape of sunset over the city, a work still owned by his descendants.

On March 27, he dedicated the new British Military Cemetery on the Mount of Olives and the following day met with Emir Abdullah, the newly designated king of Trans-Jordan, to assuage his anxiety about the pace of Jewish immigration into the area. While Abdullah was not wholly mollified, Churchill agreed that Jewish settlement east of the River Jordan would be proscribed.

Two days later, he planted a tree at the site on Mount Scopus of the future Hebrew University, telling the assembled dignitaries, “My heart is full of sympathy for Zionism. The establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine will be a blessing to the whole world.”

Before returning to Cairo the evening of March 30, Churchill visited the then-twelve-year-old Jewish town of Tel Aviv, meeting with its Mayor Meir Dizengoff, and the agricultural settlement in Rishon LeZion. On his return to London, he told the House of Commons: “Anyone who has seen the work of the Jewish colonies will be struck by the enormous productive results which they have achieved from the most inhospitable soil.”

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.