Despite a massive inquiry, the authors of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report on last summer’s Gaza war confess themselves unable to “determine conclusively the intent of Palestinian armed groups with regard to the construction and use of tunnels.” And yet, as David Horovitz writes, even while scratching their heads over that mystery, the authors did manage to find plenty of reasons to condemn Israel:

The UNHRC inquiry team . . . produced a 284-page report. And yet, in all that verbiage, it neglected to detail precisely how it was that Hamas came to power in Gaza, and what it is that Hamas stands for. It chose not to mention Hamas’s strategic goal of destroying Israel. It mixed up cause and effect in describing the security blockade as “strangling the economy in Gaza and [as having] imposed severe restrictions on the rights of the Palestinians,” as though it is the blockade that has radicalized Gaza, rather than having been introduced as an attempted defensive measure by Israel (and Egypt) against the import of weaponry by Hamas.

The UNHRC commission equated the IDF, committed to self-examination and self-criticism as it struggles to protect Israel against threats on numerous fronts, with an Islamic extremist organization preaching unmitigated hatred for Israel and seeking to kill Israelis. (Israel emphatically must, and does, constantly investigate and re-examine its military policies and operations; it doesn’t need a prejudiced UN panel to call it to order.) Actually, the inquiry did worse than that: it wandered bizarre linguistic alleyways in a bid to somehow differentiate between the Palestinian rulers and the armed groups of Gaza, as though they were not one and the same, and wishfully referred to the “State of Palestine” even as it held Israel responsible for the territory of that non-existent state.

Nowhere, in all those acres of words, did it offer the simple contextual truth in which last summer’s conflict played out, and in which, grimly, future conflicts are all but certain to unfold: Israel has no presence in Gaza. Israel has no territorial quarrel with Gaza. If Hamas halted its violence against Israel, there would be no suffering on either side of that border. But so long as Hamas continues to work for Israel’s destruction, Israel, like any nation that seeks to survive, will have no choice but to defend itself.

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.