Since the Islamic Republic’s creation, the destruction of Israel has been a key part of official propaganda, actuated in, among other things, extensive support for terrorist groups that attack the Jewish state. Michael Segall, examining numerous public sources on the issue, notes that Tehran’s attitudes are unlikely to change as a result of the nuclear deal or indeed any time soon:

Sixteen years after his death, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s founding vision—that the eradication of Zionism is an inevitable precondition for redeeming contemporary Islam—continues to guide the current generation of Iran’s religious, political, and military establishment. To him the destruction of Zionism was an axiom never to be questioned or strayed from and an objective to be perpetually and actively pursued. According to this vision, Israel should be fought as part of a protracted global struggle between Islam and the West, which “intentionally planted the Zionist entity in the heart of the Islamic world.” . . . [T]he current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, . . . is the chief agitator for the extermination of Israel, spreading this message worldwide over social media [and] books, and addressing various target audiences in English, Arabic, and Farsi.

The Iranian religious, political, intellectual, and military elite support and repeat Khamenei’s messages. Members of the Iranian army high command . . . have even declared their willingness and capability to destroy Israel, once the leader’s order is given. Practically speaking, the regime’s intelligence and international subversion agencies, mostly the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, massively support anti-Israel terror groups, and stage repeated conferences in Iran dedicated to denial of the Holocaust and to the delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist. . . .

Iranian leaders. . . have not moderated their anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric, even during the critical stages of the nuclear talks with the West, as if the nuclear talks were completely dissociated from Iranian foreign policy. Moreover, Iran went so far as to argue that the talks do not indicate any Iranian-American rapprochement. Accepting Iran as a nuclear-threshold state capable of launching a military nuclear program . . . will allow it to intensify its direct anti-Israel aggression and its subversive activity against moderate Arab states . . . under a nuclear umbrella.

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.