Hamas has played no small part in encouraging and planning the recent wave of attacks in Israel, some of which are carried out by Hamas fighters in the West Bank. But at the same time it has refrained from initiating any operations from its base in Gaza itself. Jonathan Schanzer explains why:

The group’s leader [in Gaza], Ismail Haniyeh, has called for an intifada, or uprising. Yet he hasn’t unleashed Hamas’s huge arsenal of rockets or its trained fighting forces from the Gaza Strip, the territory he controls. Hamas has one foot in the uprising and one foot out. . . .

Though Hamas is surely tempted to join the unrest, it is restrained by the memory of last summer’s devastating conflict and the certain knowledge that a new war would only compound Gazans’ misery. And they also know how difficult it has been to negotiate reconstruction after last summer’s war. . . .

Aware of its limitations in Gaza, Hamas has mobilized its fighters in the West Bank. With this arms-length strategy, Hamas can both strike out at Israel and also undermine its political rival, the Palestinian Authority, which it has for more than a decade tried to unseat. This poses little risk to Hamas’s grip on Gaza.

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.