Two weeks ago, three Arab members of Israel’s legislature visited the families of terrorists killed while carrying out deadly attacks and praised the killers as martyrs. The Knesset’s ethics committee temporarily suspended the three as a result. Now the Knesset is considering constitutional changes to streamline the procedure for such suspensions, prompting cries that Israeli democracy is being fatally undermined. Eylon Aslan-Levy responds:

Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he would sponsor an amendment to the Basic Law . . . enabling the Knesset plenary itself to suspend or even expel members for ethics violations. . . . Far from undermining Israeli democracy, . . . the proposal brings Israel in line with other Western liberal democracies, many of which already have legal mechanisms for a legislature to hold unruly members accountable through suspension or expulsion. . . .

The United States Constitution, for example, empowers each house of Congress to expel any member by a two-thirds vote. . . . The House of Representatives has used [this power] as recently as 2002. . . Crucially, the Israeli proposal is considerably stricter than its American equivalent, since it would require an absolute majority of three-quarters of legislators rather than only two-thirds of those present and voting. . . . In the United Kingdom, the bar [for the suspension of MPs] is even lower. . . .

[Indeed], the inability of the Knesset to suspend membership . . . is the exception, not the norm.

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.