In an extensive study of the role played by social media in fomenting and abetting the ongoing wave of deadly attacks on Israeli citizens, Gilad Gamlieli draws some important conclusions:

[Disinformation about] Israel’s measures on the Temple Mount [in September 2015, a few weeks before the attacks began,] generated numerous presentations in [Palestinian] social networks, . . . which did much to provoke the outbreak and incite whole sectors. This incitement was not confined to claims that Israel was changing the status quo on the Mount.

As it evolved, [the incitement] dealt more and more with . . . the increasing glorification and commemoration of the perpetrators of attacks, the legitimization of these attacks, and the portrayal of details of the attacks—[sometimes, paradoxically,] denying that they were being committed at all. This content was disseminated by Palestinians across the political spectrum, from pages identified with Hamas to those identified with Fatah. It is also clear that much of the incitement issued from pages originating in Gaza.

An important element of these incendiary contents is how the Israeli “aggressor” is portrayed. In many of the presentations, the Palestinians view their enemies on the Temple Mount compound as IDF soldiers (or other security forces) and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are quite often depicted with the use of [classic anti-Semitic tropes]. . . . It is no surprise, then, that large percentages of the victims of the stabbing attacks are soldiers or ultra-Orthodox Jews. This is clear testimony to the fact that these incendiary presentations, which have spread throughout the social networks, have influenced the perpetrators’ perceptions and shaped their actions.

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.