At the ten-year anniversary of the second Lebanon war, a number of Israeli commentators have argued that, contrary to the common view of that conflict as a fiasco, it actually secured a decade of quiet from Hizballah. Ruthie Blum is more skeptical:

The Winograd Commission, set up in the aftermath of the war, delved into [various mistakes made by the military and the government]. But the real culprit was a false assessment, reached more than a ‎decade earlier, that the “conventional battlefield” was a thing of the past. According to that ridiculous ‎theory, it would be wasteful to expend energy and resources training for ground incursions when the ‎era of high-tech sorties from the air was the wave of the future.‎ . . .

[Meanwhile, the UN] peacekeeping force [established as part of the ceasefire], which was supposed to prevent Hizballah from ‎transporting and rebuilding its arsenals, did nothing.

But the most damning evidence, according to Blum, is that Hizballah now has over twenty times more rockets than it did in the last war, and more sophisticated ones at that—and, thanks to the Syria conflict, it has become a battle-hardened force with significant regional influence.

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.