Last summer, the Palestinian Authority president made serial threats to resign, to dismantle the PA, to end security cooperation with the IDF, to sue Israel in the International Criminal Court, and to tear up the Oslo Accords. He has since backed down from all of them and even seems to be trying to end the “knife intifada,” which his own party played a large role in instigating. Yoni Ben Menachem examines his motivations:

[T]he main consideration guiding eighty-one-year-old Abbas is to remain in power while seeking an appropriate successor, one who will allow him to retire honorably and will ensure the well-being of his family and his two sons’ economic interests.

Abbas is not looking for diplomatic adventures. He is sticking with his strategy of internationalizing the conflict; hence, he supports the French [peace] initiative. That initiative could lead to an international conference by the end of the year while entailing a minimum of risk to Abbas’ rule. . . .

Particularly worrisome to him is the [possibility now being considered by the Israeli Defense Ministry] of opening a dialogue with Palestinian academics and businesspeople. Abbas sees this as going over his head to find a new Palestinian address, thereby undermining his legitimacy as leader of the Palestinian people. . . .

As Abbas sees it, [this] new plan poses a threat to his continued rule. . . . According to senior Fatah officials, from now on he will take great care not to give the Israeli defense establishment pretexts to take measures to undermine senior PA senior officials as well as Abbas himself, such as invalidating their official VIP travel documents, lifting the easier conditions at the border crossings, and so on.

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.