After the president spoke at the Israeli statesman’s funeral last week, the White House issued a press release with the text of his remarks—and then, shortly thereafter, a correction. In the revised version, the location of the speech is given as “Jerusalem” instead of “Jerusalem, Israel.” Elliott Abrams comments:

The absurdity of this move is striking. The ceremony was at Mount Herzl, the Jerusalem cemetery where many of Israel’s greatest figures are buried: Theodor Herzl himself, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, Golda Meir, Yitzḥak Rabin, and innumerable military heroes.

It lies in western Jerusalem, near Yad Vashem and Jerusalem Forest—a place Palestinians do not even claim when they claim a share of Jerusalem. Only those who seek to destroy Israel think this place will ever be anything but a part of the Jewish state. U.S. policy is that Jerusalem is a final-status issue, so we have our embassy in Tel Aviv. But there is no dispute about west Jerusalem, where the Knesset, the prime minister’s office, the Supreme Court, the National Library, and Yad Vashem—and Mount Herzl—all lie.

One wonders if President Obama, speaking about the meaning of Peres’s life for Israel, actually thought as he spoke those words at the gravesite that he was not standing in Israel, and that Shimon Peres was not being buried in Israel. I doubt it. Which suggests, again, how foolish the current and longstanding American policy really is.

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.