The American-Jewish magazine Moment recently asked a diverse group of thinkers to comment on the relationship between American Jews and their Israeli coreligionists. Herewith, Yossi Klein Halevi’s comments:

To a certain extent, a divide is inevitable because of geographic circumstances and opposite cultural makeup. Israelis live in the most dangerous and inhospitable neighborhood in the world; American Jews live in the most hospitable environment that Jews have ever lived in. . . .

I . . . find the inability of so many liberal American Jews to understand Israeli vulnerability . . . appalling. Too many American Jews speak of ending the occupation as if Israel were an island in the South Pacific and not a minuscule country surrounded by some of the most lethal terrorist groups in the world.

[Just as] I don’t understand how Israeli Jews can miss the deep offense that American Jews rightly feel for the way the state of Israel has disenfranchised entire [Jewish] denominations, . . . I don’t understand how many American Jews can miss the acute sense of vulnerability Israelis live with as their daily reality. . . .

Here is the essence of the problem: for many Israelis, American Jews sound hopelessly naïve, and for many American Jews, Israelis sound brutal. The danger here is that each community will perceive the other as betraying an essential element of Jewishness. For Israelis, the essential element is Jewish solidarity and self-protection. For American Jewish liberals, it’s empathy for the other, especially the oppressed. We have deep structural misunderstandings. But even so, I believe deeply in the future of the American Jewish relationship despite the minefields. I am optimistic about the relationship because we are the Jewish people. We are the joint custodians of the Jewish story: we have no choice but to get this right.

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.