In its most recent anti-Israel op-ed, the New York Times hosts the philosophy professor Omri Boehm branding Zionism as inherently illiberal and racist, while dragging up distortions of history that have been subjected to numerous debunkings. The blogger known by the pen-name Elder of Ziyon writes:

Of course there is a tension between Zionism and liberalism, but that doesn’t mean that a Zionist state must be by definition illiberal, as Boehm claims. Zionism is not by any means “rooted in the denial of liberal politics.” This is an obvious lie.

Boehm then adduces a 1941 letter in which Avraham Stern, leader of a Revisionist Zionist splinter group, proposed cooperating with the Nazis to rescue Jews from Europe and bring them to Palestine. This Boehm declares a “sanctification of Zionism to the point of tolerating anti-Semitism.”

When this letter was written, Stern’s assumption was that Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews systematically, but [instead] to encourage them to leave Europe. It is truly obscene to describe Stern’s desperate effort to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the clutches of the Nazis as an inherent Zionist affinity with Nazism. In fact, Stern was known to . . . compare Hitler to [the genocidal biblical villain] Haman.

But Boehm is doing much worse than misrepresenting Stern. Stern’s offer to collaborate with Germany to save thousands of Jews was anomalous. From the right to the left, the Zionist movement opposed Nazi Germany from the beginning. . . . It is instructive that Boehm digs up this little-known episode as the paradigm of Zionism’s supposed affinity with anti-Semitism.

What do you call a man who generalizes about an entire group of people based on a troubling anecdote about a single member of that group? You would call him a bigot.
You would certainly not call him liberal.

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.