The Jewish state has scored a series of small but significant diplomatic victories in the past two weeks. These range from a vote in the Czech parliament calling on its government to show “respect” for Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital, to Denmark’s decision to withhold some $8 million from organizations that it believes might be supporting BDS and incitement to terror. Evelyn Gordon comments:

Several factors contributed to these victories. One is the way Israeli NGOs are serving as force multipliers for Israeli diplomacy. . . . [Another is that] official Israel began pushing back against [support for anti-Israel NGOs, Palestinian incitement, and so forth] in talks with European governments, thereby depriving them of a perfect excuse for inaction. Europe will never be more pro-Israel than Israel’s own government.

Second, Israel has finally developed the confidence to play hardball, as it did by downgrading ties with New Zealand and Senegal, [both] co-sponsors of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, [condemning settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem], last December. Ties with Senegal were restored this week after the Muslim-majority country promised to support Israel’s bid for observer status at the African Union, which it had previously opposed. The New Zealand rupture is expected to end soon.

This confidence undoubtedly stems in part from Israel’s growing diplomatic strength outside the West, as highlighted most recently by Benjamin Netanyahu’s address on Sunday to the summit of the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS). He was the first Israeli leader to address ECOWAS, which even moved the summit from Saturday to Sunday to accommodate him. The group invited him even though two of its fifteen members have no diplomatic relations with Israel, and it pointedly preferred him to another nonmember guest: Morocco’s king. The West African monarch announced he would skip the summit rather than attend alongside Netanyahu, but that gambit signally failed to result, as it once would have, in Israel being disinvited.

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.