Recent weeks have seen a number of pieces in the American and Israeli press attacking National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and questioning his fitness for his position. Some include the assertions that he is unfriendly to Israel and favors a conciliatory strategy toward Iran. Yaakov Amidror and Eran Lerman, both of whom have held senior positions on the Israeli National Security Council and in IDF military intelligence, disagree:

Israeli officers and scholars who have worked with McMaster say that he was always highly appreciative of Israel and of its contributions to the security of the U.S. They attest to his broad support for and admiration of the IDF. It is absurd to assert that, all these years, hidden underneath McMaster’s friendliness was a grudge against Israel that the general is now free to act on. . . . [W]hatever the reasons may have been for his decision to relieve certain senior National Security Council officials of their duties, anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli sentiments were certainly not part of the calculus.

Israelis and friends of Israel in the U.S. do not need to agree with every position McMaster has taken, nor should the general be immune to specific policy criticism, such as the Trump administration’s failure to put forward coherent policies on Syria or Iran. But McMaster is not an enemy. It is wrong to assault his personal reputation, especially when the attack is based on hearsay. . . .

McMaster, and the other generals who now form the backbone of the Trump administration, should be treated as representative of an American defense establishment whose positive views of Israel are by now an important aspect of the special relationship [between the two countries], and whose importance within the American system has grown steadily since 9/11. The days of anti-Israel attitudes in the Pentagon are long gone.

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.