After serving for more than a decade as the Israeli military’s chief Arabic-language spokesman, Major Avichay Adraee had become a fixture on Arabic news programs. Last summer, he decided to expand his efforts by taking Israel’s cold war with Hizballah to Facebook. Elhanan Miller writes:

Hizballah [members have] developed the habit of tweeting greetings from their posts in Syria to loved ones back in Lebanon. One combatant, his face unseen in the photo, thought it funny to address Adraee directly by holding up a cardboard sign: “We are practicing on the Nusra Front [a Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate currently at war with Hizballah] in preparation to occupy the Galilee.” . . .

Adraee retorted on Facebook, bashing Hizballah for attacking a field hospital that treats Syrian refugees in the Arsal region, near the border with Lebanon. “My response, I thought, left us even,” Adraee said. “But the following day another fighter from [Hizballah’s] Radwan Force appeared, in full fatigue, with a similar sign reading, ‘When we finish with the takfiris’”—a pejorative term for Islamist Sunni fighters—“‘we’ll come for you.’”

At this point, Adraee and his team decided to up the ante. IDF intelligence provided him with photos of undercover Hizballah agents positioned along the border with Israel. Adraee promptly published the images among the Syrian population, adding a warning that “these are Hizballah men endangering you.” . . .

Since its launch on Facebook four years ago, the official IDF Arabic spokesman’s page—boasting over 1.2 million followers—uses Avichay Adraee as its brand. The same is true for Twitter, with 177,000 followers. As a result, he has become a household name across the Arab Middle East, with spoofs and parodies displaying the uniformed, eloquent Israeli on a regular basis. . . . It is hard to gauge the effect of the army’s Arabic activity on social media, but Adraee said several positive indicators cannot be denied. [He uses as one] yardstick for success the growing use by Arab media of the term “Israel Defense Forces” when referring to the Israeli army. “That term used to be unacceptable [in Arabic media]. . . . The change is slow and small, but extremely significant.”

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.