In recent weeks, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, along with senior members of his government, has taken to calling just about everything Israel or Israelis do a “crime,” writes Bassam Tawil. But this rhetoric—used to describe individual Jews visiting the Temple Mount, the Balfour Declaration, the killing of a terrorist in a shootout, and so forth—hardly benefits Abbas’s regime in its struggle with Hamas. Quite the contrary:

In the eyes of Abbas and his top officials, a recent visit by Arab journalists to Israel is not only an “unacceptable crime,” but a “political and national sin” as well. . . . Last week, Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction endorsed a statement . . . that called for boycotting an Israeli-Palestinian shopping mall in eastern Jerusalem and warning Palestinians that “economic normalization” with Israel was a “crime” and an act of “intentional treason.”

The daily use of the word “crime” to condemn Israel comes in the context of the Palestinian Authority’s continued effort to delegitimize Israel and demonize Jews. This is not a new policy. Abbas and his cronies have long been waging a campaign of hate and incitement against Israel—one that depicts Israelis and Jews as “criminals” and “murderers.” That is the main reason it has become almost impossible to find one Palestinian who is ready to accept any form of concessions or compromise with Israel. This campaign is also the main reason why Hamas has become highly popular among Palestinians, as the latest public-opinion poll published last week showed. . . .

Such messages are driving Palestinians into the open arms of Hamas. If you are telling your people that Israel and the Jews are criminals whose hands drip with blood, and that anyone who does business with them or visits them is guilty of a “crime,” you are telling them that Hamas has gotten it right: Palestinians should be seeking the destruction of Israel, and not peace with it.

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.