While ostensibly focused on environmental issues, the U.S. Green party has adopted the anti-Israel cause as a key plank of its platform. In September, it even petitioned the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for committing a fictitious list of crimes against Palestinians. Alan Baker comments:

Israel is one of the only states that excels in the very values treasured by the Green movement—innovative ways to protect the environment, reduce pollution, purify wastewater, desalinate seawater, reforest, and protect natural resources. It is [therefore] curious that the U.S. Green party, as a matter of policy, considers itself sufficiently credible and authoritative as to advocate dismantling the state of Israel and replacing it with “one secular, democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis on the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”

It buys, lock-stock-and-barrel, into the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign aimed at undermining Israel’s very existence, naïvely believing “that BDS can become the most effective nonviolent means for achieving justice and genuine peace between Palestinians and Israelis.” In this manner, it supports the hostile and irresponsible propaganda [of those] seeking the destruction and delegitimation of Israel. . . .

[Meanwhile], Hamas’s deliberate stockpiling and burning of thousands of tires creates mass pollution along the border area with caustic carbon fumes polluting the environment and damaging the health of the Palestinians themselves as well as the residents of Israeli communities in the vicinity of the border. The pumping of polluted sewage from Gaza into the Israeli side of the border is another blatant environmental violation that renders the lives of the residents a living nightmare. The massive piles of garbage that have accumulated in the area after three giant landfills were set up along the border fence have left the Israeli residents of the border area to cope with a putrid and toxic smell being carried by the wind across the border.

None of these actions has earned the condemnation, or even the concern, of the Green party.

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.