In 2020, the quinquennial international expo (the modern successor to the World’s Fair) will take place in Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and—over the vociferous objections of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority—Israel will take part. This news, writes Yoni Ben Menachem, is a sign that improving relations between Jerusalem and the Gulf states, long a poorly kept secret, are moving out from behind closed doors:

Israel has begun to take part openly in sports and cultural activities in Arab countries including the UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. Not to be forgotten in this context is Benjamin Netanyahu’s official visit to Oman in October last year. . . .

Last March, Anwar Karakash, the UAE’s state minister for foreign affairs, called for “an opening of the Arab world toward Israel” and said that “the relations between the Arab states and Israel must undergo a change to achieve progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” Some in the Arab world saw this as acceptance of the Israeli position that normalization between Israel and Arab states need not depend on reaching a permanent Israeli-Palestinian settlement. . . .

Arab rulers . . . see, on the one hand, that Israel has been attacking the Iranian military entrenchment in Syria with the full backing of the United States and even a certain coordination with Russia, and, on the other, [the Palestinian president Mahmoud] Abbas’s rejectionist policy toward any compromise with Israel, while Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been turning the Gaza Strip into an Iranian stronghold.

The conditions for open normalization between the Gulf States and Israel are gradually ripening, and Israel should encourage any possible cooperation with them. This is an important process that can help the Palestinians understand that Israel is a fact of life and that even the Arab states . . . have come to terms 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.