Last month, an off-duty police officer in a suburb of Haifa shot an unarmed teenager of Ethiopian-Jewish parentage. While the preliminary reports from the police investigation support the officer’s claim that he fired at the ground while trying to break up a fight in which the teenager, Solomon Tekah, was involved, the shooting has already provoked mass demonstrations, some of them violent, that have in turn prompted comparisons between this shooting and those in the U.S. that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Shmuel Rosner argues that the parallels, noted by both the American press and some of the Israeli protesters themselves, are fewer than one might think:

[First, take the] two very different histories of two black communities. Africans were shipped to America as slaves. Ethiopian Israelis were brought by their own country to play their part in the great Zionist saga of gathering Israel’s tribes. Moreover, African Americans had to fight for equality. Ethiopian equality, at least the principle of it, was a given. And yes, mistakes were made. And yes, there are clearly some issues that are not yet resolved. And yet, Israel invested more resources in helping the newcomers than it did for any other community.

Alas, what [the protestors] see is not yesterday’s achievements. What they see is today’s failures. The community, on average, is still poor. It still has a high rate of crime, suicide, and domestic violence. . . . The majority of Israeli Jews want Ethiopian Jews to integrate and succeed. The majority of Israeli Jews say that Ethiopian Jews contribute to the prosperity and well-being of the country. But it’s hard to deny that there is a problem connected to the fact that Ethiopians are easily identified because of their skin color.

The media were sympathetic to the unrest. The government will be quick to respond, by throwing more money at the situation and looking more seriously into making improvements that have the potential to tame the anger. . . . The most worrying aspect of the violent protests that we’ve seen in recent days is the prospect of the Ethiopian integration issue being Americanized. That is, of its becoming not a short-term difficulty in need of a quick and efficient response, but rather a long-term problem, maybe permanent, with all the associated baggage of cultural fissures, intrinsic anger and fear, and a great sense of alienation.

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.