Last month, seven years after his election to Egypt’s presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Morsi died during court proceedings in which he was being tried on spying for Hamas. Shortly after winning his country’s first democratic election, Morsi had attempted to undo the constitutional restrictions on his power, prompting demonstrations and eventually the coup that placed him in prison and his defense minister, Mohammad Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in the presidency. Morsi had already been convicted of other crimes by the time of his death. Orit Perlov and Ofir Winter comment on what Morsi might have portended for Israel:

Contrary to initial concerns, the peace treaty [with Israel] held during Morsi’s presidency, and Egypt even strengthened oversight of its border with Gaza and helped mediate between Israel and Hamas during Operation Pillar of Defense. However, Morsi consistently avoided mentioning the name “Israel” in his speeches, made statements in support of Hamas, and enabled visits to the Strip by Iranian and Turkish delegates.

[I]t is very doubtful that his fundamental hostility toward Israel would have allowed the preservation of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty over time, not to mention any advancement of cooperation (which is flourishing under Sisi) on strategic issues of security and energy. It is not impossible that a continued Morsi rule would have brought rapprochement between Egypt and the pro-Iran axis or the creation of an Egyptian-Turkish Islamist axis.

[I]t is obvious that strengthening Israeli-Egyptian peace relations is conditional on, inter alia, weakening the forces of radical Islam, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and on bolstering—at their expense—pragmatic and liberal political and civic forces.

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.