In a recent article for the New York Times, the architecture critic Michael Kimmelman criticized a plan to create a system of cable cars in Israel’s capital to alleviate some of the traffic on the Old City’s crowded streets. While there may be good reasons to oppose the plan on aesthetic grounds, writes Jonathan Tobin, Kimmelman’s real concern appears to be what he sees as an attempt to create a “Jewish narrative of Jerusalem.”

Kimmelman and the Palestinians opposed to the project are offended by the fact that the cable-car system is part of an effort to keep the city united and functional. But they also seem particularly disturbed by the fact that the route of the car to the Western Wall will celebrate the city’s Jewish history. . . . Palestinians and their foreign friends think every action that reinforces Jerusalem’s status as the center of Jewish life for the past 3,000 years is part of a Zionist plot to “Judaize” the city. A primarily Jewish city can’t be Judaized. But what Israel’s opponents want is to erase history, not to preserve it.

They claim that the new system will marginalize Arabs living in neighborhoods over which the cars will travel and allow travelers to ignore their people. But their real beef is with the excavations of Jewish history in the Silwan [neighborhood] and the City of David that they would have preferred to go undiscovered.

The resistance to the cars on grounds that they are solidifying the hold of the Jews—the one people for whom it has always been their capital and the focus of their faith—is not merely wrongheaded, but rooted in anti-Jewish prejudice.

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.