On Sunday, the Palestinian Authority (PA) hosted a group of Israeli journalists in Ramallah, where they were given a tour and met with various officials. During the course of the daylong visit, the reporters, as is now common practice, posted pictures and comments on their social media. One of them, Lahav Harkov, tweeted in praise of the knafeh—a sweet, cheese-filled pastry—she and her colleagues were served at lunch:

When I woke up in the morning, several American anti-Israel Twitter accounts picked up on my love of the dessert, somehow arguing that it exemplified the “occupation” because I could go to Ramallah “freely,” but Palestinians can’t enter Israel freely. Never mind that I can’t go to Ramallah freely; it’s illegal for Israelis to go, because it’s not safe for them. Nor did I wander . . . into a random bakery. I was part of a special PA delegation.

But the issue is really a larger one than the Twitter wars about Israel, and it reflects a broader opposition among Palestinians to normalization with Israelis. . . . [S]everal people attacked the restaurant that served us, using Molotov cocktails. No one was hurt, and no damage was reported. But the incident highlighted that it really is not safe for Israelis to waltz into Ramallah for dessert. It’s not even safe for Palestinians who want to invite Israelis to have some dessert and a conversation.

Videos and photos of Mahmoud al-Habash, [a chief shariah judge and an adviser to Mahmoud Abbas], addressing us in the restaurant, as well as the videos of reporters, . . . were spread on Palestinian media, with people commenting and attacking the PA official for even speaking to us.

Indeed, a Hamas operative in the West Bank had edited a video of the delegation so that it showed only kippah­­-clad journalists, and posted it on Facebook with the caption “religious settlers invading Ramallah.” And Saeb Erekat and Hanan Ashrawi, both high-ranking officials in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which governs the PA, joined in the condemnation, as Harkov writes:

Ashrawi and Erekat are too cowardly to stand behind their own organization’s official position and the people who are acting upon it. The PLO has had a Palestinian Committee for Interaction with Israeli Society. But the PLO also condemns interaction with Israeli society.

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.