While Riyadh has for a long time loudly championed the Palestinian cause, Saudi interests would not be served by the implementation of a two-state solution, writes Yoram Ettinger:

The House of Saud does not forget, or forgive, the Palestinian track record of intra-Arab terrorism and treachery, most notably the 1990 Palestinian collaboration with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which was the Palestinians’ most generous Arab host. Riyadh is convinced . . . that a Palestinian state would constitute another rogue anti-Saudi regime, [and that] the Palestinian Authority and Hamas [are] active or potential allies of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iran’s ayatollahs, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood, [all of] which aim to topple the House of Saud.

At the same time, Saudi ties with Israel have expanded substantially—militarily, commercially, technologically, medically, and agriculturally—despite the lack of progress on the Palestinian issue and in the face of mutual threats and challenges. [The] House of Saud . . . considers Israel an essential, reliable, and effective ally in the face of these threats. While the United States is, by far, a more significant ally of Saudi Arabia, its reliability was deeply eroded in Riyadh during the 2009-2016 U.S.-Iran honeymoon.

Israel’s posture of deterrence is based—to a large extent—on topographic high grounds (the Golan Heights and the Judea and Samaria mountain ridges), which have transformed Israel into a key regional force-multiplier, bolstering the national security of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other pro-U.S. Arab regimes. A retreat from these high grounds would demolish Israel’s posture of deterrence, denying Saudi Arabia and all other pro-U.S. Arab regimes a critical line of defense.

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.