Reflecting on the subdued Independence Day that the Jewish state celebrated on Wednesday, as most coronavirus-related lockdown regulations remained in effect, Ruthie Blum stresses that the nation has much to be proud of. And those things go beyond “the Star of David on our flag or the international acclaim received by our start-ups.”

One peculiar side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic [has been] a spike in the desire of Israelis living abroad to return home, and an increase in the interest of Diaspora Jews in undertaking aliyah. According to [its] chairman Isaac Herzog, . . . the Jewish Agency has been receiving thousands of inquiries from Israelis, and hundreds from British, French, and American Jews.

Two families who arrived this month—a couple from France and the Israeli parents of American-born children returning after a fourteen-year stint in New York—[stated] that a major factor in the timing of their move was Israel’s handling of the pandemic. Both [couples] said they felt far safer in Israel, from a health standpoint, than in the U.S. and Europe. . . . The French wife stated that Israel, unlike her country of origin, does not have a shortage of surgical masks.

Two young Israeli men studying in Italy who came rushing back when the crisis struck expressed the same sentiment. One told [reporters] that he used to take Israel for granted, but when he witnessed Italian hospital staff refusing to provide ventilators to any patient over the age of sixty, he had an awakening. “Even if Israel ran out of equipment, it would find a way to acquire the machines before letting anyone die,” he said.

It’s a great lesson for all the Israelis who have been whining . . . about the country’s “disastrous” healthcare system in general and the health ministry’s “poor management” of the COVID-19 crisis in particular. Sadly, it’s a message most of us won’t hear, especially not now, when the decreasing number of patients on ventilators has enabled us to focus the brunt of our anxiety on the decimated economy.

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.