Among the common responses to the possibility that Israel will extend its sovereignty to parts of the West Bank is the argument that doing so will prevent Palestinians from forming a state of their own. Not only is this claim not necessarily true, but, write David Adler and Ted Lapkin, it is based on the faulty assumption that an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza is a desirable outcome:

The creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank will never happen for very good legal, strategic, and moral reasons. . . . The geo-strategic argument is simpler [than the legal one], arising from the fact that Israeli territorial withdrawals most often lead to the establishment of terrorist enclaves on the doorstep of the Jewish state. After Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, it got rocket fire, suicide bombers, and terrorist infiltration tunnels rather than peace. There’s no way Israelis are going to replicate that experiment in the West Bank which is only twelve miles from downtown Tel Aviv.

The collapse of the Arab Middle East into bloody chaos over the past decade affords even greater weight to such geo-strategic considerations. As Syria is torn to shreds by civil war and Jordan teeters on the brink of financial insolvency, Israel simply cannot and will not abandon its most defensible eastern border along the Jordan River.

The moral argument against Palestinian statehood is self-evident as well. The Palestinian Arabs have forfeited any legitimate claim to independence through their repeated rejection of any political compromise that recognizes Jewish national ambitions. The state of Israel affords political equality to all citizens, including 1.8 million Muslim and Christian Arabs who enjoy freedom of speech and religious worship while participating in fair and open elections. By contrast, Mahmoud Abbas, now in the sixteenth year of his four-year term as Palestinian Authority president, demands that any future Arab state in the West Bank must be utterly Jew-free. In other words, the PA is calling for the ethnic cleansing of 460,000 Jews from their homes in Judea-Samaria and Jerusalem.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.