Last month, Chevron—one of the world’s seven largest fossil-fuel companies—acquired Noble Energy, the Texas-based corporation that owns a large share of the rights to the capacious gas reserves located beneath Israel’s coastal waters. Oded Eran examines the implications:

Chevron’s entry into Israel bears a number of political aspects. Chevron has extensive operations in Arab and Muslim countries, [a fact that] has indirect significance regarding the efforts of countries and bodies around the world to boycott Israel. The involvement of an American company on the scale of Chevron will endow Israel with reinforced political status in the East Mediterranean Gas Forum, which also includes Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy.

The entry into the region of an economic giant such as Chevron also conveys an important economic message, beyond the safety net with which it provides the natural-gas sector in Israel. Indirectly, it constitutes additional recognition of the economic stability of the Israeli economy and its prevailing legal and administrative norms.

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.