As Hamas returns to attacking Israeli civilians with rockets and kite- and balloon-born explosives, Gerald Steinberg revisits the role played by the European Union Border Assistance Monitors (EUBAM), a peacekeeping force deployed to Gaza after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. Stationed at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Strip, EUBAM’s mission was to supervise the Palestinian Authority (PA) border police and ensure that weapons and other contraband, as well as criminals and terrorists, didn’t enter Gaza. The force’s poor performance hasn’t stopped the Europeans from urging Jerusalem to make further territorial concessions:

From the beginning, this EU monitoring presence . . . demonstrated the chasm between high-minded talk and the reality of conflict and terrorism on the ground. . . . Weapons smuggling [into Gaza] continued, and on December 30, 2005, a few weeks after their initial deployment, EUBAM monitors fled Rafah to the safety of an Israeli military base when Palestinian police officers stormed the crossing, in what was described for media and diplomatic consumption as a “protest demonstration.”

Three months later, the monitors fled once again following a wave of foreigner kidnappings in Gaza. The EUBAM team returned, but with no actual monitoring, and when attacks from Gaza . . . escalated, the EU officials were bystanders.

The force hasn’t operated at all since the Hamas takeover of the Strip in 2007, although the crossing remains open. Steinberg adds:

In European political folklore, EUBAM’s failure, like everything else connected to the Palestinians, is blamed on Israel. . . . In reality, while the EU wanted credit for having an active role, they did not want the accompanying responsibility. The monitors moved to a hotel in Ashkelon and then an office in Ramat Gan, where, in theory, they remain on standby, thirteen years later, “maintaining readiness to redeploy to the Rafah Crossing Point once the political and security situation allows within short notice.”

This history is part of the EU’s legacy and should be recalled whenever officials such as Josep Borrell, vice-president in charge of foreign policy, lecture Israelis on how to make peace and help the people of Gaza.

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.